Art rules the day at JAG

The Gerard Sekoto Youth Festival will expose young Joburgers to art, through workshops and discussions, as well as examining the exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
TO honour the legacy of Gerard Sekoto, the famed South African artist, the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) is hosting its annual Gerard Sekoto Youth Festival on Friday, 16 December.

A painting by Gerard SekotoA painting by Gerard SekotoAt the daylong festival, there will be a workshop for children between the ages of 10 and 18 to discuss the exhibitions at the gallery. These are: MaNyauza by Mbongeni Buthelezi, Pinky Promise by Pierre Crocquet, and Play, Ritual and Inspiration by The Phansi Museum Collection of Southern African Child Figures.

There will also be a variety of artistic activities, from drama, painting and face painting to printmaking, film and dance.

MaNyauza, Silent Messages to my Mother is mid-career retrospective by Mbongeni Buthelezi. The collection gathers works from different periods of his career, including some works not shown to the public before.

Spanning over 15 years, it presents Buthelezi’s unique and complex artwork production technique, from early watercolours to his later plastic painting collages.

Pinky Promise is about childhood sexual abuse and healing. The photographic exhibition enters difficult and risky terrain, and breaks new ground by including the stories of victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse. It comes after three years of intense photography and interviews by the artist, Crocquet.

Play, Ritual and Inspiration is a collection of dolls from the Sotho, Pedi, Xhosa and Tsonga. These dolls, which were used for playing, rituals and inspiration, date from the mid-twentieth century to contemporary times.

The Gerard Sekoto Youth Festival is an annual event that has been taking place at JAG since 1991. Sekoto won the Vita Art Award in that year, and decided the prize money should be used for a day for the youth.

“He generously donated his prize money to JAG for a special day where young people could take part in activities around art,” explains the gallery’s public programmes manager, Tiny Malefane.

Festival
It takes place each December 16. JAG continues to secure sponsorship for the event, and this year the festival is sponsored by Rea Vaya, Aqua Online and Herbert Evans.

Sekoto was a South African artist and musician. He was born on 9 December 1913, in Middelburg, in the area now known as Mpumalanga.

In 1938, at the age of 29, he left Mpumalanga for Johannesburg to pursue a career in art. He lived with relatives in Gerty Street, Sophiatown, and had his first solo exhibition in 1939. In the following year, JAG bought his painting Yellow Houses. It was the first work by a black artist in JAG’s collections, and would remain the only one until the 1980s.

Sekoto moved to District Six in Cape Town in 1942, where he lived with the Manuel family. In 1945, he moved to Eastwood, Pretoria, and in 1947 he decided to leave the country and travel to Paris, in France, for many years the centre of the art world.

For his first few years in Paris, however, he was known more as a musician than as an artist. Like many voluntary and involuntary exiles, he never returned to the country of his birth.

Towards the end of his life, Sekoto’s art increasingly gained recognition, largely thanks to the efforts of one researcher, Barbara Lindop. Her research brought to light many paintings thought to have been lost, and, through her correspondence with Sekoto, many details of his life were uncovered.

Sekoto died in 1993.

The Gerard Sekoto Youth Festival will start at 10am on Friday, 16 December. Entrance to the event is free. For more information contact Tiny Malefane on 011 725 3184 or send an email to tinym@joburg.org.za