When speaking of the South African curator’s industry, there is the Curator Art Gallery which deals in South African Investment Art and specialises in the selling and purchasing of the South African Old Master Paintings.
Some curators have said they were not privy to the careers that were available to them in this industry and have always assumed they would just be academics. It was only through branching out of the academic space and finding student internships in galleries that they accessed more information about the industry and all that was possible for them including careers as art historians and curators.
A PhD researcher in the Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who is also currently the curator at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis Galleries. Her work titled “Tell Freedom: 15 South African Artists”, has been exhibited and published together with art historian Manon Braat.
Nomusa Makhubu
Makhubu is an artist and lecturer of Art History in University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. A Presidential Fellow of the African Studies Association in 2016, Makhubu is a chair of the Africa South Art Initiative.
Image courtesy of Africanah.Org
Gabi Ngcobo
Ngcobo’s work has been featured as part of the 10th anniversary edition of the Berlin Biennale. She is known for steering her work away from the labels of it being “Afro-centric”, “Global South” or even “post-colonial” – because that would just be too easy an explanation for it.
Modiko is a co-founder of the Independent Network for Contemporary Culture & Art which is a non-profit company and public benefit organisation that realises, manages and creates platforms for independent curatorial projects.
Bell is an art historian, a PhD candidate at Wits University in Johannesburg and the director of the David Krut Projects gallery. Bell has curated more than eighty exhibitions by local and international artists in the last decade with her most prestigious work being the South African Pavilion at La Biennale Arte in 2022.
Image courtesy of In Your Pocket
The Department of Arts and Culture is responsible for promoting, supporting, developing and protecting the arts, culture and heritage of the country. With sectors within the arts developing and more people being exposed to the arts, and at the same time with artists seeking support from the state resources to see their projects to fruition – the art industry seems to be neither here nor there as it needs all the support it can get but is also not getting any of the support it needs.
