‘My first audience would be a Kenyan audience… I wanted them to see something… that would have relevance to them and their lives,’ said Armitage this year. Yet his figurative paintings – often ambiguous scenes, ‘points of contention… that I don’t have a clear moral attitude on’, created not on canvas (to avoid the Western-centric history of the material) but lubugo, a Ugandan textile used in funerary rites made from fig tree bark – have found an audience internationally as much as at home. While Armitage has put much of his energy into his Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, a nonprofit for East African art he set up in 2020, this year he won the UK Government Art Collection’s Robson Orr TenTen Award and had a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. NCAI meanwhile has provided a platform to showcase Kenyan artists, including a retrospective of Kenyan artist Chelenge Van Rampelberg and an exhibition of Syowia Kyambi’s recent work across media.