Taken together, the cast of characters in these paintings is incredibly varied: lovers, healers, heroes, villains, and mystical creatures engage in worship and dancing; running and fighting; reading, lounging, sleeping, and reflecting. On the whole, the show’s framework suggests a sense of positivity attained through pride and self-recognition. Large swaths of the show focus specifically on Black joy: there’s Moke’s 1983 Kin oyé ou Coulier Madiokoko à Matonga, which depicts a group of men and women dancing in a club radiating with dim, rainbow lights, and Joy Labinjo’s Gisting in the Kitchen (2018), in which three women appear to gossip in a cheerful orange room.

Another significant portion of the show highlights contemporary works featuring figures with exaggeratedly black, even jet-black skin, like Kwesi Botchway’s Green Earflip Cap (2020), Zandile Tshabalala’s Conversation (2020), Amoako Boafo’s Teju (2019), and Cinga Samson’s Ibhungane 16 (2020). Tshabalala’s Two Reclining Women is a striking standout: bright-red lipstick and leopard print nightgowns leap off the canvas, showing two women with shaved heads lounging luxuriously on a sofa.

Both the overbearing optimism and focus on skin tone pose problems. One cannot help but wonder about the limits of the show’s optimistic spin in the face of continued anti-Blackness worldwide. In her catalogue essay, Dhlakama quotes writer Kevin Quashie, who laments that “nearly all of what has been written about Blackness assumes that Black culture is, or should be, identified by resistant expressiveness—a response to racial oppression.” Still, she writes that the exhibition was formulated to counter that prevailing sentiment of exploitation and persecution. It’s an understandable impulse, but at times, it feels forced, as if stemming from a need to prove something about Blackness or Africanness.

The exaggeratedly black skin tone can be traced back to artists like Kerry James Marshall and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—but it’s unclear what the new generation is doing to advance or complicate the technique. And it’s important to do so, since its prevalence can play into tropes of easy visibility and representation without always challenging how the Black body is seen. When artists draw such a tight connection between Black life and Black skin, they risk positioning the Black body as a gimmick.

The paintings in the show that depict groups rather than individual figures, especially those by older and historical artists like Gerard Sekoto, George Pemba, Meleko Mokgosi, Fred Oduya, Beauford Delaney, Helen Sebidi, and Maria da Silva, deal more pointedly with social and political issues. Mokgosi’s Pax Kaffraria:Graase-Mans (2014) is a 30-foot-wide triptych that, in combining several scenes, reflects the richness and plurality of Black life. In one scene, a helper cares for a small child as a man cleans his stoop with a bucket and cloth; in another, a man leans back in a chair in what looks like a classroom. The work forms part of Mokgosi’s exploration of transnationality and “Africanness,” paying close attention to Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies. It reflects on quieter and ordinary moments that make up daily life outside grand narratives about colonialism
and its afterlives.

Uneven as it necessarily is, given its size, “When We See Us” unambiguously succeeds in one respect; it brings lesser-known artists to new audiences: an artwork by self-taught Louisiana painter Clementine Hunter—among the earliest pieces in the show—introduces the artist to viewers on the continent. The task of “When We See Us” is urgent and timely, and it reflects the need to expand the language of Black art and to reassess the limits of figurative painting. It has become too easy to think the art world has transformed and become more diverse simply because we’re seeing more Black faces on the walls at art fairs and in museum and gallery exhibitions. But seeing is not enough, and eye-catching images of Black bodies can shift attention away from pressing social and political issues. Nevertheless, these failures, tensions, and contradictions open the door for generative questioning that will fuel the way forward.  

The title “Congress” suggested a coming together for some shared purpose; the exhibition emphasized scenes of social, political, and spiritual gatherings, which the curator described as “images of communion, disorder and transcendence.” These gatherings take place against the backdrop of South Africa’s spatial politics, particularly the segregationist system of apartheid and the processes of urbanization that saw many Black people moving from the countryside to cities in search of work. Several paintings detail forced removals of Black people from areas declared as “whites only” by the government (Makhoba, Removals, Cato Manor, 2001), housing insecurity (Pemba, Homeless, 1973), and precarious working conditions (Makhoba, Gumboot Dance in the Old Mine, 2002). These are presented alongside pictures of leisure, rest, and play: Pemba’s The Audience (1960) shows a young couple at a movie theater completely engrossed in each other and Makhoba’s Amagendi Kids (Cato Manor), 2001, depicts children playing the coordination game known as diketo, which involves drawing a circle on the ground and shifting small stones in and out of the circle while throwing another in the air and catching it before it hits the ground.

