Velma Rosai paints with the kind of quiet intensity that makes you stop mid-conversation. The Kenyan painter and artist was first introduced to Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah on a chilly late November afternoon in 2024, at Nairobi's Ngong race course, during Sexual Utopia, a festival dedicated to sex, sexualities, and pleasure.
The festival was co-directed by Sekyiamah alongside Kaz, a Kenyan sex educator and pole dance instructor. It was the kind of gathering where artists and thinkers found each other naturally, and that meeting between Sekyiamah and Rosai was clearly no accident.
What came out of that Nairobi afternoon is a conversation worth sitting with.
Originally published by Brittle Paper.