Joel Oswaggo, b. 1944
Biography

Joel Oswaggo was born in 1944 in Kamagambo, South Nyanza, Kenya, into a Luo family. As a child he began drawing by copying illustrations from schoolbooks onto the walls of his home. He started his working life in 1968 as a signboard painter for a business in Uganda, returning to Kenya in the early 1970s as political conditions there deteriorated under the Idi Amin regime.

Self-taught, Oswaggo emerged as one of the pioneering figures of Kenya’s contemporary art scene in the 1980s and 1990s, supported by Nairobi’s Gallery Watatu and its curator Ruth Schaffner. He works in meticulously elaborated colour pencil and ink drawings, built up slowly over long working sessions, documenting what he has described as the disappearing customs and cultural traditions of his Luo community in a style at once hyper-realistic and quietly grotesque — scenes that do not shy away from poverty, hunger, disease and death alongside everyday village life.

His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including through Indigo Arts Gallery in Philadelphia and in the group exhibition Kenya Art at the Kentler International Drawing Space, New York (2004). He continues to work as a freelance artist in his home community in Kenya.

source: Indigo Arts Gallery; artprice.com; Bonhams; Kentler International Drawing Space; The Africanists