Dominic Benhura

b. 1968

At age 10, Zimbabwean artist Dominic Benhura moved in with his cousin Tapfuma Gutsa, a well-known local sculptor in the suburb of Tafara. Benhura quickly moved from polishing Gutsa’s sculptures to carving his own out of large blocks of stone, and eventually turned to sculpting full time after finishing school despite his lack of formal training. In 1990 he joined the Chapungu Sculpture Park’s resident artist program and began to travel more broadly, attending workshops in Botswana, the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. Eventually he began to incorporate metal into his stone sculptures, which follow the Zimbabwean Shona style of carving.