June has flown by but some of the exhbitions are still running if you missed them. Mark your calendars for the upcoming July art events and exhibitions. Find all the art iN Nairobi this month….Events, openings and ongoing exhibitions, it’s all here in your monthly art guide.

EVENTS & OPENINGS

Forging Urban Citizenship | Munyu Space | The Mall, Westlands | 23 – 30 June

A collaborative art and research project that brings together sixteen independent artists and/or artist collectives from four cities across Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe to think about what it means to continuously ‘forge’ the urban lifeforms, care, and justice that many Gen-Z demand on the streets.

The project engages with a multiplicity of art forms, materials, genres, and techniques, mirroring an ever-growing panoply of urban life projects, spaces, politics, and practices. Cities in Africa and beyond have become social laboratories and workshops where new ways of belonging, caring, building, sounding, and enacting community are invented, tested, revised, and constantly brought into conversation with one another.

In this sense, ‘forging’ in the exhibition title speaks to a process of perpetually reassembling connections and solidarities, welding together divergent life trajectories, but also rearranging social relations, movements, mobilities, and political structures in creative and sometimes surprising ways.

Artist Talk & Book Signing: Staying Myself | Thandiwe Muriu | Circle Art Gallery | Saturday 27 June | 2 – 4pm

 FULLY BOOKED

Colour Our World | Betty Press | One Off Contemporary Art Gallery | Opening 27 June | Until 19 July

Betty Press’ exhibition brings together images spanning four decades of observation, travel, and visual storytelling. Drawn from her extensive work across Africa and beyond, the exhibition reflects a deeply human and poetic approach to documentary photography.

Through intimate portraits, landscapes, and everyday moments, Press captures the resilience, beauty, and quiet complexity of human experience. Her photographs move between memory and place, offering viewers a contemplative journey through cultures, communities, and changing times, while celebrating the enduring power of photography to connect people across generations.
Betty Press is an internationally exhibited photographer known for her long engagement with Africa, especially Kenya and East Africa, where she worked and photographed extensively from the late 1980s onward.

Here; Now | Musyoka Martin | One Off Contemporary Art Gallery | Opening 27 June | Until 19 July

Musyoka Martin’s botanical paintings explore the quiet relationship between nature, memory, and human emotion. Working primarily in acrylic, he creates layered compositions where organic forms, leaves, flowers, and imagined plant life become symbolic spaces for reflection and storytelling. His botanical works balance realism with abstraction, combining rich textures, luminous colour, and fluid movement to evoke growth, fragility, and transformation.

Rooted in Nairobi’s contemporary art scene and influenced by his experimental painting techniques, Musyoka’s practice often merges natural imagery with social and personal narratives. His paintings invite viewers to slow down and observe the delicate rhythms of the natural world while considering themes of renewal, coexistence, and resilience.

HUMANIMALS | Dar Al Naim – Sudan | THE SORROW OF EXILE | Rashid Diab – Sudan | Red Hill Art Gallery | 27 June to 15 August 

Honoring Fathers Through Art | Sanaa Art Universe | Sarit Centre, Ground Floor | Through Sunday 28 June

Meet the artists, feel the vibe, and enjoy the experience.

Indigo Hypoxia | Sannad Shreef | Goethe-Institut| Opening 2 July | Until 23 July

Indigo Hypoxia is conceived as an immersive solo exhibition—a space that brings together painting, textile installation, and live performance. It presents a series of presences: alienated blue figures existing within a purple atmosphere.
The exhibition explores an internal psychological state shaped by a sense of spatial and emotional void. This is not a literal room, but a mental enclosure in which the figures are suspended—caught between withdrawal and exposure, fragility and weight.

Private Dinner | Haunting of Visions Exhibition | Shah Houses, Ngara | Thursday 2 July | 8pm

This dinner is a part of the programing associated with the exhibit. It is a night of art, conversation, and storytelling through food and movement. A review of the foods served are a reflection of the defiances, and wisdom on sustenance, medicine, recreation and denial. Presented in the routines and rituals that women often practice when preparing or serving food.
Chef Lesiamon Sempele, one of Africa’s best Chef’s, the runners up in the “House of Chef’s” competition is head chef and curated the menu in collaboration with Wairimu Gatemba. Tickets available at Wairimu Gatemba Studio website.

A Haunting of Visions | Yoni Waite, Wairimu Gatemba, Kebbi Williams, Ndung’u Mbithi | Shah Houses, Ngara | Opening Friday 3 July

A Haunting of Visions is an exhibit that is anchored by the word VISION and its meanings. Through these definitions, the story of the African woman is told in vignettes that speak to legacy, power, nurture, and identity. The paintings, sound installations and textile installations weave this story in the ways that African women have defied or strengthened themselves in the ways that they see the world, are seen, and the futures they accept or reject. Visual works by Yony Waite ( courtesy of her estate), Wairimu Gatemba, Sound installation by Kebbi Williams and Textile Installation by Ndung’u Mbithi.  Tickets available at Wairimu Gatemba Studio website.

