Nyama Choma

Signed and dated (lower right corner): ‘uman’23’.

Beneath the colourful and decorative surface of Nyama Choma hides a poignant and gripping tale of migration, displacement, identity and alienation. The piece also, however, bears testimony to a sort of homecoming with a happy outcome for a once distressed and discriminated against human being.

When Uman painted the piece, she was happily settled in Roseboom, upstate New York, U.S.A. Some fifteen to twenty years earlier, the young artist had relocated from Europe to New York (on a single ticket, with minimal luggage and a burning desire to become an artist).

Times were initially hard with little or no money (barely scraping by washing dishes in coffee shops, etc.) to pay for artistic supplies, using whatever materials she could find: ‘I would pick up things on the streets to paint on. I never bought canvases. I worked everywhere, even when I was sleeping in Union Square. I met a few struggling artists, other people who sold things on the streets’ (‘At Work in the Garden. Uman in conversation with Matthew Higgs and Annatina Miescher about displacement, community and letting art speak for itself’, Hauser & Wirth, 2024).

Eventually, with the support of other artists and close friends, things would change for the better, however. Of major importance here was the local gay-trans community (‘I felt loved among them, and supported. We used to hang out at the Christopher Street piers and also at meetings at the LGBT center on 13th street’), as well as Uman’s encounter with Dr Annatina Miescher (Swiss-born, naturalised American psychiatrist and retired clinical assistant professor at New York University), with whom Uman participated in therapy. Uman later told Chris Martin (‘Uman with Chris Martin’, The Brooklyn Rail, May 2023):

I tried to go to all these groups, you know, trauma groups and therapy groups and around 2005 someone told meyou need to meet Dr. Annatina Miescher. She was doing this art therapy thing at Bellevue. She was so wild. She had pigtails and had henna, red braided hair, and a big Swiss goat bone in her ear. And she just looked very cool.

As told to Chris Martin, Uman’s participation in meetings at the LGBT center on 13th Street as well as her therapy sessions with Miescher were related to Uman’s need to develop her identity as a woman and a trans person:

I’ve always been trans. I always knew that was part of myself. I think I was such a feminine kid that I didn’t give a fuck, I was just like, living my life. I was entertaining. I was flamboyant. I walked around the school with my mother’s scarf and somehow I ended up wearing it around my neck, and kids found it amusing. That sense of freedom is lost the older you get, and people soon made me aware of it by taunting me, but I knew “This is who I am.” And that belief made me reject them. I always said, “I’m going to leave this place and I’m never turning back. Never looking back.” I had to be free and not be around certain family members. Once I moved to New York, it felt like, “there’s not that many people here who know me. I can really just be who I am.

Miescher would soon introduce Uman to the ‘137 Artists Collective’ (a New York City art studio, founded by Miescher, allowing for its talented, but often struggling, members to continue developing their skills). Uman, thus, got a chance to exhibit her work in group shows at downtown New York City galleries, starting in 2012, when artist Bjarne Melgaard (born 1967, Norwegian artist based in New York City who has been described as ‘the most famous Norwegian artist since Edvard Munch’) invited Miescher to bring self-taught artists to his studio to collaborate. This initiative led to group exhibitions at New York’s Ramiken Crucible gallery and London’s ICA, Institute of Contemporary Art (both in 2012). A few years later Uman then participated in the 2015 group exhibition Art Brut, The 137 Artists Collective at Biancasforni Studio, New York City. 2015 was also the year that premiered Uman’s first solo show, Uman, at White Columns, New York.

Ever since, Uman’s work has borne testimony to a remarkable journey that eventually empowered the artist to tell her own story on her own terms. A story about a sort of homecoming as an artist, as well as a human being, despite all odds, or as Uman told Meka Boyle (in ‘Uman’s Studio in Upstate New York is a Portal to a Kaleidoscopic World’, Elephant, 16 June, 2023): ‘My work offers an escape. Whether it’s the night sky, the sun, or a cow in a field, I want it to feel good for the audience. And the first audience is me. I’ve always felt like if I were to make great art, it would have to come from deep within me and be very honest. My work is its own activism, just painting my life, existing, living. I don’t need to say too much.’ To this statement could be added the following extensive description of Uman’s work (provided by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, U.S.A., in connection with her 2025-2026 solo exhibition, Uman: After all the things…):

Informed by Uman’s remembrances of her homeland, her diasporic experience in Europe and the US, as well as a love for East African textiles and transcontinental fashion, nineteenth-century French painting and visionary abstraction, and the natural world, her subject matter elicits the flamboyant fabrics worn by women in the Somali bazaars, the slanted flourishes of Arabic calligraphy taught in the madrasas, and the vast countryside of Kenya and upstate New York. Her all-over compositions in oil, acrylic, spray paint, and oil stick, which sometimes also incorporate collage and sewing, are predominantly square, on average four to nine feet, and enclosed in hand painted frames. Her imagery dances with animated hues and phantasmagoric patterns on unprimed canvas that favor singular colors, reds, yellows, greens, and blues, spirals and grids, pendants and all-seeing eyes, doodles and scribbles, circles and stars in abundance, as well as whimsical creatures and native botany. […] She chooses pigments instinctually for their emotional and optical power. Often referring to her works as self-portraits, they are a perfect synthesis of realism and magic. Fusing art history with autobiography and spirituality with reality, Uman’s work is deeply personal, fueled by drama and survival, journeying and community, and penultimately the boundless possibility of being an artist.

It seems fairly obvious that the decorative pattern as well as the ‘emotional and optical power’ of the predominantly red colour in Nyama Choma relates the work to Uman’s upbringing on the African continent with its ‘flamboyant fabrics in Somali bazaars’. Worth pointing out, however, is also the importance of the very title given to the work by Uman. The nyama choma is a speciality of grilled or barbecued goat meat or cow meat (roasted meat is very popular in Tanzania and Kenya, where it is considered the national dish). The expression ‘nyama choma’ means ’barbecue meat’ in Kiswahili (a Bantu language originally spoken by the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique, along the East African coast and adjacent littoral islands). Nyama choma gatherings are informal, with people convening around an open fire for any special occasion and at any occasion with a grill. Thus it is a social custom in much of Eastern Africa and, quite possibly, also something that (rather like the iconic Madeleine cake, triggering a powerful and involuntary flood of childhood memories when dipped in tea, in Marcel Proust’s legendary 1913-1927 novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu / In Search of Lost Time) constitutes an important memory for an artist who carved out a new life for herself, across the seas, far away from her native homeland.

Provenance

Hauser & Wirth, London, Darling Sweetie, Sweetie Darling, 30 January-30 March 2024.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).