A Woman's Work

It’s Friday night in Harare, commuters and combis are crawling their way out of town, their tyres kicking up the dust, clouds of sand and grit illuminated only by car headlamps on the unlit streets. Just off this main road, along a narrow, bumpy track, is a garden centre — a rather incongruous location for one of the city’s most happening art exhibition spaces. Tonight, the car park is overflowing onto the street and the garden leading up to Artillery Gallery is packed: young, old, black, white, men, women, gay, straight, undecided, hip and not-so-hip all gathered together — a snapshot of real, modern Zimbabwe.

This modern Zimbabwe is the only Zimbabwe I’ve ever known, recent import that I am; its people, the places I’ve visited and the experiences I’ve had here have enabled me to come up for air after too long drowning in a life I wasn’t meant to lead. Tonight represents a significant step: I’m out on my own for the first time, I know no one at the exhibition. It is a wonderful feeling of freedom.

Now, relax — I’m not going to bore on about me and my personal circumstances. The reason I’ve been self-indulgently scene-setting is that my trip to the other end of town to see an exhibition by an artist I had never heard of was a real-life Sliding Doors moment. If, that Friday, I’d stayed at home with a sub-standard Netflix cop show and a lasagne-for-one, I would never have met the show’s star, Prudence Chimutuwah, the friend I’ve come to call Prudie. I would never have stood so close to her mesmerising mixed-media canvasses, or felt the power of her strong women towering over us from the gallery walls. I would never have conceived of collaborating with her and our cover star, Shingai. With every centimetre of the show space taken — no room for Insta selfies here — it also dawned on me that there was such a need to celebrate and support Zimbabwe’s cultural scene, to show it to the world and to give space to its rising stars. And so, in a way, this magazine was born that Friday night in March 2023.

Prudence “Prudie” Chimutuwah was born in 1989, raised and educated in the Harare suburb of Chitungwiza. She was a diligent student with a love of painting that even an art teacher with a penchant for corporal punishment couldn’t beat down: “She was so strict that everyone always ran away from the art class,” Prudie says. “She was a great teacher, but she hit you if you got something wrong. I was the only child who went to her class willingly.” An early indicator, as you will see, that Prudie is not one to be deterred.

Then, as is so disappointingly still the case, art was not thought of as a “proper” profession, so a career as a beauty therapist beckoned until Prudie met her husband, renowned Zimbabwean artist Calvin Chimutuwah. “I had no clue he was an artist when I met him,” she says. “Then I went to his house and saw all his art and it made me revisit my passion for the subject, and he told me that there was actually a place where I could go study it full-time.” She applied for Zimbabwe’s National School of Visual Arts and Design and stayed there until 2011.

Prudie had her first show with Calvin, “Purple Rhythm”, at the Tanglewood Art Zone in Borrowdale in 2019. “That show was the beginning of Prudie,” she says, “who I was, what I wanted to do and where I wanted to take my art.”

In 2020, when COVID brought the world to a standstill, Prudie managed to get herself into an online art bootcamp, run in conjunction with the Rele Gallery in Lagos. Promises of an art show in LA didn’t materialise, leaving Prudie with finished canvasses and nowhere to display them. “I was so excited about the exhibition and got everything ready to ship to LA, but then they just went completely quiet. It was a huge shock.” Enter Fadzai Muchemwa, celebrated curator of Harare’s National Gallery, who agreed to host Prudie’s “lost” show. Prudie’s star was rising: exhibitions in the UAE, France and Nigeria followed. She sold an entire show to one collector.

And it’s not hard to see why. Prudie’s work is a celebration of women in enormous, glorious technicolour, but they’re not just a powerful expression of feminism. Her composition, use of colour (there’s always some fabulous neon) and technical prowess place her among the very finest, and most original, artists in the country. Why does she paint only women? “I can relate to them,” she says. “I’ve gone through the same struggles and I understand their world. I don’t want to try to fit into a man’s world.”

Prudie’s subjects are always striking, but their sometimes gentle, feminine poses belie an underlying power. “I am intrigued by serious faces, and I rarely paint them smiling. I love the confidence they have when they’re up to some serious business.”

Although Prudie has often cajoled her sisters into sitting for her, it is the real women of Zimbabwe, those she meets on the streets of downtown Harare, who give her the most inspiration. “Most of the women I paint are selling stuff by the side of the road in the CBD. They’re hustling. They tell me their dreams, their wishes, what they are looking forward to. They say, ‘I’m sitting on a pavement and it’s hot, but I’m hopeful I’m going to make some money and I’m going to put that money to good use.’ I’m telling their story of hope.”

