About April

After spending 17 years doing portraiture commissions, Kamunde transitioned into full-time practice in late 2020. She works primarily in oils, creating paintings that tell intimate and personal stories. Her work foregrounds moments in which African women are at rest, painting her sitters in vivid detail and rich colour highlighting relatively unspectacular moments, magnifying worlds in which black women are the protagonists, reclaiming connection to themselves, their time, and their pleasure. Through soft and delicate brush strokes, her subjects, oftentimes placed into a natural, lush environment, radiate a gentle and natural presence.

Her work explores meanings of rest and the pursuit of it. The work is driven by personal reflection and response to feelings of deep fatigue triggered by her experiences of a rapidly changing world and the endeavor to live a successful and fulfilling life in fast-paced Nairobi, one of Africa’s mega cities.

She has more recently extended her subject matter beyond the margins of rest, and explored the contradictory, and nuanced experiences of rest vs labour, sensuality vs modesty, alongside themes of respectability/presentability through the mediums of video, installation, and sound.

Her inaugural solo exhibition, Fabric of Our Being, showed in both Nairobi (The African Arts Trust) and Kampala (Afriart Gallery) in 2025. Her work has been shown in the group exhibitions Walking the Edge (Afriart Gallery, 2022), Shapes of Water (Afriart Gallery, 2023), and Eastern Voices: Contemporary Art from East Africa (Addis Fine Art, London, 2023). She participated in 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London, Art X Lagos, INVESTEC Cape Town Art Fair and African Galleries Now x Artsy in 2023 and 2024. In 2022, she completed a three-month residency at Silhouette Projects, Kampala and in 2024, she was awarded the WAFT (Writer’s and Artist Fellowship for Travel) facilitated by Wangechi Mutu Studio.