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About Us
In contemporary Africa, the Bushman artists of the Kuru Art Project bring back the role of art as an expressive outlet for their traditions and recent life experiences, as their ancestors had done in the many rock paintings all over Southern Africa. The Kuru Art Project encourages and assists these artists by exposing them to contemporary art materials and techniques, as well as the administration and marketing of their art, which has become a much needed economic resource for this group of artists and their community.
The Kuru Art Project was founded in 1990 and is a project of a community trust called the Kuru Development Trust. It is situated in D’Kar, a small settlement in western Botswana.
The twenty artists currently with the project are from the Naro and Dcui San groups. They reside in D’Kar and all of them have grown up in the vast Kalahari sandveld around the Ghanzi district of western Botswana. They are skilled traditional dancers, storytellers, musicians and craft producers, and the transition to express themselves in contemporary art materials has come naturally to them. They work in different media and techniques, including oil on canvas, lino cuts, dry point engravings and lithography.
They have won many awards, both collectively and individually and their work is to be found in private and public collections throughout the world. Members of the project have had their work used in many publications, book covers, on the tails of British Airways planes and on a set of stamps issued by the Botswana Postal Services.
After thirty years, the group is well known and their art has been exhibited in more than 15 countries globally with about 160 exhibitions.
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