Ithui Othe O Rimwe (All of Us, All At Once ) | Harrison Karanja “Scopt” | Creativity Gallery, Nairobi National Museum Opening 3 July | Until 31 July

At a moment shaped by accelerating technology, ecological uncertainty, and shifting realities, Harrison Karanja “Scopt” invites us into Ithuĩ Othe O Rĩmwe (All of Us, All at Once) a powerful reflection on how memory, identity, nature, systems, and imagined futures exist simultaneously within shared human experience.

Through 35 layered paintings drawn from Once Upon a Time and Of Monoliths and Plinths, Scopt builds a world where landscapes, human figures, architecture, and data infrastructures overlap, revealing not one story, but many unfolding at once. Guided by Scoptism, the works open space for multiple interpretations and remind us that we are always interconnected with each other, with our histories, and with the futures we are still shaping.

Come experience a world where nothing exists in isolation, where everything is connected, and all of us are here, all at once.

Weaving Workshop | Ndung’u Mbitha | Shah Houses, Ngara | Saturday 4 July | 2 – 6pm

Join Ndung’u Mbithi in a workshop focused on textile art, as part of the programme of A Haunting of Visions Exhibit. Tickets available at Wairimu Gatemba Studio website.

House of Kuria | Group Exhibition | HoF Gallery, Kibera Arts District | Opening 4 July | Until 2 August

An exhibition based on a family of creatives, curated by Santana Sino

Things That Make Us | Yusuf Mirumbe & Benjamin Ogada | Nobody Owns Me Gallery, Kibera Arts District | Opening 4 July | Until 2 August

The Cost of Presence | Santana Sino | Annex Gallery, Kibera Arts District | Opening 4 July | Until 2 August

Where Trees Dance | Liz Campbell | Heltz House, Ngara | Until 5 July, including special Capoeira Angola performance and roda on closing day 3 – 6pm

Liz Campbell of NY, USA, is holding her first exhibit in Nairobi. This is exciting to me on many levels – at 87, she’s an example of a person who has pursued her creative expression with passion and vigor. She creates daily and embraces art with the discipline of any spiritual practice. Campbell has a magical way of discovering new ways of seeing the “ordinary.”
The exhibit is curated by @azzasatti who continues to create platforms for artists from diverse backgrounds.

Birhane Worede | Circle Art Gallery | Opening 15 July | Until 12 September

Birhane Worede lives and works in Addis Ababa. His intimate and affective portraits are rendered in a reductive stylistic approach, grounding colour, gesture and surface quality. He sees his process as one akin to abstraction, applying oil paint on canvas in loose washy strokes and using suggestive lines and tonal shifts to define the composition, often a solitary figure in a domestic interior setting. Worede’s works also play with mood, oscillating between cool and warm palettes.

“Throughout my work, I expressed interest in self-discovery and the everyday occurrences of the surrounding world. Growing up, living and working as a studio artist in the biggest market place of Africa “Merkato” Addis Ababa influences my work. Human life and emotions are main inspirations… I want my work to create consciousness … self-awareness, curiosity for others’ self- examination.”

Anita Kavochy | Circle Art Gallery | Opening 15 July | Until 12 September

Anita is a Kenyan artist born in Kibera who primarily draws, paints, and experiments on different mediums and materials. Her work seeks to recover the layers of emotions that constitute the self and the relation to the world, the work questions the notion of home and belonging.

ONGOING EXHIBITIONS

Shifting Tides III | Artists of Kobo | Kobo Trust | Until 4 July

Change of Time| Mutisya Kasamba |  Nairobi National Museum, Creativity Gallery | Until 30 June

An exhibition of works exploring the rhythm of time memory and transformation.
8:30am – 5:00pm daily | Normal museum rates apply.

Dancing Lights | Edison Mugalu | Banana Hill Gallery | Until 2 July

Edison Mugalu is a self-taught Ugandan expressionist painter born and raised in Kayunga. He has developed his own distinctive style using acrylics, collage and African fabric to give an eye-catching visual creativity in form of paintings.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Scar—Who Put You Where You Are? | Nahom Teklehaimanot | Circle Art Gallery | Until 4 July 

This is the first solo exhibition for Nahom Teklehaimanot, an Eritrean visual artist whose work explores migration, memory, displacement, and the fragile architecture of belonging. Working primarily with airbrush and collage, Teklehaimanot creates layered, atmospheric compositions that navigate the emotional terrain between homeland and exile. Read more about Teklehaimanot’s show in our article.

