Villagism
Portfolio by John Bosco Muramuzi / Introduction by TWR
John Bosco Muramuzi got his first exhibition, a group show, at Kampala’s Xenson Art Space in 2020. The pandemic season was a highly productive period for Muramuzi, who at the time was developing the unique visual language that’s been appropriately described as villagism. The term underscores the freedom with which Muramuzi paints, the way he fashions narratives that put one in mind of the joy and wonder of the village pastoral. Even when he paints cityscapes, the pictures are so lush with flora and fauna that they evoke the sense, one may say, of life in all its abundance. This singular achievement is what makes Muramuzi’s work attractive to collectors. They see in his style a hopeful, positive vision of life, the case even when the canvases are addressing poignant subjects. He is, to be honest, the boy wonder of the Ugandan art scene.
Muramuzi’s first solo was an exhibition in 2022 with Umoja Art Gallery in Kampala. The show, titled “Back to my Roots,” presented the artist in his proper context: as a creative person trying to come to terms with his humble beginnings while claiming a glorious future. The paintings in that show – more than 30 of them – were executed in a broad spectrum of color and presented verily as architectural buildings in and of their own. The pictures charm as much as they intrigue, and they are as simple as they are complex. Muramuzi told TWR that even in cities he visualizes things with the “village mindset” anchoring his artistic vision. “It’s not a disadvantage to grow up in the village,” he said.
Muramuzi, who was born in 1991, has since become more established as an artist, coming into his own as the leader of a burgeoning artists’ collective based at Buloba, a town on the highway to Mityana where he lives with his wife and children. There, even now, he can be found at work in his studio or presiding over the construction of some building, most recently a shelter for the sculptural works he’s been working on lately. His practice is rooted in community and charity, and to this end he supports many young people in his neighborhood who seek a permanent and gainful relationship with visual art. Some of his apprentices have already created drawings of their own, and they also are getting lessons in the use of recycled materials. “The idea is to use art to solve community problems, not just to benefit myself as an artist,” Muramuzi told TWR, speaking of his 15 apprentices. “It’s their work. My role is just to nurture them.”
TWR is pleased to present a portfolio of 12 acrylic-on-canvas paintings by Muramuzi. Some are recent while others were executed some time ago. They represent only an example of his best work, the artist having churned out scores of canvases in recent years as his popularity grew at home and abroad. His work has been shown by Tewas Art Gallery in Nairobi, and later this year he expects to show his latest work at Zanzibar’s Forster Art Gallery, where he was in residence earlier in 2025.
As a man more than as an artist, Muramuzi is the perfect example of what it means to pull oneself up by the bootstraps. He grew up poor in a village in Sheema, a remote district in western Uganda, and didn’t come to Kampala until 2005. He went into the care of relatives who took him as far as they could in school. He struggled to continue his education after completing high school. He recalled auditing classes at Makerere University’s art school while not being enrolled, so that his classmates and lecturers had no idea at the time that he wasn’t a legitimate student of the university. Muramuzi later earned a diploma in industrial art and design from the YMCA Comprehensive Institute. Early in his career, he said, he was dismissed by some as an “artisan.” Now his work is in personal and institutional collections in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere.
Many artists spend a lifetime trying to prove that they matter. With very little help from others and in so brief a time, Muramuzi has distinguished himself as an innovator with a sharp eye for his surroundings as much as the aesthetic needs of others. His success reflects hard work as well as fidelity to his craft as an artist who forces us to see his wonderful reality.▪
