Joburg's Statue of Liberty

A Bulgarian friend of mine asked me to take a photo of myself wishing her boyfriend a Happy Birthday from Johannesburg, SA. She was putting together a sweet global birthday greeting collage for him. She asked me to take the photograph in front of some landmark or background that is unique to my locale. I chose one of my favorite pieces of public art in the Joburg CBD, The Firewalker sculpture

Lou & Serge and I in front of The Firewalker

The Firewalker by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx  is an 11-metre high metal sculpture created by fractured pieces that split apart as you view it from different points. It pays homage to the women who walk along nearby Diagonal street with lit braziers atop their heads selling sheep’s heads 'smileys' or mielies (corn cobs) and the everyday activities of city dwellers.

NY's Statue of Liberty on the 4th of July

The image of a woman carrying light or fire on her head does, of course, evoke the image of New York's Statue of Liberty. But according to the artists, "She is a very particular Statue of Liberty - Johannesburg's Statue of Liberty - which carries with it, at every point, either the history or the threat of its own collapse."

HBD Rifi from Johannesburg, SA!

Textured Translations

me with Marguerite Stephens

Run ...

         don't walk ...

















... to 44 Stanley ...

... and Gallery AOP to see Textured Translations, an exhibit of tapestries from The Stephens Tapestry Studio.

We thought today was the last day to see the exhibit but it has been extended until Tuesday and should not be missed! (The gallery is closed on Mondays.)

"Opened in 1963 as a branch of a carpet and curtain business in Swaziland, the Stephens Tapestry Studio moved in 1965 to Diepsloot, a suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa, where it established itself as an independent workshop focused on raising awareness of weaving as an art. The studio has collaborated with a wide array of artists from South Africa and Europe—including Gillian Ayres, Gerard Sekoto, Eduardo Villa, and Tito Zongu—allowing them to experiment with and realize works in the tapestry medium. Included in many public collections throughout the world, the tapestries produced by the studio have also been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries—most notably at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg since 1970.

Stephens and her team of weavers create tapestries that range from wall-sized to monumental. Production begins as a cottage industry in Swaziland, where mohair shorn from goats and purchased in bulk is carded and spun, a process requiring at least ten to fifteen women for each tapestry. Four dyers then achieve a variety of subtle tones working from the three primary colors. The weft is dyed in vats over a wood fire and hung to dry in the sun. 

The rest of the process takes place at the Diepsloot studio, where Stephens currently employs thirteen women as weavers. Stephens herself participates in the crucial stage of translating the artist’s work by hand into a large-scale cartoon. The cartoon is a full-sized map for the weavers to follow with exacting detail, and it includes annotations specifying colors as well as outlining the patterns, forms, and characteristics that comprise the artwork’s imagery. Using the French Gobelin high-warp technique, the weavers work on vertical looms, and the weft is woven in a horizontal motion. The cartoon is placed behind the loom face as a guide to the weavers as they create the tapestry from the bottom up.

Cicero by William Kentridge, 2014

Stephens recognizes that the artist involved in the collaboration can be one whose sensibilities exclusively resonate with the decorative aspect of tapestry, or one whose work is also considered political or controversial. While the art of tapestry is based in precision, it also possesses plasticity that can capture many different artistic expressions and can allow for successful collaborations such as the series produced with William Kentridge. 

Since 2000 Stephens and the weavers in the studio have created nearly a hundred tapestries from the artist’s series of seventeen Puppet Drawings. For Stephens, the combination of a strong artistic vision and meticulous execution is what produces a successful tapestry, and it can be judged only when the tapestry is released from the loom and hung for the first time, becoming a work of art in its own right that possesses reverberations of the touch of all who participated in the process of its making." (text from The Philadelphia Museum of Art website)

Night Shift by Sam Nhlengethwa, 2012

the earliest tapestry in the exhibition, School Board by Norman Catherine, 1986

'-for the lion roars himself compleat...' by Judith Mason, 2014

New Orleans Dandy by Robert Hodgins, 2013 (designed 2009)

In the case of New Orleans Dandy, the original artwork by Robert Hodgins was exhibited right next to the resulting tapestry.

Marguerite created this small scale cartoon of the design which was blown up into a larger cartoon in scale with the size of the intended tapestry.

The weavers then took the scaled cartoon and used it as their loom guide.

The weavers had to change out the mohair yarn for each color change guided by the cartoon.

There are plans in the works for a group of us to visit the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Diepsloot and see the production process firsthand. Seeing this exhibit really whet my appetite!