Ephemerals | Rasto Cyprian | Circle Art Gallery | Until 4 July

Ephemerals is Circle’s first solo exhibition for Rasto Cyprian, a Nairobi-based mixed media artist whose practice explores process, material experimentation, and the atmosphere of everyday life.

See Also
Stand Together as One – iN Review – Two Rivers

Colour Untamed | Katie Simpson | KitenGallery, Nani’s Wonderland, Kitengela Glass | Until 9 July

Katie Simpson is a Kenyan painter whose work is an act of witness to the animals, landscapes, and fragile ecologies that shaped her from childhood. Born in Kenya and formed by an artistic environment surrounded by nature, the colours and textures of Africa have never left her. They are the ground from which everything else grows.

Colour Untamed brings that lifelong conversation into full focus. Her paintings are ethereal explorations of the earth’s fragility and wildlife’s vulnerability, attempts to catch fleeting moments before they vanish, subjects held briefly in abstracted, luminous space.  There is urgency in that impulse. Kenya’s wild places are changing, and Simpson paints in response – not with polemic, but with something more tender and more lasting.

After the Curtain Falls | Lincoln Mwangi | Gravitart Gallery | By appointment

Lincoln’s body of work is immersed in symbolism. The figures, objects, animals, landscapes, and elemental forms inhabiting the paintings behave almost like actors upon a stage, each embodying ideas, forces, and states of being.

Contact Gravitart to arrange viewing.

The Art of Connection: Part 2 – The Invisible City | Curated by Myrna Art Direction @ Hyatt Regency | June – August

In collaboration with Hyatt Hotels Westlands Nairobi, the exhibition ‘The Art of Connection’ unfolds across five floors as a living exhibition curated by Myrna (Art Direction). Bringing together contemporary artists and designers the exhibition explores art as a fluid space of encounter, movement, and exchange. New works will be introduced throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Artists and designers are invited to submit their work and join the exhibition. Portfolios (PDF) can be submitted via WhatsApp to +254 115 784 649.

Quilting Light | Elizabeth Ashamu Deng | Paper Cafe X The Good Grain | Until 1 August

In this body of work, Elizabeth pushes cyanotype beyond a single process. She uses toning to shift its characteristic blues into browns, draws on photographic, hand-drawn, and contact-print methods, and sometimes adds gold pen, gold leaf, watercolour, and stitching to create richly textured compositions.. Free and open to all

Viewing Hours; Tuesday to Saturday, 8 am to 4 pm.

In This Valley of Dying Stars | Jess Atieno | The African Arts Trust | Opening Friday 12 June,6pm | Until 16 August

In This Valley of Dying Stars reveals how we are haunted not only by the lingering weight of the past, but also by futures that were once imagined and never realized. At the heart of the exhibition lies Jess Atieno´s investigation of brutalist architecture in the context of post-independence Africa​. Once envisioned as monuments to liberation, progress, and collective futurity, these structures now persist as weathered remnants — spectral forms suspended between utopian aspiration and historical rupture.

Exhibition curated by Niklas Obermann.

Tabula Rasa | Peterson Kamwathi | NCAI | Until 23 August

Peterson Kamwathi’s first major institutional solo exhibition and his first such exhibition in Nairobi. Spanning drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video, and a site-specific wall drawing, the exhibition centres drawing as a way of thinking, a way of looking that is never passive. Through layered images, shifting between clarity and obscurity, Kamwathi questions what is remembered, what is erased, and who decides. The everyday becomes monumental; the overlooked, charged with history. In this exhibition, Kamwathi offers something more valuable than resolution: a set of images precise enough to slow us down, and open enough to let us look again.

 

A featured work By @altayeb_morhal, from the opening collection at Nubian Art Gallery

Opening Collection | Nubian Art Gallery (Stellato Mall) | Ongoing

The newest gallery in town, championing Sudanese art/artists and raising funds to support communities in Sudan affected by crisis, uplift children, and empower artists back home. Walk-ins are welcome, and private viewings can be arranged by appointment.

Hours: Mon – Thurs & Saturday 12-8pm | Friday & Sunday 2 – 9pm

Wahenga Wa Sanaa | Nairobi National Museum | Until 2027

Wahenga wa Sanaa: Tracing two centuries of artistic legacy 1800 – 1980

Wahenga wa Sanaa brings the NMK collection into public view, tracing powerful themes of cultural identity, spirituality, history and politics, nature and environment, and the growth of formal art training and supporting institutions. The exhibition honours the Wahenga—the wise ancestors and cultural forebearers whose creativity laid the foundation for generations of artists. As we create art today, we walk in their footsteps and continue to build on their enduring legacy. The exhibition is funded by the Kenya Museum Society. Read more about the exhibition in our article.