Prudie works mainly with acrylics, but her skilful collages — on dresses, jewellery and head wraps – are also a prominent feature of her pieces. She’s also found an excellent way to recycle the demonically denominated bank notes that circulated in Zimbabwe from 2007-2008 (the $100,000,000,000,000 note was a particular landmark). Many of Prudie’s canvasses include collages made from these now-defunct notes: “By reusing the bank notes, I’m trying to have a conversation about how much pain that time caused. I was at school when it was happening, and sometimes I just didn’t have the bus fare to get there. Collecting and using this money is how I can restore its joy and value. I want to give it new life — it’s me trying to give oxygen to something that still has the chance to make people happy in some way.”

Prudie’s studio, three rooms at the back of a church just off the Chiremba Road, is sun-filled and spotless; there’s always a canvas on the easel, sometimes with the first tantalising pencil marks full of promise that something special is about to happen. Every day she is watched over by the women on the walls. “Sometimes I find it difficult to let go of the paintings because when I’m sitting in the studio working it feels as though I’m having a conversation with them. These women touch my heart and I don’t want them to leave. They become part of me.”

A big part of Prudie is her husband Calvin, with whom she shares three children: Atidaishe, Anaka and Anezwi. Calvin is often with her in the studio, working on his own creations. “Thank God for my husband,” she says. “Calvin doesn’t put me in a box. He has allowed me to explore myself and he understands that I am my own person and I have my own way of thinking. He has allowed me to grow.”

Such a progressive and supportive attitude to the life of a woman within a marriage is rare anywhere, let alone in Zimbabwe where the roles of a husband and wife are still defined along strict, traditional lines. “I was brought up at a time when at our bridal showers, just before we got married, our aunties and grandmothers would come and lecture us about how to take care of our husbands and how to put our dreams on hold,” Prudie says. “But my friends and I are now the older aunties giving the advice to the brides-to-be. We are saying to these young girls that they need to detach themselves from their husbands, that they can be a mum and a wife, and still explore their dreams and become someone who is celebrated on their own.”

It would be fair to say that feminism as a concept has some way to go in permeating Zimbabwean society, and no more so that in the art world which is still heavily dominated by men. “It starts at school,” Prudie says. “Even then the boys in my art class didn’t see us girls as competition. They thought only they would make it so they just competed among themselves, and this made the girls feel like they just weren’t good enough.” Prudie believes that this early years discouragement is what is holding back many Zimbabwean women from choosing art as a career.

The battle continues, even for Zimbabwe’s established female artists. Prudie’s solo show at Artillery Gallery in March 2023 was held in conjunction with International Women’s Day. It was a sell-out, breaking the gallery’s record for opening-night attendance. While Prudie’s strong female subjects represented the very essence of International Women’s Day, at other events it was business as usual with women pushed to the side. At one gallery’s Women’s Day exhibition, only two female artists were represented, their works displayed on a corridor off the main show space. The gallery itself was full of works by male artists, whose brief had been to depict real women going about their daily lives. Prudie called the gallery out: “Yes, I did! We can’t have men celebrating us like we’re dead,” she says. “It was heartbreaking. The women artists were so disappointed that no one could see their work.”

“We have to fight against the way the boy child is being raised in this country,” says Prudie. “They are being brought up as if they are born to lead and they can’t accept that women can lead too. Men haven’t come to terms with the fact that a woman can do anything a man can. Or maybe they do realise, but they choose to ignore it.”

“A guy walked up to me and actually said, ‘Women can’t draw, so how are you painting figures so well?’ He expected a woman to just be painting flowers and abstract themes.”

“How do you think I’m doing it?” I asked him. “You are lucky that tonight is so busy and I can’t spend my precious time talking to you about your useless philosophies.”

“One day,” she continues, “when I see that guy, I am going to sit him down and properly school him.” He’d better watch out.

Prudie also has little time for many of her male counterparts in Zimbabwe’s art world. “I won’t have them in my studio,” she says. “They want to school you on their ideas. It’s just criticism after criticism. They are there to pull us down, and when you’re down they just leave you there and make sure you don’t rise again.”

While in recent years Zimbabwe has seen a rise in the opening of communal art spaces — undoubtedly a positive step in supporting emerging artists — Prudie believes that a women-only art space is what the country needs. “Making it as an artist in Zimbabwe is tough enough already without having to fight our own men who are in the same industry as us,” she says. “Women don’t want to have to fight like this, so they just give up and walk away from their art, so we remain a small group of female artists doing well.”

“But I know,” she continues, with her hallmark optimism and determination, “that if you are consistent and focused, and you know what you want, you can achieve anything.”

That, Prudence Chimutuwah, is exactly what you’re doing, and we can’t wait to see what you achieve next.

Words by Milly McPhie
Photographs by Daniel Hargrove

Instagram: @prudiemas