In the 1980s Public Enemy rapper Chuck D once said “Rap is CNN for black people.” At the time, largely excluded from mainstream media, stories and opinions with a black perspective were taking center stage as rap lyrics.
The idea of art functioning to tell untold stories and document unrecorded truths also informs much of Sam Nhlengethwa’s work. Given limited representation in the South African media for many years under apartheid, black communities were often better represented in art and music than anywhere else. In early works, like Lala Ngoxolo (1992) (page 50), Nhlengethwa portrayed a scene of a township funeral during the 1980s.
Black music and musicians have long been a key subject for the artist. In the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, jazz played a very significant role in black urban centers in South African cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town. Musicians from the 1950s and 1960s, like singer Miriam Makeba, trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and pianist Abdullah Ibrahim moved on from electrifying local audiences to become international stars. Nhlengethwa is a dedicated jazz devotee, attending clubs and concerts and playing music in his studio as he works. Coming from a musical family, at one stage he considered becoming a musician himself.
The idea of jazzlike improvisation links to his style, a Romare Bearden-inspired collage-and-painting hybrid. Recasting figures from magazines and newspapers, Nhlengethwa utilizes them in a playful yet incisive act, working paint, pastel, and charcoal into and over printed pictures to create a collision between the mechanically generated image and the handmade. The nature of the final work is determined, in part at least, by the images happened upon by the artist in his search through books or newspapers. And, like members of a jazz collective, the drawn, painted, and printed components of the works each have their turn to step forward and “solo,” stepping back just as surely in deference to the next one.
In the inaugural exhibition Lift Off at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, in 2007 Nhlengethwa adopts a different role: the painter as curator. For his work Sold Out he chose his favorite works by South African artists, such as Marlene Dumas and William Kentridge, and also included his own work in a painting of a plausible but fictional gallery space.
As Nadine Gordimer writes in an essay on his artwork in a monograph on his work edited by Kathryn Smith, “His work is abstract when that is the way he receives his strongest impressions, expressionist when inner and outer vision strike him with this kind of violence, realist when the painstaking surface of images needs to confront us with what this conceals.”
Untitled (book painting) 2006
Mixed media on canvas
20 x 25 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and
the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Private Collection
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Sam Nhlengethwa
Rehearsal 2002
Oil and collage on canvas
90 x 120 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and
the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: Ruphin Coudyzer
© Sam Nhlengethwa
Sold Out 2007
Oil and mixed media on canvas, triptych
Each panel 184 x 130 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and
the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Sam Nhlengethwa