Theresa Musoke is one of East Africa’s most prolific female artists. She is a painter, printmaker and sculptor most known for her rhythmic and expressionist painting style. A skilled draughtswoman, T. Musoke was formally trained at the Makerere School of Fine Arts (now the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art) where her talents were recognised in the early 1960s. In 1964, she was commissioned to create the mural Symbols of Birth and New Life for Mary Stuart Hall at Makerere University, which remains there to this day. She became one of the first female students to graduate with a degree and was awarded the Margaret Trowell Painting Prize in 1965 for outstanding artistic achievement. This led to her first solo exhibition at Uganda Museum. In the same year, during a Royal visit to Uganda, she presented her painting Uganda Martyrs (1965) to Princess Margaret.

After graduation, T. Musoke pursued further studies in education and later taught for a year at Tororo girls’ school before receiving a Commonwealth scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art in London. There she studied for a diploma in printmaking between the years 1965–67. The birth of her son in 1968 prompted her to return home and she returned to teaching, this time at Mount Saint Mary’s school. In 1969, she won a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study for an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Art, where she focused on drawing, painting and graphics. In the early 1970s, she returned to Uganda and to Makerere University as a graphics lecturer and was commissioned to paint a mural at Entebbe Airport. However, by then the political situation in the country under the dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada was volatile, particularly for University faculty members, and she left Uganda in 1976 with her son to settle in Kenya.

During her exile in Kenya, T. Musoke continued to teach at several institutions, including Kenyatta University and the International School of Kenya, to support herself while also continuing to exhibit locally and internationally. Selected solo and group shows include Sanaa: Contemporary Art in East Africa, Commonwealth Institute, London, 1984 ; and the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995.

Since returning to Uganda again in 1997, T. Musoke has continued her practice at her home studio in Kampala. Her work recently came back to the fore and public interest was renewed with the retrospective Theresa Musoke – Legendary Artist of Uganda at Nairobi Gallery in 2017. More recently her work was included in the exhibitions Michael Armitage. Paradise Edict at the Royal Academy, London and Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2021; Mwili, Akili Na Roho (Body, Mind, and Spirit): Ten Figurative Painters from East Africa, at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) in 2022; and A Retrospective of Three Artists: Theresa Musoke, Thabita wa Thuku, Yony Waite at the Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi in 2022.

While T. Musoke’s works over her extensive career have included several themes such as the Maasai people, women at market and motherhood, her most frequent inspiration is the wildlife of her two home countries, Uganda and Kenya: wildebeest, hartebeest, birds, leopards, giraffes and wild dogs all make repeated appearances. She is a keen observer of nature, its recurring patterns, movements and mystery. She doesn’t paint while observing, instead preferring to capture the impressions in her mind’s eye, and later paint from memory. A self-described semi-abstract artist, T. Musoke’s subjects are incidental. The colours and subject matter are suggested to her as she works through an experimental and iterative approach where she dyes her cotton canvases before responding to forms suggested by the stains. She then repeatedly marks and responds to the marks until figures emerge and eventually consolidate themselves into dense, often roiling, compositions.