Comfort M. Wasikhongo is an American painter of African American and Kenyan heritage. Born and raised in Madison, Wasikhongo earned recognition as an artist as early as elementary school. After high school, Wasikhongo studied a year at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, which helped him develop a social outlook that he brings to his artwork. This consciousness further deepened when he moved to Chicago to attend Chicago State University, where he studied weightlifting and art. Returning home, he completed his B.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned a full graduate studies fellowship to Tyler School of the Arts, where he earned a M.F.A. in painting and taught studio as a teaching assistant.
Wasikhongo’s paintings are a continuum of his personal, creative, and intellectual interests. For a number of years he has painted portraits of bodybuilders and hip-hop singers and musicians, inspired by the bodybuilders’ aesthetics and discipline and by hip-hop culture’s music, rhyming, and social criticism. More recently, Wasikhongo has focused on painting portraits of legendary African American intellectuals. He has exhibited in solo and group shows in Madison, Racine, and Philadelphia.
