Described by international curator Okwui Enwezor as "one of the most dynamic and vigorous spaces of artistic practice," contemporary South African art is an exciting, emerging scene that is attracting the attention of international museums, curators, and collectors today. South African Art Now documents, through in-depth essays and stunning full-color photographs, the remarkable work of nearly one hundred South African artists working in every medium from painting, sculpture, and video to cutting-edge performance art. This lush volume includes the impressive work of art world stars such as William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas; newly prominent artists such as Berni Searle, Robin Rhode, and Mustafa Maluka; and exciting newcomers still unknown outside their own country, but clearly marked for success. This book covers forty years of art history, from the dark years of apartheid, which saw the rise of resistance art, to the long-awaited achievement of freedom in 1994, to the present-day struggles for reconciliation and transformation. Through it all, the engaged, powerful work of these artists provided a mirror for society. Including a compelling foreword by Nobel Prize-winning writer Nadine Gordimer, South African Art Now is a must-have resource for collectors, curators, and anyone interested in the pulse of international contemporary art.

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.

Africa's artistic landscape is immensely fertile. It has emerged from its colonial past, and is once again asserting its own identity.

In recent years Africa's booming art scene has gained substantial global attention, with a growing number of international exhibitions and a stronger-than-ever presence on the art market worldwide. Here, for the first time, is the most substantial survey to date of modern and contemporary African-born or Africa-based artists. Working with a panel of experts, this volume builds on the success of Phaidon's bestselling Great Women Artists in re-writing a more inclusive and diverse version of art history.

"Resistance Art" was Sue Williamson s classic account of the visual art against apartheid. First published in 1989, it soon became a bestseller. Editions were sold in the United States and the UK, and the South African edition sold out within a few years. Because of continuing demand, this landmark work has now been reprinted with a new preface, so as to make the art of the 1980s and 1990's available to a new generation of readers and art lovers.

South African artist Irma Stern (1894–1966) is one of the nation's most enigmatic modern figures. Stern held conservative political positions on race even as her subjects openly challenged racism and later the apartheid regime. Using paintings, archival research, and new interviews, this book explores how Stern became South Africa's most prolific painter of Black, Jewish, and Colored (mixed-race) life while maintaining controversial positions on race. Through her art, Stern played a crucial role in both the development of modernism in South Africa and in defining modernism as a global movement. Spanning the Boer War to Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and into the contemporary #RhodesMustFall movement, Irma Stern's work documents important twentieth-century cultural and political moments. More than fifty years after her death, Stern's legacy challenges assumptions about race, gender roles, and religious identity and how they are represented in art history.

An account of the pictures and people that have played a role in the modern history of South African art. The story opens in the second half of the 19th-century and charts the course of modern South African painting, from the descriptive records of the Africana painters, through the various experimental forms of modernism, to the revisionist perceptions of end-of-the-century South Africa.

An inclusive exercise in cultural analysis, this book deals with the gravitas and folly of identity politics, the boom of so-called African art, and the fetish and fascination with a global Esperanto. Designed to provoke thought and feeling, it is hoped that this collection of essays on South African art will reach a wide audience. The book's strength lies in its diversity of focus and cultural frameworks. It offers no defining system or divining rod. Rather, it is hoped that this book will provide a healthy contribution to an already thriving debate regarding the value and purpose of contemporary art, the on-going significance of the decolonising project, and the importance of art from Africa in the global pantheon.

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.

Offering a wealth of perspectives on African modern and Modernist art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this new Companion features essays by African, European, and North American authors who assess the work of individual artists as well as exploring broader themes such as discoveries of new technologies and globalization. A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa Includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material Features new and complex theoretical arguments about the nature of modernity and Modernism Addresses a widely acknowledged gap in the literature on African Art