Kaloki Nyamai: Tukilile Vaa

January 14 - February 27, 2026
Institute for the Humanities Gallery, 202 S. Thayer
Gallery Hours: M-F 9am-5pm

Kaloki Nyamai is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nairobi. His artistic practice explores Kenya's histories and collective memory, blending Kamba traditions with contemporary narratives. The artist finds inspiration in his grandmother’s stories of the Kamba people, a Bantu ethnic group of eastern Kenya.

Densely layered with acrylic paint, rope, photo transfers, and stitched yarn, his free-hanging compositions defy our expectations as to what a painting is and how art occupies public spaces. Nyamai blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation. The sheer physicality and expansiveness of his constructions inspires wonder in the viewer. We become immersed in their presence, as if in conversation with the artist himself, his own hands in the making still evident. Stitched and sewn, his compositions are the embodiment of a reparative process… the beginnings and ends, fronts to backs… fragments, unfinished. Nyamai likens the formal act of stitching to symbolically unifying a wounded or fractured community. 
The Institute for the Humanities exhibition Tukilile Vaa unites Nyamai’s seminal work Tukwatane Kimwe, first exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial in 2025, with two more recent smaller canvases, an opportunity for new insights.

In synchrony with his artistic endeavors, Nyamai recently founded the Kamene Cultural & Research Center in Nairobi, a creative and collaborative hub dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and innovation of African cultural practices. Nyamai’s responsive social practice builds a place for community to gather, to learn, and to be empowered through art making and art education.

Kaloki Nyamai's paintings command rooms and reclaim spaces. They are refusals of the flat and singular narratives often used to represent Kenya’s history and post-colonial identity. Instead, Nyamai creates worlds, vast in scale, beckoning futures.

–Amanda Krugliak, IH Arts Curator

Kaloki Nyamai is the 2025-26 William and Sally Searle Visiting Artist at the Institute for the Humanities.

In addition to the Institute for the Humanities exhibition, the large mixed media work Tusukane is on view in the U-M Museum of Art's Gallery of African Art through Spring 2026. Visitors are encouraged to visit both sites to experience Nyamai’s work in very different contexts and spaces.

Kaloki Nyamai (*1985 in Kitui, Kenya) is a multidisciplinary artist working with installation, painting, and sculpture based in Nairobi. From an early age, his mother introduced him to painting and taught him to draw, fostering an ever-lasting interest in art. Nyamai studied Interior Design at the Buruburu Institute Of Fine Arts (BIFA) and then pursued painting after working in other creative fields. His large-scale paintings and mixed-media installations intricately explore historical narratives, examining their resonance in the present. Nyamai has shown his work across the globe in solo exhibitions at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2024); James Cohan Gallery, New York (2024); Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin (2023 and 2022); SEPTIEME Gallery, Paris (2019), and other venues. In 2023, he featured part of his series Dining in Chaos in the “Unlimited” section at Art Basel in Basel. He has participated in group exhibitions and biennials, most recently at the Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah (2025); The Völklinger Hütte, Völklingen (2024); the Kenyan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Venice (2022); and the Dakar Biennale, Dakar (2022). His works are part of numerous private and institutional collections around the world, such as the Dallas Art Museum, the Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the Arthur Primas Museum.