George Pemba, The Audience, oil on canvas board, 14 by 18 inches.

Drawing its own kind of circle across time, “Congress” was organized at a critical moment in the history of realism, now that figuration is under scrutiny due to its massive proliferation, particularly in the form of works depicting Black people and Black life. By presenting early works by artists proficient in that genre, the exhibition anchored contemporary figuration in an art historical lineage. In South Africa specifically, the current burgeoning of representational art-making comes after a hiatus during which many young artists—including Igshaan Adams, Nandipha Mntambo, and Nicholas Hlobo—worked in abstraction that frequently engaged materiality.

The exhibition drew interesting parallels between the three painters and their respective social contexts. Pemba’s sketches, notations, and studies reveal how he moved from watercolors to oil painting on the advice of his mentor Gerard Sekoto, a fellow artist who nudged him away from rendering idealized pastoral versions of his people and toward reflecting the world as he experienced it. Sibisi made a similar shift in his career: though he started working in printmaking, other Black painters (including Pemba) inspired him to transition to oil painting. Like his contemporaries, he moved away from idyllic and sentimental depictions of Black life to begin painting what he observed around him—as seen in Taxi Group (2003), a vivid and dramatic canvas illustrating commuters in a vehicle, most of whom look with annoyance at a fellow passenger carrying a live chicken on his lap. Later, as he sought to become a spiritual healer, Sibisi increasingly incorporated spiritual themes into his work; one of his last series of paintings focuses on ocean baptisms. While Sibisi and especially Pemba arrived at a subtle, earthy palette with the realistic use of color, Makhoba favored evocative, harsh, and dark palettes. This may result from his circumstances—he sold his work on the Durban beachfront, where it was regularly exposed to sunlight. Often considered a moralist painter, Makhoba was deeply invested in Christian values and a personal cosmology. More than that of Pemba and Sibisi, his work is didactic, warning youth about the scourges of HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence, and alcoholism.

Sthembiso Sibisi, Baptism: Spiritual Healing in the Sea, 2005, oil on canvas, 39 by 25 ¼ inches.

Although this exhibition could be read as a document of Black life in a very specific time frame, a purely historical reading would miss the artists’ nuanced engagement with surrealist aesthetics: Pemba, Makhoba, and Sibisi often experimented with fantasy and distortion in trying both to make sense of the conditions of life under apartheid and to stretch the limits of what was possible. Just as the parameters of the artists’ work remained open, the parameters of the exhibition were provisional, suggesting ways in which group portraits might contribute to increased understanding of communal life in South Africa.

South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa’s vivid color portraits of shack dwellers, coal and gold miners, brick workers, sugarcane cutters and, most recently, Christian worshippers are marked by a recurring compositional strategy. To call it a formula does it a disservice. Since 2000, Mthethwa has unerringly portrayed his subjects standing, seated or huddled in determinate environments (a cramped bedroom, a burned field) that offer contextual insight into how his unnamed cynosures live, work and, in the case of “The Brave Ones” series, rejoice spiritually.

One of two new photographic series exhibited, “The Brave Ones” (2011) comprises 10 frontal portraits depicting the young male worshippers (or Nazarites) who every January participate in religious festivities at Nhlangakazi, a holy mount north of the Indian Ocean port city of Durban. According to legend, Isaiah Shembe, an itinerant Zulu evangelist, was struck by lightning here in 1910. Shortly afterwards he founded the Nazareth Baptist Church, currently the most sizeable independent religious movement among the Zulu people, South Africa’s largest ethnic group.

