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An in-depth look at the evolving ethos of curating and collecting art at South African universities. In Picturing Change, Brenda Schmahmann explores the implications of deploying the visual domain in the service of transformative agendas and unpacks the complexities, contradictions and slippages involved in this process. She shows that although most new commissions have been innovative, some universities have acquired works with potentially traditionalist - even backward-looking - implications. While the motives behind removing inherited imagery may be underpinned by a desire to unsettle white privilege, in some cases such actions can also serve to maintain the status quo. This book is uniqu...
The Mapula Embroidery Project in the Winterveld is one of the most important community art projects in South Africa. In addition to generating an income for economically disadvantaged women, Mapula embroideries couple high levels of technical and visual artistry with topics that speak eloquently of public histories as well as women's personal experiences. Dazzling in colour and inventive in design, the embroideries also engage compellingly with social and political issues that have shaped the lives of their makers. In Mapula: Embroidery and Empowerment in the Winterveld, Brenda Schmahmann discusses the complex circumstances that resulted in the founding of Mapula in 1991, when the Winterveld...
The role of the workshop in the creation of African art is the subject of this revelatory book. In the group setting of the workshop, innovation and imitation collide, artists share ideas and techniques, and creative expression flourishes. African Art and Agency in the Workshop examines the variety of workshops, from those which are politically driven or tourist oriented, to those based on historical patronage or allied to current artistic trends. Fifteen lively essays explore the impact of the workshop on the production of artists such as Zimbabwean stone sculptors, master potters from Cameroon, wood carvers from Nigeria, and others from across the continent.
Since the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa has been engaged in an unprecedented exercise of national soul-searching, torn between the need to lay to rest centuries of racial conflict and the desire to come to terms with its traumatic history. This book asks whether the country has begun to turn the corner on the legacy of collective hurt. To do so it ranges in scope across 350 years of South African history, encompassing the struggle against the apartheid regime, the downfall of white supremacy, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the first 25 years of democracy, up to more recent movements, such as #RhodesMustFall, or the inquests into the 2012 Marikana massacre, that point...
In this book, contributors identify and explore a range of iconic works – "Mistress-Pieces" – that have been made by feminists and gender activists since the 1970s. The first volume for which the defining of iconic feminist art is the raison d’être, its contributors interpret a "Mistress-Piece" as a work that has proved influential in a particular context because of its distinctiveness and relevance. Reinterpreting iconic art by Alice Neel, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, the authors also offer important insights about works that may be less well known – those by Natalia LL, Tanja Ostojić, Swoon, Clara Menéres, Diane Victor, Usha Seejarim, Ilse Fusková, Phaptawan Suwannakudt □and Tracey Moffatt, among others. While in some instances revealing cross influences between artists working in different frameworks, the publication simultaneously makes evident how social and political factors specific to particular countries had significant impact on the making and reception of art focused on gender. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies and gender studies.
How does South Africa deal with public art from its years of colonialism and apartheid? How do new monuments address fraught histories and commemorate heroes of the struggle? Across South Africa, statues commemorating figures such as Cecil Rhodes have provoked heated protests, while new works commemorating icons of the liberation struggle have also sometimes proved contentious. In this lively volume, Kim Miller, Brenda Schmahmann and an international group of contributors explore how works in the public domain in South Africaserve as a forum in which importantdebates about race, gender, identityandnationhood play out. Examining statues and memorials as well as performance, billboards, and other temporal modes of communication, the authors of these essays consider the implications of not only the exposure, but also erasure of events and icons from the public domain. Revealing how public visual expressions articulate histories and memories, they explore how such works may serve as a forum in which tensions surrounding race, gender, identity, or nationhood play out.
Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials examines how the modification, destruction, or absence of monuments and memorials can be viewed as performative acts that challenge prescribed, embodied narratives in the public realm. Bringing together international, multidisciplinary approaches, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways in which memorial constructions disclose implicitly and explicitly the proxy battle for public memory and identity, particularly since 2015. Acknowledging the ways in which the past — which is given agency through monuments and memorials — intrudes into daily life, this volume offers perspectives from researchers that answer questions about the roles of mo...
This book interprets relationships between art and ethics in the context of contemporary South African art. Nearly three decades after inaugurating political freedom in a democratic form, the infrastructure of South Africa faces palpable issues and challenges to the social fabric. The social tension involves painful struggles for decolonization and violent debates about the removal of colonial statues, change of colonial names, transformation of universities, and curriculum change. This book does critical work in art history, theory, criticism, and visual culture by looking from and looking after social differences to interpret the potential impact of contemporary media and mediation. Artists examined include Zanele Muholi, Mohau Modisekeng, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Hasan and Husain Essop, and Kemang Wa Lehulere. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, visual culture, art theory, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of art, and African studies.
In contrast to the divide between conception and execution advocated by Anglo-American artists in the second half of the 1960s, this book reappraises conceptual art by examining it from the perspective of craft. The emphasis on craft shifts the focus from the Western art system to its margins, where creators were relegated to the status of mere artisans in the colonial context, on the pretext that attaining that of artists was beyond their reach. From this peripheral point of view, the book shows that work carried out with artisanal means can lead to conceptual practice. Moreover, this shift in perspective provides a new understanding of several positions within conceptualism, which ultimately appears as an ongoing reflection on the role of the hands, making, and craft.
Troubling Images explores how art and visual culture helped to secure hegemonic claims to the nation-state via the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary Emerging in the late nineteenth century and gaining currency in the 1930s and 1940s, Afrikaner nationalist fervour underpinned the establishment of white Afrikaner political and cultural domination during South Africa’s apartheid years. Focusing on manifestations of Afrikaner nationalism in paintings, sculptures, monuments, buildings, cartoons, photographs, illustrations and exhibitions, Troubling Images offers a critical account of the role of art and visual culture in the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary, which helpe...