Wangari Mathenge: Re-membering
17 September - 24 October 2026
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64 Street

Scroll to the bottom of this webpage to preview works on view.

PRESS RELEASE
DROPBOX FOLDER OF IMAGE FILES

With 1960s-Kenya as the backdrop for imagined domestic scenes of women—a decade that saw a cultural shift in Africa following the liberation of numerous nations—Wangari Mathenge (b. 1973, Nairobi, Kenya; BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2021) will be the subject of the ground-floor fall exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan's New York townhouse. The exhibition, entitled Wangari Mathenge: Re-membering, consists of all new large-scale painting and sculpture. ​

Re-membering is inspired by Kenyan scholar Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s 2009 book, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, which focuses on the critical impacts of colonialism and slavery on the experience of diasporic and continental Africans, as well as strategies of resistance and recovery. The first part of Mathenge’s project involved extensive study of Kenyan colonial literature and cultural objects from 1900 to 1963 (the year of Kenya’s independence from the United Kingdom) to examine and interrogate how history and her own cultural identity had been formed. 

Mathenge portrays women (each an avatar for the artist) in vibrant domestic interiors interacting with, altering, and reconstructing the objects and spaces around them. Rich in symbols and signifiers of history, culture, and landscape, the imagined, charged scenes take place in the 1960s—a decade that is, again, significant here for the cultural shift it saw in Africa following the liberation of many nations.

Directly relating to imagery in her canvases, Mathenge’s large-scale sculptural works extend her investigation into three dimensions. One features a wooden doorframe (intricately hand-carved by Malindi artisans) on which a densely embellished macramé textile is suspended. The sculpture derives from the nineteenth-century carved doors found on the East African coast, where elaborate doorframes represented the status, wealth, and prestige of their owners. The second sculpture—an ornate and voluminous piece displayed on a dress form—stems from the memory of a historical garment of Mathenge's Gikuyu ethnic group, whose traditional mode of dress was deeply rooted in craft. Again bringing her practice into her community, the knitting was done with contributions from Mathenge’s circle, in her words, “extending Re-membering into a collective act of making, in which cultural form is not simply preserved but remade through shared labor, memory, and care.” 

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download web-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition.