'I was pushed to embrace my differences': Canberra artist pays homage to people who have shaped him

Musonga Mbogo possesses that effortless kind of cool that instantly draws you in.

He’s the kid at school, colleague at work or guy just walking down the street that you want to be close to in the hopes that his “coolness” might rub off.

In only 19 trips around the sun, this teenager is basking in the light of his recent and well-earned successes.

Exhibiting at the Nishi Gallery as a solo artist was a dream realised for Mbogo earlier this year during Canberra’s iconic Art, Not Apart festival.

His Black Boy Fly collection conjures up mixed emotions, not all of them pleasant but that’s entirely the point. The work intermixes bright colours with darker themes born out of the artist’s own experiences as a “third-culture kid”.

“My whole approach so far has been to talk about the narratives which are subconsciously and intentionally shunned by the general public,” he says.

And if anyone’s confused by the term “third culture”, Mbogo uses lyrics by American rapper Earl Sweatshirt to sum it up, “too black for the white kids and too white for the black kids”.

“This is a feeling that really holds true amongst the African Diaspora – especially those in Canberra,” he adds.

Born in Singapore to a Zimbabwean mother and Tanzanian father, Mbogo migrated to Queensland with his parents as a mere baby in 2000, then the family moved to Canberra shortly after in 2002. They’ve been locals ever since.

Unsure of whether it’s acceptable to ask about someone’s background, I hesitantly prodded Mbogo about his knowing that his character, work and ultimately his understanding of this world has been heavily shaped by it.

He greeted the question with the grace of a man much older than he and the enthusiasm of a person who endeavours to expand the thinking of the people around him.

“I was pushed to embrace my differences, to the point where I wasn’t really affected by what people thought or think of me … Naturally, art just felt like the right field to vocalise my differences,” he says.

After traversing his adolescence in private school, feeling like an outsider, Mbogo harnessed the discomfort and treated it as an opportunity for self-actualisation.

“I really had to come to terms with who I am and why I am the way I am,” he says.

Though inherently personal, the mixed media artist isn’t tied to the concepts of internal reflection and societal exploration present in the Black Boy Fly exhibit.

“In future, I’ll probably break away from that, but as of now I’m just trying to celebrate and pay homage to the people who have shaped me into who I am today,” he says.

Nor is he absolutely loyal to a particular medium, as he frequently interchanges oil pastels, acrylic, spray paint, paint markers and everyday objects like loose staples (present in Tribute to Warhol) on paper, and even that’s not set in stone.

“I’ll work on A5s to flesh out ideas and so that I can work wherever I can. Then once I’m done, I’ll look for ways to transfer the same ideas onto larger scales,” he explains.

“I like the rough appeal that comes with oil pastels. To me, they’re all imperfect mediums and I think there’s a lot of beauty in imperfections.”

Mbogo opts for these accessible mediums that most will recognise from their own childhood memories of art and craft. There is an almost childlike composition to each piece that’s purposefully juxtaposed by the mature issues lying under the surface.

Four years of an art history minor has taught me that a lot of people love to remark, “It’s cool but even I could paint that”. I don’t think there’s a phrase that bothers me more.

There’s more to great art than precision line-work or trained technique; great art follows you when you leave its vicinity, tumbling over in your mind for days, weeks or a lifetime.

It has to rattle you, upset you and change the way you lived life up until that point – not everyone can do that, but Mbogo does.

His eclectic upbringing permeates his style and adds layers of intricacies to his work as well as his personality.

In one sentence, he’ll flip from using old-fashioned terms such as“amongst” to the highly contemporary slang phrase, “slide into the DMs”. He’s the old and the new, ancestor and next-gen, the burgeoning form of what we should expect for art and the new wave of “third-culture kids”.

“P.S. Shout out to my mother, she’s the OG artist.” So humble.