ROOTS & REINVENTIONS runs from DEC 13 to JAN 15 at Ardhi Gallery

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The Future Is Youth. The Medium Is Art
Creating value through art.
Photo credit: James Dundi
ROOTS & REINVENTIONS runs from DEC 13 to JAN 15 at Ardhi Gallery
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Creating value through art.
Photo credit: James Dundi
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Warazi Art Collective featuring Odyssey Collective
Roots & Reinventions brings together the Warazi Art Collective and guest artist Marvin Abwao of the Odyssey Collective, creating a powerful cross-collective showcase that bridges heritage, innovation, and community-driven creativity. The exhibition highlights diverse artistic practices, ranging from sculpture and illustration to bamboo technology, woodcut printing, digital art, and painting, revealing how contemporary Kenyan artists transform materials, stories, and cultural memory into new visual possibilities.
Warazi’s work explores sustainability, ancestral symbolism, and material reinvention, while the Odyssey Collective, an emerging community of artists committed to creativity, healing, and boundary-pushing collaboration, contributes an additional layer of dialogue through Marvin Abwao’s vivid figurative and cultural paintings.
Together, these two collectives expand the exhibition’s core theme: that tradition and innovation not only coexist, but energize one another. Roots & Reinventions positions Ardhi Gallery as a space where artistic communities meet, exchange, and reimagine the future, celebrating transformation in all its forms.
Ardhi is honored to present the extraordinary works of South African jeweler and gemstone artist Ian Barnard, whose rare ability to merge fine jeweler craftsmanship with sculptural storytelling has positioned him among Africa’s most distinctive creative voices.
In his remarkable series, Guardians of Africa, Barnard transforms uncut and unpolished gemstones, raw treasures drawn from the earth into poetic tributes to the continent. Each piece becomes a celebration of Africa’s natural grandeur, its iconic wildlife, and the profound spirit that binds land, history, and heritage.
At the heart of the collection is The Riches of Africa, a breathtaking mosaic of the continent composed of over 3,000 carats of gemstones, including garnet, aquamarine, tsavorite, tanzanite, amethyst, tourmaline, ruby, and moissanite. This luminous map captures Africa not as a geopolitical form, but as a living jewel, diverse, radiant, immeasurable in value.
Barnard extends this celebration of the continent through sculptural silhouettes of the Big Five, each rendered in ethically sourced stones that echo the character of the animal portrayed.
Now available on view at the Ardhi Gallery and our website, Guardians of Africa invites collectors, connoisseurs, and admirers to encounter Africa’s mineral poetry up close. Barnard elevates raw minerals into emblems of identity and guardianship, inviting viewers to reflect on the beauty, fragility, and majesty of the land we call home.
This collection is more than art; it is a love letter to Africa, a reminder that the continent’s greatest riches are not only found beneath the soil, but in its stories, its wildlife, and its unyielding spirit.
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Exhibition | Dec 13 - Jan 15
By Marvin Abwayo