Price Tiers: From KES 15,000 Prints to Studio Originals
By Otieno Odhiambo · 9 August 2026 · 2 min read
What art actually costs on ArtCollect right now, in real KES figures from the live catalogue — not a market-wide estimate, but our own published prices, tier by tier.
Rather than estimate what East African art "typically" costs — a claim no one can verify without seeing every gallery's private price list — here's what's actually priced and published on ArtCollect right now.
The real range, as published
Across the artwork currently live on the wall, published prices run from KES 15,000 up to KES 120,000. That's not a rounded estimate; it's the actual floor and ceiling of what's for sale on the platform today, and it will shift as the catalogue changes — a live wall is a moving target by design, which is also why we publish prices instead of asking you to enquire.
Where most of it actually sits
The bulk of published pieces cluster well below the top of that range — most fall somewhere in the KES 18,000 to 30,000 band, with a smaller number of pieces priced higher into the KES 45,000–120,000 range. In practice that means the entry point to collecting an original or a signed edition here isn't the KES 120,000 top figure — it's much closer to the KES 15,000–20,000 floor, and most of the catalogue at any given time sits within reach of that entry-level budget rather than at the ceiling.
What a tier actually buys, honestly
A lower-tier price on this platform is typically a smaller-scale piece, a print, or an edition rather than a large one-off original — that's a function of size and materials as much as artist reputation. The higher end tends to be larger studio originals or pieces with more material and time invested. Neither tier is a judgment on an artist's skill; a KES 18,000 piece and a KES 120,000 piece can come from the same studio practice at different scales.
What this doesn't tell you
This is ArtCollect's own published range, not a claim about East African art prices generally — galleries and auction houses outside this platform price differently, and the secondary/auction market (where a historically significant work sold for KES 3.5 million in 2025) operates on entirely different criteria than a living artist's direct, primary-market price. Treat this as an honest snapshot of one catalogue, not a market index.
— Njeri Wachira