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With shows on three continents, a growing base of Black collectors in Los Angeles, and more in Dallas, Nyamai has been energized by the reaction to his work: “It’s that thing of silent support, where you’re told, ‘We are with you. You will never fall if we’re here.’ And that was so overwhelming until I almost was in tears, because they felt the connection.”

Though deeply personal, Nyamai’s paintings are able to embody a seemingly universal connection to personal memory and collective history. His dynamic and time-intensive process of preparing a canvas symbolizes how layers of information, story and image accrue to form our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Nyamai described his process in very down-to-earth terms on a recent WhatsApp call. “It is like when you go to the streets and you see posters in the street, and then you will see a poster from last year,” the artist said. “Another poster on top of each other, another one on top of each other. You can tell. ‘Oh, this thing has been [pasted] over a certain period of time.’”
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Nyamai re-creates this weathering effect by distressing the work — even going so far as to step on his canvases. It’s a process that made gallery owner Bart Keijsers Koning anxious at first. But Nyamai reassured him that anything that falls off in the process needs to; anything that remains becomes an essential part of the creative record.

History moves like a band of ticker tape across each painting, in haunting, grayed-out backgrounds collaged with archival, newspaper and personal photographs. Only after that do figures emerge, pulled out from the river of time and foregrounded in colors of yellow, turquoise, Pepto pink and Prussian blue.

Six of the show’s seven works unfold subjunctive memories, recollections the artist hoped had been true in his life: a young boy looking onto a scene of tenderness and affection, a couple clasping hands as they pose for a photograph, a father — possibly the artist’s — holding his son on his back, a mother holding a young child as a father turns and leaves. (For a run? For good?)

The way Nyamai reconfigures the canvas and abstracts the human form distinguishes him from many Black artists within the diaspora who also focus on painting the body. That’s part of the reason Keijsers Koning is excited to expose U.S. audiences to Nyamai’s oeuvre.

“Where figurative work stops, this kind of painting begins,” Keijsers Koning says.
The figures that come to life in “Moments I Wished I Had” — as much as the backgrounds they emerge from — reveal the struggle of the artist to render the memory into paint. Figures aren’t always rendered anatomically; a threaded outline of a nose or mouth whispers of a face.

Nyamai leaves the paintings unresolved, which oddly feels more truthful to the subject matter. This tension animates a much more expressive composition, capturing the tender and provisional posture with which we must approach even our best efforts at (re)constructing a life.

“I always have an idea of what I’m going to do, but I never know how it’s going to come out,” the artist says. “It’s like working somewhere new, where you’re expecting something. You might be surprised.”

Painting in a post-colonial and wartorn context, Nyamai attempts to raise questions about how Kenyans can create an expansive future for themselves in the wake of violence. Individuals across the diaspora and the world resonate with this question: The body needs stitching; the ground needs stitching; so does the wounded soul, and also the collective imagination. That’s where the mass of threads that spool and hang from the paintings come in.

“It’s like going through the fire or going through an accident where you have an open wound. You have to be stitched together, so you can have a new beginning,” Nyamai says.
Each work on view is composed of fragments of unstretched canvas sutured together with crude and irregular stitches done with sturdy rubber wire. In addition to making allusions to Nyamai’s grandmother and mother’s practices of basketry and fashion design, this choice draws visual attention to the personal and social attempt at repair after trauma.

The artist says the threads were the result of an accidental experiment that came out of his 2019 Nairobi show “The Fire This Time,” inspired by James Baldwin’s seminal book The Fire Next Time.

Whether attempting to mend the strained interpersonal relationship between a father and son or weave a new future for post-colonial Kenya, the stitches are not done cleanly. Thick black threads pour from the skin of Nyamai’s figures, reaching out possibly to connect to the viewer or to obscure their forms from view.

“Moments I Wished I Had” reminds us that art, like history itself, is not simply an object to be admired but a process that entangles us “in the space between now and the past,” as the artist puts it. That between space is revealed on the surface of Nyamai’s composition after all that needs to fall off has fallen off, once the wounds have been sutured and fractal memories collected. Only then can we responsibly, if at all, talk about wishes and dreams, about a future where all the threads might finally come together.
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DetailsKaloki Nyamai’s “Moments I Wished I Had” runs through Oct. 8 at Keijsers Koning, 150 Manufacturing St., Suite 201, Dallas. Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Monday and Tuesday by appointment only. keijserskoning.com


SOURCE- Dallas Morning News 

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The festival kicks off Saturday, Oct. 22, with the opening-night gala screening of “The Banshees of Inisherin,” directed by Martin McDonagh. The festival culminates Saturday, Oct. 29 with the closing-night gala screening of “Living” and will feature a spotlight screening of “The Whale, directed by Darren Aronofsky, on Friday, Oct. 28. Miles Teller will attend an conversation and presentation of “Top Gun: Maverick.” Former U.S. Congresswoman and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Gabby Giffords will appear with Oscar-nominated directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West following a special screening of the celebrated documentary “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down.”