William Kentridge

William Kentridge is a contemporary South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films and his virtuosity is represented in no less than three exhibitions opening this month. (PS there is a painting of his as part of the current exhibition at the  Standard Bank Gallery too if you want to be absolutely Kentridge-complete.)

The first exhibition is a collaboration with Philip Miller, Catherine Meyburgh, Dada Masilo and Peter Galison at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The Refusal of Time is a video installation on multiple screens. It opened today and closes February 1st. Vince and I went to the opening this afternoon.

According to NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art where the piece was presented in 2012,

"The Refusal of Time is essentially a room-sized, filmic machine—a mechanized Plato's cave in which five video projections surround the viewer and the whole seems to be run by a pumping, organlike sculpture at center. Through a series of half-hour episodes, Kentridge intersperses images of antiquated devices for measuring time (e.g., a metronome or a bellows purported to send pneumatic bursts of air under the streets of Paris for the calibration of official city clocks) with animated drawings and live-action sequences. These vignettes recall a time at the dawn of the last century when Einstein's early experiments with station clocks and telegraphs mirrored other attempts at ordering the world through measurement. They also evoke the more contemporary study of black holes, beyond whose threshold all matter may disappear forever. In the last sequence of The Refusal of Time, as a procession of shadowy silhouettes travels around the room to a driving soundtrack only to be enveloped in blackness, a powerful question remains: after we, too, pass that dark threshold, will there be any trace of us left behind?" 

Got that?

The second is an exhibition of drawings called East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book at the Goodman Gallery. It opens on the November 15th and closes December 20th.

And the third exhibition is called Tapestries and it is a collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio. It opens at Wits Art Museum on November 18th and closes on December 15th.







I am going to try to make it to all of them as I have been wanting to learn more about this artist and native son of Johannesburg. I guess this November is definitely the month to do it.

The Joburg Botanica "Smell-itorium"

Vince and I went to the Standard Bank Gallery to see an exhibit on Botanically Inspired Art in South Africa.

Along with the beautiful antique botanical watercolors and drawings ...

an iris by William Kentridge

... and works of art featuring botanical subjects by South African artists,

Painting and wire art sculpture

... there were displays of traditional crafts using plant material.

And displays on South African buildings whose architecture and design derive directly from botanical structuring. (Vince loved these!)

This was a really cool bubinga quilt made from a hardwood removed from the tropical rainforest of Gabon.

close-up of the wood veneer "cloth"

There were also historical letters and artifacts taken from botanical expedition voyages in and around South Africa. This is Captain Cook's actual signature from a letter he posted from the Cape of Good Hope in 1776!








I also learned the name of the strange Crayola flesh-colored flowering plant we saw in the Richtersveld. The Stapeliae Novae.

But the most interesting exhibit of all was what I am calling their Smell-itorium, a greenhouse-turned-scent-house. In it were displayed plants and beakers filled with the plant extract typically used for medicinal purposes.

@ the Chelsea Physick Garden

It was like a combination of the Chelsea Physik Garden in London and ...

a floral chemist explains the plant extraction process

... and an exhibit I saw smelled a few years ago at NY's Museum of Art and Design called "The Art of the Scent."

Like the NY exhibit where you could stick your nose into a dent in the wall and smell the associated perfume, ...

Vince smells some essence of ether

... in the smell-itorium, you could stick your nose in a beaker and smell the associated essence of the plant standing beside it.

Next week I am going to hear a lecture at the gallery on "The History of Medicinal Plants in South Africa" or as I am calling it, ...  "Muthi for Dummies."

Historic Houghton

I succumbed to my spring fever this weekend with a garden and house tour of historic Houghton Estate with the Gardens of the Golden City.

I couldn't decide which I enjoyed more, the historic houses or the lush gardens ....

... and then I realized I didn't have to choose. I can have my proverbial cake and eat it too ... in the Tea Gardens set up along the tour!











Fine historic houses ...

one of the properties in the 55 St. Patrick Road cluster that also includes Longnor

Cullinan House

historic cars too!

killer views from the ridge

jacarandas about to pop

overlooking ...

my house in Sandton

love these

and the Joburg roses are magnificent this time of year

and one my favorite shrubs, the yesterday-today-and-tomorrow

it is everywhere in Joburg - including my garden at Valley Lodge

And lots of garden elements ...

I miss my garden fountain back in the USA!

I miss my pergola too!

perfect place to dine outdoors

with an ivy'd cherub

interesting cat adornments atop William Kentridge's garden gates

and entertainment from the pipe band at the King Edward VII school

Is my spring fever cured? Hardly. Next weekend, the Gardens of St. Christopher!