The late Kenyan painter’s greatest legacy may lie beyond his canvases: in an open-door studio where making, teaching and building an artistic career happened side by side.
For years, Patrick Mukabi’s Dust Depo operated somewhere between a studio, classroom, meeting place and informal art school. Set beside Nairobi’s Railway Museum, it was the kind of space in which the boundaries normally separating those functions were difficult to locate. Mukabi might be working on one of his own paintings while a younger artist drew nearby; another might arrive looking for advice, materials or simply somewhere to work.
There was no conventional curriculum. Nor was there much distance between the established artist and those learning from him. Instead, knowledge circulated through proximity: watching, drawing, being corrected, starting again and, eventually, developing a practice of one’s own.
Mukabi, widely known as Panye, died in April 2026 at the age of 56 following a prolonged illness. His death prompted tributes across Kenya’s cultural community, many of which described him as a mentor as readily as they did a painter. Yet the word “mentor” only partly explains what he created. Dust Depo became something closer to an artist-led piece of cultural infrastructure, operating outside the conventions of an academy while performing many of the functions that institutions are expected to provide.
A studio with an open door
Mukabi was already deeply embedded in Nairobi’s emerging contemporary art ecosystem before establishing Dust Depo. He was among the artists associated with the GoDown Arts Centre from its early years and later worked within other important creative networks in the city, including Kuona Artists’ Collective.
The open-door culture that would define Dust Depo did not begin there. Accounts of Mukabi’s years at the GoDown describe a studio in which younger artists were routinely welcomed to observe and learn. When he eventually secured his own space near the Nairobi Railway Museum in 2015, that informality became a defining feature of the new studio rather than something he left behind.
The location carried an additional resonance. Mukabi came from a family connected to Kenya’s railways, and the studio placed his artistic life beside an infrastructure that had shaped part of his family history.
But Dust Depo’s importance was not architectural grandeur. It was precisely the opposite. Its significance came from what could happen inside an ordinary working studio when access was kept deliberately porous.
Young artists came to draw, paint and observe. Some were children; others were adults attempting to build professional practices. Mukabi taught beyond the studio as well, including in schools and through television, but Dust Depo offered something different: sustained exposure to art as daily work rather than art as occasional instruction.
That distinction matters.
Many forms of art education separate learning from the conditions in which artists ultimately have to operate. Technique is taught in one place, production happens in another, exhibitions arrive later and commercial realities are encountered somewhere further down the line.
At Dust Depo, those stages could overlap.
A visitor could encounter works being started, corrected, completed, discussed and potentially sold within the same environment. Younger artists were therefore exposed not only to drawing and painting but to the rhythm of sustaining a practice: producing consistently, speaking about work, responding to criticism and understanding how an artwork eventually enters circulation.
It was an education in the ecology surrounding the object, not simply the object itself.
Learning by making
Mukabi’s reputation as a teacher was closely connected to drawing. Charcoal in particular became an important part of the visual language through which artists around him developed their command of line, proportion, light and the human figure.
Accounts from Dust Depo repeatedly emphasise the studio’s focus on close observation and continuous practice. Rather than treating artistic development as the discovery of an instant signature style, Mukabi encouraged younger practitioners to build technical confidence through repetition.
That approach becomes especially interesting when viewed against the diversity of artists who passed through his orbit. The significance of a strong teaching environment is not that everyone emerging from it makes similar work. It is that they eventually cease needing to.
Some moved towards painting; others into sculpture, mixed media or more experimental material practices. Mukabi’s influence therefore cannot be measured by searching for miniature versions of his own colourful figurative paintings. It is better understood through a culture of making that allowed younger artists to develop independent vocabularies.
This also complicates the image of the solitary African artist progressing primarily through talent and market discovery. In Nairobi, as in many art centres across the continent, careers have also been formed inside networks of studios, workshops, collectives and artist-to-artist exchange—structures that often receive far less attention than galleries and international exhibitions.
Mukabi belonged to that history, but Dust Depo made his contribution particularly visible.
When mentorship becomes infrastructure
The clearest evidence of Mukabi’s influence may be what happened when mentorship began reproducing itself.
In May 2025, less than a year before his death, Ardhi Gallery in Nairobi presented Dust to Form, bringing together Mukabi and his former student Jimmy Kitheka alongside artists connected to subsequent generations of mentorship. Contemporary reports described the exhibition as tracing an artistic relationship across three generations, with nine additional practitioners invited into the presentation.
The exhibition centred significantly on charcoal, turning a material associated with instruction and technical formation into a means of considering artistic lineage.