A key stop on the Academy Awards festival circuit, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival will screen 143 films, including 53 narrative feature films, 20 documentary feature films, and 79 shorts, with eight world premieres and six U.S. premieres.

Gala screenings include “Aftersun,” “Armageddon Time,” “Broker,” “Causeway,” ‘Close,” “Corsage,” “Decision to Leave,” “Devotion,” “Empire of Light,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” “The Good Nurse,” “Holy Spider,” “The Inspection,” “Living,” “The Lost King,” “The Menu,” “My Policeman,” “Nanny,” “One Fine Morning,” “She Said,” “Taurus,” “Till,” and “Women Talking.”
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See the entire festival lineup over at the website here.


SOURCE- Indie Wire

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​There are many types of music, but there is nothing quite like the Blues genre. If you’re familiar with songs like Smoking Gun, Right Next Door, You Move Me, and Back Door Slam, then you are likely a fan of blues guitarist and singer Robert Cray and The Robert Cray Band. Cray is a five-time Grammy Award winner and has been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and earned the Americana Music Awards Lifetime Achievement for Performance.

He has played with artists like Albert Collins, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, and Eric Clapton [that’s a stellar list].

I had the pleasure of chatting with Cray about the legacy of his music that spans over 40 years. His love for music, like many musicians, began as an influence of his parents.
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“The love of music came through my parents and their vast and varied record collection that included people like Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke, Bobby Bland, and on and on and on, and then The Beatles hit, and I happened to be a boy at that time of 11 years old and after my parent’s music, they wondered why I was going in that direction and it’s because everyone else was, and the guitar was a really popular instrument at that time and also just listening to everything on the radio,” said Cray.

He ended up gravitating back toward the music he first discovered through his parents, the Blues, right before the end of high school.

I was curious about how Cray developed his unique sound.

“I guess that’s one thing that people tell you. I just had a lot of favorites that I enjoyed listening to like Albert Collins and B.B. King of course, and I listened to Jimmy Hendrix because he was the guy. When you start writing I guess that’s when you feel you have something to say and people tell you that they recognize your sound upon hearing you. It’s something that you just do,” he said.
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The Robert Cray Band was formed in 1974, and though there have been many group member changes, Richard Cousins, who helped form the band, outside of a 12-year hiatus has been a part of the group since the beginning.

Though he has worked with many artists, Cray has many memories with Albert Collins who taught him a lot about the music business.

“I had the pleasure of working with Albert Collins for about a period of three years off and on whenever he was on the West Coast in the early days. He was kind of like a father to us because we were really young and we were on the road. He would ask, “Have you called your parents today and let them know where you are?” He was instrumental in showing us how to get our money from unscrupulous club owners. I also worked with John Lee Hooker for a while, B.B. King, of course, and Eric Clapton. We’ve had a lot of great opportunities over the years,” he said.

Cray is a guitarist as well as a singer, he doesn’t feel forced to choose which he enjoys the most. He loves them both equally.

“With the band and everybody listening and working together and getting a good groove going, and then trying to mix the vocal in between is a challenge I love a hell of a lot because every night there is always something different about the way we play a song and you always hear different ways to sing that same song so that’s a constant challenge that I enjoy trying to improve on, which you know is never going to happen but it’s always a challenge and a lot of fun,” he said.

Since Cray has been touring for many decades and most of his career, he’s learned that it takes a village for a tour to happen.

“It takes a good team of people. It’s a big family out here and then the people behind the scenes as well, management, booking, just good camaraderie. It’s your team moving into a different location, setting up and doing your best, and setting up at the next place. It takes ability and strength,” he said.

It was hard for Robert to narrow down his favorite city to perform in, but I loved his response.
“Whoever has the best food at the moment. You do travel with your stomach as well. And if you’re able to get whatever the specialty of the city is, if you’re lucky enough to have that time, that’s the best city of the moment,” he said.
As he is one of the musical greats. He’s never really thought about it that way but appreciates the respect for his music.
With so much time in the music industry, Cray has seen the change in the music industry like many artists have.
“It’s [the music industry] changed in a lot of ways. Streaming has changed things as people don’t have to purchase music from a particular artist or band. I think if you’re a touring musician you stand a chance of staying out there and making a living doing this but it’s really hard for those who are just now coming into the business because you can look at your record of how many plays you’re getting on a streaming service and you go I’m only getting two cents and they played my song 10 thousand times. It’s really disheartening. Also, the accessibility of people on internet services as opposed to going to concerts has changed quite a bit too because you don’t have to be there,” said Cray.
You can check out the Robert Cray Band here in Dallas on Friday, September 30, 2022, at Annette Strauss Square.


Tickets
https://robertcray.com/pages/tours
SOURCE- Dallas Weekly ​