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.

Detail of Lungiswa Gqunta’s Noluthando; Kholiswa; River Beds, 2021.

Caring for land can result in abundant harvests. But when human connections to the land get severed—whether by ecological disaster or colonialism—harvest time can exist only in dreams. This is the premise behind South African artist Lungiswa Gqunta’s solo exhibition “Tending to the Harvest of Dreams,” on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt through November 14. The show responds to South Africa’s Natives Land Act of 1913, in which the segregationist government allocated only 7% of the nation’s productive land to the Black majority, whose members were relegated to these “native reserves.”

Gqunta typically creates sculptural assemblages and installations using found materials—empty beer bottles, old bedsheets, razor wire, and discarded bed frames—all of which are ubiquitous within the urban township of her birthplace, New Brighton. Her newest work is an installation in the form of an immersive garden. But instead of flora and fauna, her dreamscape is filled with metal riverbeds and shrubs made of barbed wire. The installation highlights how the Land Act’s legacy continues to be felt—there’s been hardly any successful land ownership reform in the nation since it attained full democracy status in 1994.

The space is also permeated by the sound of Gqunta’s recorded voice recalling a dream in Xhosa. She recites dreams as part of her spiritual practice, recording her recitations so she can consult with a guide. A string of seemingly random thoughts, the dreams are largely unintelligible, even to those who understand her language. The opacity is deliberate—a way of keeping the spiritual aspects of her practice sacred. The show continues Gqunta’s quest to unearth the hidden structures of violence buried just beneath the surface of the South African landscape, and to construct an alternative present through spirituality and dreams.

View of Lungiswa Gqunta’s exhibition “Tending to the Harvest of Dreams,” 2021, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.

The sculptural works are made with barbed wire wrapped in green and purple fabric. For the artist, binding and wrapping the material transforms it into “plant-like things that begin to grow into space, naturally unwinding into whatever they want to be.” She sees the process as a meditative act of care akin to hair braiding. The fabric does not completely conceal the ferocity of the wire—the spikes resist and poke through the fabric. The work reflects on the ways in which it is difficult to conceal or build on top of the violent legacies of colonialism.

Gqunta began working on the installation’s wire sculptures during her 2018 residency at Gasworks, London. The year prior, she performed in Documenta 14 with the iQhiya Collective, a group of eleven Black women artists launched when they were all students at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Cape Town. Gqunta also mounted her first solo exhibition in 2017, at Kelder Projects in London. The show included a sculpture called Sleeping Pools (2017), for which she lined a metal bed frame with LED lights and sealed petrol in clear plastic, evoking a haunting swimming pool—an image of suburban luxury disrupted by the material used to intensify flames during protests. In her various gardens and pools, Gqunta reconstructs the symbols of privilege and safety often found in South African suburbs, continually evoking nature through mass-produced objects. Her choice to highlight the dismal nature of her material surroundings only emphasizes the appeal of the alternative spiritual realms she conjures alongside them.

Lee first noticed this duality while growing up in Harlem. In a 2020 virtual studio visit hosted by Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, she cites Central Park as her entry point to the natural world. But later in life, she learned that this contested geography conceals stories of the free Black American landowners who once populated Seneca Village, a community that was forcibly displaced to make room for Central Park.

Dionne Lee: A Test for
40 Acres, 2016, pigment print, 8 by 10 inches.

Lee began interrogating the racialized histories of the American landscape by means of photography in 2016, while an MFA student at the California College of the Arts. Her black-and-white A Test for Forty Acres from that year is a photograph of a patch of grassy land covered by a giant emergency blanket—the artist was aiming for forty acres—that Lee made by taping together sheets of reflective mylar. By producing this emergency blanket and then placing it on the hilly land, she pointed to an unfulfilled promise: in January 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 granted family homesteads up to forty acres to some 18,000 freed slaves in portions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, but by that fall, President Andrew Johnson had overturned it. Lee’s choice of material was prompted by personal experience. After receiving an emergency blanket in an earthquake kit upon moving to California, the artist noticed that it both beautifully reflected the sky and evoked an image of crisis. In a virtual artist talk at the New Orleans Museum of Art, she said the gesture posed a series of questions: What do we consider an emergency? What could be reflected back to us?

Dionne Lee: North, 2019, gelatin silver print collage, 14 by 11 inches.

More recently, Lee, who is now based in Oakland and teaches at Stanford, has been making collages. She often glues together double-exposed gelatin silver prints, found images, and graphite drawings. In two related collages, North and True North (both 2019), we see the artist’s hands gesture upward—pinkies extended, thumbs touching, and the three middle fingers of each hand bent inward. This configuration, held horizontally, is a tool for navigation. If one pinkie is pointing to the end of the Big Dipper’s handle, the other should point toward true north, which differs from magnetic north in small yet fundamental ways. One is found using a tool; the other, using one’s body. In an audio track accompanying the works in “Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020,” an online exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lee says the images are an homage to her ancestors who navigated north on the Underground Railroad. The works bespeak Lee’s interest in exploring the body’s relationship to the land, and in tools that facilitate survival in the wilderness, an ability relevant to both social history and climate change.

Motivated by fear of impending ecological disaster, Lee has been learning a number of outdoor skills: how to navigate, make fires, and forage for food. During a lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design last fall, Lee noted, “My ancestors, who were enslaved, had to be survivalists, and I’m attempting to reclaim that heritage.” In response to nearly drowning in a public pool as a child, she made her gelatin silver print A place to drown (2019) by scanning an image of a desolate swimming hole. Lee slowly dragged a found photograph across a digital flatbed, and the resulting image is a distorted view of what seems like a gaping hole, perhaps a portal for escape. Swimming is yet another survival skill that reflects histories of racial oppression. The work brings up questions of access: historically, who had the right to swim? Who had access to water? Who had the privilege to perfect the survival skill of swimming?

Many of Lee’s works evoke the sublime terror we feel when faced with nature’s wondrous magnitude. Yet the artist seems to chafe at traditional landscape photographs. In her seven-minute video Drafts (2016), we see Lee’s hands at the top of the screen. Physically inserting herself into the picture this way, she refers to the ancestral traumas the landscape contains. Lee performs a sort of slow montage, creating a litany of provocations in the form of landscape images. One after another, the pictures are placed on a flat surface, slowly yet almost carelessly. Formulaic images of glaciers, layered bands of red rock, sunrises and sunsets, flowering plants, and various galaxies are punctuated by shots of dramatic natural events: volcanic eruptions, storms. The only sound is the rustling and rending of paper. Tearing, cutting, and folding these beautiful views, Lee gracefully refutes, among other things, the role photography played in the displacement of people by misleadingly depicting the American West as “pure” or “unaltered.”

This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue, pp. 72–73.