For Mukabi’s legacy, the importance of Dust to Form lies less in the exhibition as a single event than in what it demonstrated: knowledge transmitted at Dust Depo had begun moving beyond Mukabi himself.
That is the point at which mentorship starts to resemble infrastructure.
An institution survives because its methods can be carried forward by people other than its founder. An informal studio is more fragile. Its atmosphere may depend on one person’s generosity, authority, contacts and constant physical presence. Mukabi’s death therefore leaves a difficult question hanging over Dust Depo: how much of what made the space function can be preserved without him?
Dust to Form suggested at least a partial answer. If artists taught by Mukabi can themselves train others, then the studio’s most consequential output may not be a collection of objects but a chain of artistic transmission.
An art community mobilises
The strength of that network became especially visible during Mukabi’s final months.
As his health deteriorated in early 2026, artists and organisers in Nairobi mobilised around his medical care. On 4 April, a benefit exhibition organised by Tewasart and Patrons at Trademark Hotel in Village Market brought together 50 works donated by 47 artists. The event was organised by curator Thadde Tewa, with part of the proceeds directed towards Mukabi’s treatment.
The scale of participation was telling. Artists who normally operate as individual practitioners temporarily became part of a collective support structure.
At roughly the same moment, Banana Hill Art Gallery was presenting Mukabi’s exhibition Mali Safi: The Art of the Hustle. With Mukabi hospitalised and unable to produce a conventional new body of work, the exhibition brought together existing pieces, including works sourced from another gallery and loans from private collectors. More than 17 works were assembled for the presentation.
There is something particularly poignant about that exhibition title.
Much of Mukabi’s own painting examined ordinary Kenyan life: marketplaces, working women, movement, exchange and the visual theatre of everyday survival. His figures—often women rendered in vivid colour and shown within scenes of labour or social life—became among the most recognisable elements of his practice.
Yet The Art of the Hustle could just as easily describe the conditions in which many artists around him had learned to build careers.
For artists working without the security of permanent institutional employment, making art also involves negotiating studio costs, materials, collectors, galleries, commissions and unpredictable income. Mukabi did not eliminate those pressures. What Dust Depo offered was a place from which younger artists could begin confronting them together rather than alone.
Beyond the mythology of the mentor
There is a temptation, following the death of an influential artist, to turn generosity into mythology. Mukabi’s story does not require that treatment.
His legacy becomes more consequential when Dust Depo is examined pragmatically.
Here was a working artist who created a space that reduced barriers to entry for others. He provided instruction and materials, welcomed younger practitioners into his professional environment and treated teaching as part of artistic practice rather than an activity separate from it. Contemporary accounts describe aspiring artists receiving both guidance and access to materials at the studio.
The model was modest, but its implications were considerable.
Across rapidly expanding art markets, discussions about cultural infrastructure frequently centre on museums, commercial galleries, foundations, residencies and art schools. These organisations remain essential. But Mukabi’s career offers another way of thinking about infrastructure: not only as buildings and institutions, but as systems of access.
A table at which another artist can work is infrastructure.
So is the transfer of technical knowledge.
So is introducing an emerging practitioner to a collector, encouraging an artist through an unsuccessful period, lending materials, providing a studio address or showing someone how a professional practice functions from one day to another.
Dust Depo gathered many of those functions beneath one roof.
What happens after Dust Depo?
The question facing Nairobi after Mukabi’s death is therefore larger than how his paintings will be remembered.
His work will continue to circulate. Exhibitions can be organised, archives assembled and retrospectives mounted. The more complicated inheritance is the social architecture that existed around the work.
Dust Depo belonged to a wider Nairobi tradition in which artist-led spaces, collectives and cultural organisations have helped compensate for gaps in formal artistic infrastructure. Mukabi himself moved through several of those environments before establishing his own.
His achievement was to translate that experience into an unusually accessible studio culture.
Whether Dust Depo continues in its existing form is only one part of the story. More important is whether its underlying principles—open access, intergenerational exchange, rigorous making and the integration of teaching with professional practice—are carried into other studios.
That process may already have begun.
The artists Mukabi taught are no longer simply evidence of his past influence. Some have become teachers, collaborators and established practitioners in their own right. Dust to Form made that succession visible before his death.
It offers a different way of understanding Patrick Mukabi’s place in Kenyan art.
He leaves behind paintings, certainly. But he also leaves behind something more difficult to catalogue: artists who entered one studio, learned how to work, and eventually walked out capable of building spaces of their own.