Mthethwa, himself a Zulu, is not interested in the ritual or social organization of the church, whose theology is a fusion of Zulu traditions and Christianity. “What fascinates me is how and why people clothe themselves in these different ways,” he says in the catalogue for the recent exhibition “Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography” at London’s V&A Museum. In keeping with his stated aim, Mthethwa’s large-scale chromogenic prints focus on the unusual dress—tartan kilts, bow ties, gingham skirts, colonial-era sun helmets, knee-length football socks—of a particular sect of the Nazarites.

Mthethwa’s photographs, which do not entirely deflect ethnological readings, are nonetheless remarkable for the visual abundance they describe, sometimes unintentionally. In an untitled image, one of two pink-skirted Nazarites casually holds onto a misshapen tree in the left foreground. Adjacent to this tree is a young boy in everyday dress; he is seated on a mound, his back turned to the camera, apparently absorbed by his own activities. Pairs appear in four of the 10 photographs, an act of doubling that invites meditation on the hybrid qualities of the faith.

The verdant setting of “The Brave Ones” is a counterpoint to the cramped and impoverished mise-en-scène of Mthethwa’s earlier portrait series. An intimate study of destitution, the six photographs in “The End of an Era” (2011) were made in the substandard labor dormitories that have long housed Johannesburg’s large underclass of black male workers. Three sparse photographs depict modified electric stoves on bare concrete floors. The standout works, however, are two studies of bedside countertops. In one we see a bright green bar of soap resting on the worn orange bristles of a scrubbing brush neatly laid out beside a candle—details as acutely observed as those in his accomplished “Empty Beds” series from 2002.

Photo: Zwelethu Mthethwa: Untitled, from the series “The End of an Era,” 2011, chromogenic print, 59 by 76 inches; at iART.

In Penny Siopis’s painting Pine, we see a man and a woman lying on the ground in a forest, almost entirely obscured by a screen of pine needles and cones that forms a meditative, batik-like pattern of ocher and brown. They are alone in this quiet landscape, and the man’s hand is firmly clamped over the woman’s mouth. In Three Trees, a naked woman sits against a tree, her legs splayed and tied with rope to two other trees. Two figures kneel over her, pushing her legs farther apart. The image is rendered in sensual pours of deep reds, pinks, grays and purples that form a lacquered, visceral sheen. The sharp tug between seductive surface and troubling content is the core of the Johannesburg-based artist’s work, which for years has employed erotic and violent allegorical images of women culled from such sources as Japanese woodblock prints, news stories and ancient myths.

For her latest body of work, made in 2008-09, Siopis restricted herself to glue and ink on canvas, producing remarkably liquid, luminous swaths of color. The technique is especially effective when the ink is red, which she favors (previous series featured only this hue). As with Louise Bourgeois’s recent series “Blood Ties,” where naked babies and women are rendered in pale red washes of gouache, Siopis’s wet reds and pinks vividly conjure blood and flesh. In Anonymous, which depicts an androgynous seated figure holding a flower, glossy saturated crimsons evoke the dense red of a blood clot, and the figure looks skinless. A tiny baby is barely visible in Miracle, falling through an almost entirely abstract composition of swirled and splashed color that resembles celestial gases; in this painting, Siopis uses gold, cream, mahogany and a splatter of dark brown the color of dried blood.

Allusions to the female body as a site of birth, bleeding and violence are a constant in Siopis’s work, but are deftly tempered with unsettling beauty. In Still Waters, a woman’s face floats almost negligibly in a vast tapestry of yellow-green lily pads. Ophelia is the obvious reference; in Siopis’s rendition, the woman stares out with an eerily calm gaze that seems, in its resignation, to accuse. In a recent interview, the artist said she values unpredictability and likes working on a knife’s-edge balance between form and formlessness. She maintains the same kind of balance between victimhood and culpability, erotic ecstasy and violence or sacrifice. It is rich, and difficult, territory. Quoting Bataille’s assertion that art can offer “ravishment without death,” Siopis offers an apt epigram for her captivating, disquieting work.  

Photo: Penny Siopis: Three Trees, 2009, ink and glue on canvas, 783⁄4 by 981⁄2 inches; at Michael Stevenson.