Rosemary Karuga

Style: Junk Art;

Place: Meru

Born: 1928

Death: 2021

Biography:

Rosemary Namuli Karuga (19 June 1928 - 9 February 2021) was a Kenyan visual artist. In 2017, she was named Artist of the Month by the National Museums of Kenya. She is known to be the first woman artist to have studied at Makerere University. Karuga was born in Meru, Kenya to a Ugandan father and a Kenyan mother. She was the first female graduate of the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University in Kampala between 1950 and 1952 where she studied design, painting and sculpture. She worked as an art teacher in rural Kenya, retiring in the 1980s to pursue art professionally. During this period in her life, she got married in 1953, then having three children from her marriage. In 1987, she became artist in residence at the Paa ya Paa Arts Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. In 2006 she moved to Ireland to live with family and obtain medical attention due to her failing health. She passed on at the age of ninety-three at the Amberley Nursing Home in Dublin, Ireland where she lived with her daughter. She lived there until her death on 9 February 2021.