Much has changed since "Craft Art in South Africa" was published in 2002. This follow-up edition highlights the renewed sense of creativity and inspiration that is sweeping across the country against all odds. South African craft artists proliferate in these precarious economic times and maintain their artistic integrity with perseverance and passion. This book showcases the versatility and skill of some of the many artists working in South Africa today. It takes pride in the wide variety of tactile craft art works created, and explores the interdisciplinary nature of creativity through the examination of beading, basket weaving, ceramics, fibre art, glass sculpture, metal and wirework, recycling, and wood carving. It rejoices in the sharing of skills between cultures, and in the sharing of creative knowledge towards upliftment and employment. But above all, it celebrates the craft artists themselves and honours their sheer ingenuity.

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa’s apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station. It is the story of a community that made its way through the travails of white supremacist South Africa and demonstrates how the art students and teachers made together became the art of their lives. Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, as well as recent scholarship that explores violence, criminality, and the hopeless entanglements of the apartheid state, this book focuses instead on a small group’s efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives for its members and their community through the ironic medium of the apartheid-era school. There is no book like this in South African historiography. Lushly illustrated and poetically written, it gives us fully formed lives that offer remarkable insights into the now clichéd experience of black life under segregation and apartheid.

Encompassing black-and-white linoleum cuts made at community art centres in the 1960s and 1970s, resistance posters and other political art of the 1980s, and the wide variety of subjects and techniques explored by artists in printships over the last two decades, printmaking has been a driving force in contemporary South African artistic and political expression. Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, introduces the vital role of printmaking through works by more than twenty artists in the Museum's collection. The volume features prints by John Muafangejo and Dan Rakgoathe, a selection of posters produced for anti-apartheid coalitions in the 1980s, and nuanced political work by SueWilliamson, Norman Catherine andWilliam Kentridge. The book features many more recent projects, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of the medium in South Africa today. The work, presented in a generous plate section, is contextualized in an introduction by Judith B. Hecker, and accompanied by brief biographies of the artists, a timeline of relevant events in South African history, and a selected bibliography.

A celebration of the work and the world of craft artist in South Africa, this title shows examples of work and reveals the artists' creative inspiration. Craft art includes baskets, beads, ceramics, glass, fabric, metal, paper, quilting, winre, wax and wood. The craft art objects are categorized according to the materials used, with each category being a separate chapter.

Brilliantly illustrated, this is a unique record of the renaissance of black South African art, focusing on the extraordinary flowering of township art in the 1980s.

During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy. However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the manuscripts. This book advances on the contrary a holistic approach to the study of these manuscripts and gather contributions on the different dimensions of the manuscript, i.e. the materials, the technologies, the practices and the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption. The originality of this book is found in its methodological approach as well as its comparative geographic focus, presenting studies on a continental scale, including regions formerly neglected by existing scholarship, provides a unique opportunity to expand our still scanty knowledge of the different manuscript cultures that the African continent has developed and that often can still be considered as living traditions.

Black South African artists have typically had their work labeled "African art" or "township art," qualifiers that, when contrasted with simply "modernist art," have been used to marginalize their work both in South Africa and internationally. This is the The first book to fully explore cosmopolitan modern art by black South Africans under apartheid.

"The evangelical Lutheran Art and Craft Centre at Rorke's Drift, as one of the very few places that offered training to black artists during the years of aparthied, played a key role in South African art, not only for those who studied there, but the many others whom they trained or influenced in turn." "Drawing on a wide range of interviews with participants in the Rorke's Drift project, not only from South Africa, but also from Sweden, the Netherlands, Britain and the USA, this book sets out to write the story of the beginnings of the Centre in the 1960s, the founding and development of the Fine Art School in 1968, and the contribution of teachers and students until its closure in 1982." --book jacket.

This uniquely designed book and kit with a detachable plexiglass spine contains nearly 2,000 colorful beads and instructions to make a variety of jewelry items while learning about African culture. 100 illustrations.

The manufacture and decorative use of wire in Southern Africa traditional arts dates back to the first millennium AD. With advancements in telecommunications, a new type of wire -- multi-colored plastic-coated copper wire, often referred to as telephone wire -- came into being. Beginning in the late 1960's, Zulu night watchmen started weaving scraps of this wire around their traditional sticks. This new material was also applied to making izimbenge -- beer pot covers -- that had been traditionally made from grass and palm. Today, there is wide variety in the creative use of this wire, and, in post-Apartheid South Africa, Zulu craft artists are imbuing old forms with the colourful contemporary material of telecommunications. The result is a vibrant, distinctive new folk form gaining international attention. This is the first and only publication to document the development of this transitional art. Including more than two-hundred examples of baskets, this book traces telephone-wire weaving from its roots to its most current forms, featuring the works of the most renowned contemporary weavers. The accompanying text -- from some of the foremost experts in African art and craft -- traces the history of telephone-wire weaving as well as discussing its significance to South African culture and art history. Today telephone wire baskets are at the heart of growing markets for South African products and sustainable cultural industry in Zululand.