Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Thandiwe Muriu

Thandiwe Muriu‘s work takes you on a colorful, reflective journey through her world as a woman living in modern Kenya, as she reinterprets contemporary African portraiture, and presents a bold new vision of a woman and her autonomy.Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Muriu discovered photography at age 14. Self-taught, she immersed herself in books and video tutorials, learning from every resource she could find, as Kenya did not have any formal photography schools.By age 17, she was working professionally, and by 23 had shot her first solo advertising campaign. By 2019, she was photographing campaigns for some of the largest companies in East Africa.Muriu draws on the slick aesthetics of fashion photography to reinterpret contemporary African portraiture.These bright, playful images immerse her models in colorful textures until they simultaneously disappear into the background and burst from the frame.Exploring how individuals lose their identities to culture, Muriu’s work interrogates contemporary self-image and brings aspects of Kenyan tradition to the fore, from reappropriation of everyday objects to traditional architectural hairstyles.Muriu aims to reclaim the self love of the African woman, who is often excluded from beauty standards in her own country.More of Thandiwe Muriu’s photography can be found at https://thandiwemuriu.com/.