Most people normally ask what really the connection between art and wildlife conservation is. And the answer is crystal clear: there are several ways to conserve our wildlife, but art is one key method which helps individuals be conscious about the significance of helping protect Mother Nature.
It’s through the power of true art pieces that the viewer’s eyes happen to appreciate the beauty and nature and through this the wonderful uniqueness of our fauna. Rwanda is a small country tucked in the heart of Africa. But despite its smallness, it packs a variety of wildlife and plant species that are quite unique, and some of these are endangered and need protection.
In Kinigi, Mohamed Ndabaye aka Zulu’s paintings hung prominently at Red Rocks Art Gallery. A 60×90 acrylic on canvas depicts a group of tired, weary women traversing a vast desert with water jerrycans balancing delicately above their heads. They have travelled long a distance to fetch this precious commodity. Juxtaposing this is a painting of similar size, depicting a group of zebras, in their resplendent black and white stripes drinking water from a river, with verdant background richly represented by green trees and lush grass.
“The two pieces provoke us to think why man, busy destroying his environment by cutting down trees to give way for deserts, struggles for basic commodities like water while the animals, which are at peace with nature at its pristine, freely suck life out of its rivers and other water sources,” says the artist.
Red Rocks Art Gallery is a new venture which, according to Greg Bakunzi, the founder of Red Rocks Cultural Centre, aims to help in conservation efforts through art, research and education.
The painting by Zulu called Zebra Seriesof, depicts three zebras in different colours, their lower bodies in the normal white and black, while the upper bodies are painted in various technicolor stripes.
Looking keenly at this painting, the beauty and the innocence of the zebras radiate through their faces. According to Tuyisenge, the painting is an artistic call to humans “to let nature be, a call to let the animals live peacefully in their natural habitat, without destroying their ‘homes’.”
There are some artists whose works beckon us to contemplate and experience the world around us. These artists play a unique and significant role in marshaling people’s consciousness and energies to steward, protect and conserve the natural world.
Jean Marie Vianney Munezero, a resident artist at Ivuka Art Center in Kacyiru, Kigali, makes his artistic contribution to conservation through a 76x65cm mixed media piece depicting black, thick smoke billowing towards the sky in a busy industrial metropolis.
Dark figures, their eyes teary white and their skins pitch black, are looking resignedly at the smoke that threatens to engulf the whole sky. This is a warning about how man, with his greed to manufacture goods, end up destroying his own life through destroying the environment. The painting provokes our thinking about whether we want to continue dangerously producing these goods at the expense of our health, and the verdict can be found in the painting itself.
“Pollution is hurting the environment and it’s our responsibility as artists to help stop the harm,” says Munezero.
Djamal Ntagara, formerly of the now defunct Uburanga Art Center, is more poignant why artists need to actively produce pieces that promote conservation.
“It is about artists changing the world, one piece of art at a time. Through our artwork, people can see the harm they do to the environment and be compelled to change their harmful ways. Art has this way of provoking a debate about conservation,” he says.
Ntagara’s realism painting depicts a group of people cutting trees in a forest. However, one man stands behind in a contemplative mood, with his ax on the ground, wondering what the men are doing, in an unspoken trance. “This man has refused to join the mass in the indiscriminate forest destruction, and he has no words to speak about the same. However, we should always speak our minds when something is wrong and the man’s nonchalance towards what’s going around him makes him as guilty as the rest,” Ntagara explains.
