Oumou Sy

Oumou Sy from Senegal is one of the most important African designers. She knows all techniques for making fabrics, coloring them and fashioning: her art of making clothes begins with weaving, dying, stitching. Oumou Sy combines fabric with materials like metal and vinyl and connects traditional African dessins with Western elements and motifs - sometimes the products have their own humor.

Kenya's fashion week

Nostalgia, enough said...

A tasty Mandazi

I want this book...

In his book "A Tasty Maandazi" Kwame Nyongo highlights contemporary life in Africa, through this day in the life of a young boy, Masu, in a coastal Kenyan town in this coming of age story.

Artistic goodness

Found this article, very inspiring... Somerset Community College art instructor Darlene Libbey worked with some 40 children in the Mathare Children's Art Program located in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. The program was started by Jacob Watchira, a Kenyan artist who spent the Spring Semester of 2006 visiting the University of Kentucky and SCC.

Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi's art has stepped out of the typical kenyan art, which mostly mirrors a nolstagic representation of precolonial (traditional) life.

Text written by SFMOMA

Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born artist based in New York, makes luscious yet unsettling pictures of female figures. Her painted and collaged works on Mylar function as potent social critique while simultaneously exploring more poetic strains of mythology and allegory as well as the sensuousness of form, color, and pattern. Particularly interested in myths about gender and ethnicity that have long circulated in Africa and the West, Mutu has adopted the medium of collage — which by its nature evokes rupture and collision — to depict the monstrous, the exotic, and the feminine.