Kevo Stero is a visual artist from Kibera. He started as a street artist doing signage for shops in Kibera, going on to join Maasai Mbili, and creating pubic art projects that showcase important but often overlooked stories in Kibera and further afield. Maasai Mbili Artists’ Collective is an East African contemporary arts organisation based in Kibera, Nairobi. The studio currently comprises of a dozen members, students, interns and visiting artists in residence. Through this collective, the artists make, exhibit and produce interactive multimedia projects, street fashion, public art, children’s art programmes, performance and animations. Today, Kevo works across signage and contemporary art and has applied his ongoing project, Daily Kibera (2007-present), to numerous local and international contexts to consider what stories 'make the news' and how we think about local impact and historical legacy in our neighbourhoods.
In Huntly, Kevo aimed to tell the stories of everyday people through the creation of new public murals in the town. Working with residents that live and work by or around the sites that the artist created work on, and working through the lens of everyday stories, Kevo recreated their stories and reflections as monuments in the town. Through the project, Kevo asked who makes history; what makes a monument; and what are the stories that make communities.
To find answers to these questions, Kevo created new murals at three locations across the town: Gordon Rural Action's new Bikery workshop, The Gordon Schools and a train carriage in a garden next to the A96. Following a call out for mural locations, Kevo's mural at the Bikery – a community bike maintenance workshop – was inspired by the wheels, spokes, bike frames and handle bars surrounding him to create a mural of a cyclist taking a ride through the green hills of Huntly’s surroundings. On the edge of the A96, Kevo turned an old train carriage into a colourful welcome to Huntly, mixing lines from Robert Burns poems with his own style of painting and portraits of train travellers. Kevo also spent some time working with a group of pupils at The Gordon Schools to create a series of panels inspired by their present situations and future dreams. Kevo used tools made as part of Affirmative Art, a programme he co-designed in 2021 to empower people to draw, discuss and discover their dream future. The final painted panels feature planes, mugs of tea, NASA, portraits, sausage rolls, calculators, cartoons, books, pigs, cameras, algebra and alien spaceships… amongst many other things, and are installed in locations chosen by the pupils for the whole school to admire.
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