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The Johannesburg Art Gallery, in collaboration with Goodman Gallery, is proud to present ‘Umkhondo: Going Deeper’, Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s first solo exhibition at the museum, following his 2023 FNB Art Prize Award.
‘Umkhondo: Going Deeper’ unites two significant and interconnected bodies of work — ‘I carry Her photo with Me’ and ‘Ezilalini (The Country)’ — seen together for the first time. The exhibition showcases Sobekwa’s journey of introspection and discovery as he wrestles with absence, loss and belonging.
Senzeni Marasela is one of South Africa's most prolific contemporary artists. The exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery will consist of a selection of the works that were presented in the 2021 highly successful exhibition at Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town titled Waiting for Gebane.
The works in Ngoma: Art and Cosmology bring to the fore the entanglements of historical, physical, metaphysical and existential spheres of existence. Ngoma seeks to explore these spheres of existence through artworks that cover different beliefs, cultural practices, mythologies and cosmologies. It aims to encourage individual and collective engagement with questions, traumas and concerns, as well as latterly encouraging the listeners or viewers to delve into their own articulation of spiritual meaning-making or ritual healing.
Museums are an important part of our history, serving as a complex reflection of South African culture and society in the past, and in the present. Johannesburg Art Gallery is no exception to this rule. The museum houses some of South Africa’s most important, but in spite of this, visitors to the museum have declined over the years. The revival of this national monument, and its precinct is one of the focuses of the inaugural AFRISAM Student Architecture Award, which challenges students to rescript the relationship between the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), its immediate urban fabric and the community at large.
In the wake of the Soweto uprisings, the Federated Union of Black Artists became an important and safe space for black artists during the darkest days of apartheid. Through art, black artists became the voice of their communities telling poignant stories of migration, oppression and an elusive freedom. Some of the works created through FUBA currently sit in an underground archive at the JAG
In the late 1950s, Lorraine Deift registered for an Arts Degree at the Technical College in Bree Street. She traces her love for art back to her student days, when would visit the JAG museum, to journey into the fantastical world of visual imagination. Today, Lorraine shares her passion for art by acting as a tour guide to the children of Lapeng Day Care Centre.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), the Embassy of France in South Africa and the French Institute of SA are pleased to present The Art of Comics, an exciting new exhibition that showcases the fascinating worlds of South African comics and French bandes dessinées, the famous French comic style.
David Koloane was born in Alexandra, Johannesburg in 1938 and from a young age had a passion for art. “I drew everything I came across in comic books and films and always made sketches of my friends” he recounted in an interview for Dutch newspaper Het Parool.
Coming soon to the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) is the contemporary visual art exhibition “AND COUNTING”, presented by the !Kauru Contemporary African Art Project and curated by Tšhegofatso Mabaso (South Africa) and Julia Taonga Kaseka (Zambia).
Curated by Khwezi Gule, the chief curator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, All Your Faves Are Problematic is intended to provoke different ways of thinking about South African art.
For this year’s FNB Joburg Art Fair, the Johannesburg Art Gallery will be selling works that were donated to be sold, to raise seed money to start a fund for the restoration of the JAG building.
Wolfgang Tillmans’ touring exhibition, Fragile, is coming to the Johannesburg Art Gallery this July after making stops in Kinshasa and Nairobi. This exhibition, which will be touring many more cities on the continent over the next few years, is presented by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen/ Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) in collaboration with Tillmans and the Goethe-Institut.
CLOSE, a contemporary art exhibition presented by the !Kauru Contemporary African Art Project, is curated by Zingisa Nkosinkulu (South Africa), Violet Nantume (Uganda) and Nyambura M. Waruingi (Kenya).
Beauchamp describes himself as an artist, multimedia designer, and art director. For the last 12 years he has created artworks by means of painting, spray-paint and stencils to comment on social issues and on the politicians and events that make up the South African social landscape. More recently he has used silk-screening in order to bring the content of the work (that is, critical observation of people and events) closer to a ‘media’ based technique. These works are the artistic version of satirical journalism and social critique, often controversial.
JAG has joined the list of 50 cultural institutions worldwide whose collections of contemporary art, encompassing more than seven thousand works, are now available to explore online. JAG has a growing collection with an exhibition space that can’t reflect its full scale. There are... “in excess of 10 000 objects, many of which cannot be seen often because of the number of internal and external exhibitions we host.
To any avid Pre-Raphaelite lover, Elizabeth Siddal is a familiar face among the movement’s ethereal beauties. Her striking features first caught the attention of artist Walter Deverell in 1949, when she was twenty years old and working as a milliner (hat maker) in London. She quickly became a popular muse among the Pre-Raphaelite artists, posing for Millais’s famous painting Ophelia in 1852.
Call and Response: First engagements with a KwaZulu–Natal heritage collection exhibition draws on JAG's recently acquired Maritz collection of heritage artifacts from various parts of the KwaZulu-Natal region. This collection has further enhanced and cemented JAG's reputation for having one of the finest Southern African heritage artifact collections in the world.
What does an elephant skull have to do with abstract sculpture? How did conservators foil a hidden attack from Germany? Why would you find a unicorn under a mulberry tree? Explore the surprising answers to these mysteries at Spellbinders, an exhibition dealing with the art of stories – and the stories of art.
JAG is fortunate to host A labour of love, following its much vaunted run in Frankfurt, Germany in 2015-2016. The story of this exhibition can be traced back to 1986, when the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt on Main commissioned Hans Blum to buy works of contemporary South African art on their behalf. Blum acquired 600 works by black South African artists, which today forms a key part of the contemporary art collection of Museum.
JAG is fortunate to host A labour of love, following its much vaunted run in Frankfurt, Germany in 2015-2016.
The story of this exhibition can be traced back to 1986, when the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt on Main commissioned Hans Blum to buy works of contemporary South African art on their behalf. Blum acquired 600 works by black South African artists, which today forms a key part of the contemporary art collection of Museum.
This year marks the 61st anniversary of the Women’s March to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956.
Led by Lilian Ngoyi - a trade unionist and political activist, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, 20 000 women of all races, classes and religious persuasions protested against Pass Law legislation, bringing about a turning point in the struggle for freedom and South African society at large.
Johannesburg Art Gallery will host South Facing, Ângela Ferreira’s first solo exhibition at a public institution in South Africa. The exhibition, which opens on May 7, includes recent and previously unseen work, as well as a newly commissioned work by Ferreira that responds to the Gallery’s Meyer Pienaar extension.
Often described as a as a conceptual formalist, De Wet was also known for his serial puns. His oeuvre straddles nearly forty years and encompasses a range of diverse media from traditional sculptural media, performance and video to craft skills, which included crochet and embroidery.
Judith Mason, who passed away at the age of 78 on 29 December last year, was considered one of the foremost South African artists of her generation. She represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale (1966), the Sao Paulo Biennale (1971) and at international art fairs, like Art Basel (2009).
To activate visual discourse around the themes in the The Evidence of Things Not Seen exhibition, artists, photographers and general public are invited to post portraits on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for Visible Tones: active visualisations of blackness.
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a reference in part to James Baldwin’s book of the same title, speaks to the intangible but pervasive nature of identity. Using works from the JAG collection exclusively by artists of colour, the exhibition explores various forms of identity and explores issues of feminism, queerness, revolution and culture in Black identity.