Spotlight · Wednesdays
Money Stories
Money through the lens of art. Not the art market and not artists' career economics, which is a different desk. This is money as a human subject, what it does to a life, made legible through a portrait and grounded by someone who reads the numbers for a living.
The first wage. The debt that does not move. School fees. The cost of a funeral. The gap between earning and stability. The price of dignity. What money asks of an ordinary person, told through the face of the person living it.
How it is made
A chapter is one money story told across five pieces. Kathleen Mureithi names the financial reality. The Studio's portrait carries the part the figures cannot reach. The order never changes: what it felt like, then what it reveals, then the thing that stays true and is left unresolved.
Chapters one to five are Kathleen's own. She tells hers first so that other people can tell theirs. She is a co-creator here, not a contributor.
What is coming
- Wednesdays. A new piece each week.
- A podcast. In production. Subscribe and you will hear it first.
- The Artist Edition. Other artists make work responding to an announced money theme. Selected works run as their own pieces and feed the exhibition.
The chapters so far
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Beyond the paycheck: why a salary alone is no longer a financial plan
Her first salary did not last two weeks. What came after was a fuel gauge she was afraid to look at, and the long unglamorous work of learning to see money.
By Kathleen Mureithi
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She was planting trees while the world called her dangerous
Before the Nobel Prize, there was a woman planting trees alone. Money Stories begins with Wangari Maathai, and the long years before the world caught up.
By Kathleen Mureithi, Financial Adviser
Get it on Wednesdays
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Two other ways in
Tell your own money story
The next chapters are open. If you carry a money story and are willing to have it drawn, send it. You keep your name on it, and nothing runs without your say. Put your story forward.
⚠️ Entering costs nothing. It never will.
Commission a portrait
The portraits in this series are drawn by hand in the Studio. The same hand takes commissions, and a commission is what funds the series. Commission a portrait.