Presently on View
Paintings and Sculptures by Lilian Mary Nabulime
(August 23 – September 30, 2025)
A Retrospective Curated by Rodney Muhumuza
The exhibition presents paintings and sculptures by Lilian Mary Nabulime, a long-established artist in Uganda. The show, titled “Contours of Being,” is a major retrospective of the work of a legendary artist and teacher. While Nabulime is best known as a sculptor of almost peerless rank in Uganda, she is also a terrific painter whose pictures have rarely been seen in public. Her sculptures and paintings on canvas are united in the show that captures Nabulime in all her glory: as a terrific observer of human nature and a creative whose work forces us to perceive what’s good and what’s not so good in us.
In a firm way, Nabulime’s entire career can be almost summed up as an interrogation of the human impulses that affirm or undermine existence, a quality that marks her as a universal artist. And if her works are almost always beautiful to behold, as indeed they are despite the ugliness they renounce, it is because Nabulime is also a constant aesthete, usually trying to find fragments of beauty even in the turmoil of existence. The best of Nabulime reminds us that humans are unable to be still, for reasons they can or can’t control, and because we know few moments that are totally devoid of fear or worry. Thus Nabulime’s striking imagery, whatever the medium, gives shape to the contours of being.
Previously on View
Rehearsing the Future: Roduza Collection
(May 10 – June 28, 2025)
An Exhibition Curated by Rodney Muhumuza
The show that launched the Weganda Gallery exhibited paintings and sculptures owned by founding curator Rodney Muhumuza, a journalist, essayist, editor, and collector based in Kampala. Muhumuza amassed a growing collection of more than 50 paintings and sculptures by some of our most important artists: George W. Kyeyune, Godfrey Banadda, Nuwa Wamala Nnyanzi, Leonard W. Kateete, Lilian Mary Nabulime, Ronex, Ocom Adonias, John Bosco Muramuzi, Sheila Nakitende, Ismael Kateregga, Bruno Sserunkuuma, Canon Griffin Rumanzi, and others.
Many Ugandans are ignorant of the explosion of art around them, and the show’s prophetic central argument was that this fact should – and can – change. In “Rehearsing the Future: Notes on the Fierce Urgency of Collecting,” an essay that outlined the intellectual underpinnings of Kampala’s newest gallery, Muhumuza wrote of those who step into a house like his, filled with books and pictures, and, seemingly confused or out of place, dare to ask, Now how much did you pay for that? “They have an idea that the pieces may not be cheap, but they are looking for confirmation that money has been wasted and I am waiting to confirm my fear that, as solid and educated as they may be, they are not cultured people. At such times I think, rather arrogantly, that one person, just one, can have the uber-consciousness a million Toyota-loving Ugandans don’t have,” he wrote.
The show’s overarching goal, therefore, was to try to spread the love of art – one Ugandan at a time.