Mathenge depicts domestic scenes and everyday moments in vivid, colorful detail, while alluding to the tension between home, displacement, the contemporary woman and tradition.
Wangari Mathenge (b. 1973 in Nairobi, Kenya) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She holds degrees from Howard University and Georgetown University Law Center and an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
After a career in international business and law, Wangari Mathenge began pursuing her painting practice professionally in 2019. Mathenge's work is a visual testimony to the black female experience of existing simultaneously within two cultures-traditional African society and the Diaspora. Figurative, patterned, and brightly-hued, her paintings are lively and generative. Her rich compositions, emboldened with gestural strokes and mark-making, often depict close friends and loved ones. Mathenge's portraits are slices of life, offering an intimate view into her subjects' interiority.
