The Glasses Artist

“Yeah these glasses here are going for a couple of thousand dollars to New York collectors”, Cyrus Kabiru mentions casually, showing me a pair of his now iconic C-Stunners (glasses) hanging from wire clothes lines stretching across the walls of the shipping container studio at the Kuona Trust in Nairobi. 

So much of Cyrus’s work focuses on glasses - the wearing kind but without the prescription lenses. A throwback to a childhood obsession with these optical devices and his dad’s casual quip one day that if he is so desperate for a pair of glasses “he should make his own”. 

So make his own he did. 

Intricate wire and copper framed ones fabricated out of pieces of scrap metal he’s dug out of tips and dumps around Nairobi, the city he calls home.

Then he winds and weaves and welds them adding antennae-like bits of wire here and bi-focal-like rounds of metal there until they emerge into pieces of art. 

There’s a real beauty in their quirkiness and recycled labours of love. But you feel like you want to own about four pairs so you can give them a context displaying them together.  But priced at between a  few hundred to a few thousand dollars a pop….there’s a reason why they’ve found their way onto the wall space of galleries around the world. 

His dad was always offering to support him to pursue a “proper” career but despite no training, no qualifications he’s properly getting African art out there in his own offbeat way - “giving trash a second chance”, he calls it.  Already a TED fellow he’s just been featured in TIME magazine as one of a new wave of contemporary African artists. 

When I look at his painting on my wall here in Buenos Aires - an etched side profile of Cyrus in a pair of his goggle C-Stunners against a vivid, yellow backdrop, I’m reminded why I often feel nostalgic about Kenya: meeting these uber-talented, young Nairobians who are putting themselves out there.