A former Sacramento artist sold a painting to Crocker Art Museum for more than $100k

A major acquisition for the Crocker Art Museum, both in terms of size and price, currently sits in four crates at the museum, with staff hoping to install it by the end of August.

But it wasn’t always this way for Wangari Mathenge, the artist behind the 96-inch-by-290-inch painting, “Home Sweet Home (After Seurat, Manet and Pippin)” which the Crocker acquired for an undisclosed six-figure sum in April.

There were the years in the mid-late 2010s that Mathenge, 50, lived in North Natomas and did art from her apartment before heading to art school in Chicago in 2019. Prior to this, she practiced civil litigation, lived in places like the Bay Area, Massachusetts and her native Kenya and pursued art as a hobby as far back as 2005.

Mathenge might now appear to be a quick-rising star in the art world, though she doesn’t see it this way.

“I’ve been working on this for so many years, it doesn’t feel meteoric at all,” Mathenge said.

Mathenge’s background

Mathenge has lived, as she put it during a phone interview for this article, many lives.

Born in Kenya in 1973, she moved at six weeks old so her father could work for the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. The family returned to Kenya when she was 5 and soon lived on land in a Nairobi suburb, Karen that was once owned by Karen Blixen.

Blixen is better known to Western audiences by one of her pen names, Isak Dinesen under which she wrote the 1937 classic autobiographical work, “Out of Africa.”

Part of the 1985 film of the book was made on Mathenge’s family’s land. Mathenge doesn’t remember seeing stars Meryl Streep or Robert Redford on-location. But she recalled the excitement around the staging of the film – and how she felt upon learning that its street scenes contained merely the semblance of buildings that were held up in back with stilts and wooden poles.

“I remember being very let down by the fact it was just a facade,” Mathenge said. “And I’m like, ‘You mean this is what they do in movies?’”

In time, Mathenge would use other nearby land once owned by Blixen to help inspire the work that the Crocker recently acquired. She took staging photos in April 2022 on land that’s about a mile from where she grew up, taking these photos to her Chicago-area studio where she would paint “Home Sweet Home” on four canvases.

She came to the United States in 1995 to attend college, eventually earning an MBA and multiple law degrees. She practiced law between 2003 and about 2016, returning to Kenya for a time around the mid-late 2000s to work for her family’s horticultural export business.

At some point, Mathenge also began taking art classes at American community colleges. “I think I just always had this interest for the formal learning of it, especially when I decided I was going to take it up as a serious hobby, which is what I just always thought of it as,” Mathenge said.

Mathenge spent nine years thinking about pursuing an MFA, moving in this time to North Natomas in 2015 after her husband got a job locally. Other than the 100-degree weather, she said, she loved living in Sacramento, only leaving after a School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor convinced her to get an MFA.

How Mathenge got on the Crocker’s radar

Several months after Mathenge finished her MFA in 2021, she got a solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London.

Francesca Wilmott, who became an associate curator for the Crocker in January, happened to be in London getting a Ph.D. at the time of Mathenge’s show and attended it. Wilmott said she fell in love with Mathenge’s work. “I thought it was so powerful and so important,” Wilmott said.

Wilmott and Scott Shields, who is the Crocker’s Ted and Melza Barr curator and associate director, keep a wish list of artists whose work they hope to acquire. In mid-April, they got a heads up that Mathenge would have a solo exhibition at Los Angeles gallery Roberts Projects from April 22 to June 3.

“We dug in right away to see if there’s any chance to acquire something,” Shields said. “Given the quality of work and her connection to Sacramento, we’d been looking.”

One thing working in the Crocker’s favor: While works from gallery shows often are privately sold, Mathenge had dictated that the 193-square-foot “Home Sweet Home” go to a museum. Her concern was that the work would wind up in storage because a private owner lacked space to display it.

Mathenge and Roberts Projects co-owner and co-founder Bennett Roberts extended a 20 percent discount and waved the cost of shipping, with Roberts saying he was willing to do “whatever I need to do to get pieces into the correct venues and add whatever value that I can.”

Still, with three museums overseas also interested in “Home Sweet Home,” it wouldn’t come cheaply. The Crocker turned to Simon Chiu, an Orange County-based member of its board who has donated more than 40 works to the museum and helped expand its collection of BIPOC artists in recent years. Chiu footed a cost somewhere over $100,000 (he declined to provide a specific price tag) for Mathenge’s work.

“She is still considered a young artist and just her work is really amazing,” Chiu said.

The deal moved quickly, with Shields going to museum director Lial Jones on April 18, sending photographs to the museum’s collections committee on April 20 and having an invoice by April 22. The painting was shipped to the Crocker in mid-June and will eventually hang on the main wall near the entrance at Friedman Court.

Shields said he thought Mathenge’s work is a wonderful painting by an artist with local connections who helps expand the museum’s diversity offerings. And for Mathenge, whose husband still has family in the Sacramento area, “Home Sweet Home” will give her an excuse for a trip back at some point.

“Once I hear it’s installed, I will come see it,” Mathenge said. “I’d love to see it.”