Painting Cape Town: Graffiti from South Africa provides the reader with an insider view into the graffiti subculture in this well-known South African city. The book includes interviews with 29 of Cape Town's most prominent graffiti artists. Each story provides a unique insight into the rationale behind the artist's passion and obsession for spreading their names. The history of the graffiti scene is traced from its beginnings on the Cape Flats in the 1980s and its roots within hip hop culture to the current graffiti scene polarised by contempt and praise. Painting Cape Town is the first publication of its kind and the reference text on the subject. The text is coupled with over 150 full colour illustrations.
Postcards For Ants is an exquisite retrospective collection from miniaturist artist and global Instagram phenomenon Lorraine Loots. It includes high-quality reproductions of her entire 2014 collection: 365 miniature watercolours inspired by Cape Town in its role as World Design Capital 2014. Part art book, part Cape Town tourist guide, Postcards For Ants puts a microscope onto one of the world s most beautiful cities, and is an instant collector s must-have."
Follow Raina and her beloved stuffie, Lola, on their profound journey from birthday jitters to cake-filled happiness. Celebrate the courage of one little girl's conviction to decide for herself when to speak up. This relevant and important book shouts YES to sharing one's truth. Brava to author Britta Stromeyer Esmail for empowering and elevating girls and their grown-ups. —Andrea Alban, author of The Happiness Tree and Anya's War Beautifully illustrated and eloquently written, Raina's (Un) Happy Birthday shows that girls, whatever age they may be, have the power to choose how they show and receive love. This is a powerful message for girls and boys and everyone who cares for them. —Loung Ung, author of Lucky Child and Lulu in the Sky A magical story. With extraordinary insight, tenderness, and love, Britta Stromeyer Esmail delivers a timely and empowering message—the importance of voice—to our children and youth. It takes courage for a little one to speak out and stand up to pressure. Raina's (Un) Happy Birthday provides an example of how to do just that without hurting the feelings of those you love. It's a lesson that all of us—young and old—can benefit from. I can't wait to share this beautifully told and illustrated story with my granddaughters! —April Christofferson, best-selling author of Buffalo Medicine
San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery. Taking as his starting point the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, J. D. Lewis-Williams examines the artistic and cultural significance of rock art and how this art sheds light on how San image-makers conceived their world. It also details the European encounter with rock art as well as the contentious European interaction with the artists’ descendants, the contemporary San people.
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.
Diana Ferrus was born in Worcester in 1953 and completed her high school career in 1972. She completed a postgraduate degree in Womens and Gender studies at the University of the Western Cape where she works as an administrator in the Dept of Industrial Psychology. Diana is a writer, poet, performance poet and story-teller. Her work in both Afrikaans and English has been published in various collections and some serve as prescribed texts for high school learners. Her publishing house, Diana Ferrus Publishers has published various publications including her first Afrikaans collection of poetry, Ons Komvandaan. Diana co-edited and published a collection of stories about fathers and daughters, Slaan vir my n masker, Vader in 2006. The mission of her publishing company is to publish writers from previously disadvantaged communities. Her company in association with the University of the Western Cape has published life stories of three former activists and unionists namely, Liz Nana Abrahams, Zollie Malindi and Archie Sibeko. These publications contain rich material about South Africas past and some are prescribed texts at the University of the Western Cape. She is a founder member of the Afrikaanse Skrywersvereniging (ASV), Bush Poets (all women poets) and Women in Xchains (grassroots women writers). Diana has attended numerous literary festivals locally and abroad. In 2006 she performed her poetry at the Klein Karoo Kunstefees with the Mamela band. They received a Kanna-award for the best contemporary music. At this very festival Diana received a Kanna-award for her contribution to Afrikaans. However Diana Ferrus is internationally known and acclaimed for the poem that she wrote for the indigenous South African woman Sarah Bartmann who was taken away from her country under false pretences and paraded as a sexual freak in Europe. Dianas work has had and still has a bearing and influence on matters of race, gender, class and reconciliation. She is popular amongst South Africans of all race groups. She believes in her countrys future and works tirelessly for her peoples emancipation from racial, sexual and class exploitation as well as reconciliation.
Pictures, painted and carved in caves and on open rock surfaces, are amongst our loveliest relics from prehistory. This pioneering set of sparkling essays goes beyond guesses as to what the pictures mean, instead exploring how we can reliably learn from rock-art as a material record of distant times: in short, rock-art as archaeology. Sometimes contact-period records offer some direct insight about indigenous meaning, so we can learn in that informed way. More often, we have no direct record, and instead have to use formal methods to learn from the evidence of the pictures themselves. The book's eighteen papers range wide in space and time, from the Palaeolithic of Europe to nineteenth-century Australia. Using varied approaches within the consistent framework of informed and proven methods, they make key advances in using the striking and reticent evidence of rock-art to archaeological benefit.
Originally published by the Standard Bank as part of a curated exhibition in May 2011, this prestigious volume celebrates the life and works of Peter Clarke (1929–2014), one of South Africa’s foremost artists. A mere 500 copies were originally published, all taken up at the exhibition, and continued demand has led to its re-release. Clarke left his job as a dockworker in Simon’s Town to devote himself to art. The wisdom of this decision is reflected in a remarkable career, which extended over some six decades and was acknowledged in the awards of the Order of Ikhamanga (silver) in 2005 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Listening to distant thunder: The art of Peter Clarke recounts an artist’s life in the context of the social history of South Africa from the 1940s onwards. His images reflect the social disruption of the Cape Flats, and the trauma of his community’s forced removal from Simon’s Town to the bleak apartheid township of Ocean View. Yet Clarke’s images have avoided bitterness, and his work is a perceptive scrutiny and celebration of life in all its aspects. Illustrated with over 200 reproductions and photographs, this book was researched and written by well-known South African art historians Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin, in close collaboration with the artist over almost seven years.
Rock art is one of the most visible and geographically widespread of cultural expressions, and it spans much of the period of our species' existence. Rock art also provides rare and often unique insights into the minds and visually creative capacities of our ancestors and how selected rock outcrops with distinctive images were used to construct symbolic landscapes and shape worldviews. Equally important, rock art is often central to the expression of and engagement with spiritual entities and forces, and in all these dimensions it signals the diversity of cultural practices, across place and through time. Over the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied ancient arts on rock surfaces, both out in the open and within caves and rock shelters, and social anthropologists have revealed how people today use art in their daily lives. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art showcases examples of such research from around the world and across a broad range of cultural contexts, giving a sense of the art's regional variability, its antiquity, and how it is meaningful to people in the recent past and today - including how we have ourselves tended to make sense of the art of others, replete with our own preconceptions. It reviews past, present, and emerging theoretical approaches to rock art investigation and presents new, cutting-edge methods of rock art analysis for the student and professional researcher alike.
