Half a century ago, South Africa was under apartheid — institutionalized segregation — for 18 years. It was during this period that saw the beginnings of 3.5 million nonwhite South Africans forced out of their homes and moved into segregated neighborhoods, commonly known in South Africa as townships. It was also when a woman named Linda Goodman founded Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Goodman made it her mission to create a non-discriminatory space that offered respite from the museums that catered to the autocratic government.
At exhibition openings during apartheid, black artists represented by Goodman Gallery would have to be ready at any instant to pose as waiters serving patrons in order to avoid arrest. “She was brave enough to decide that this was going to be an alternative space to a white-supremacist government who had implemented the system called apartheid, and she protected the artists, protected the artists, showed their work, managed to get their work out the country, so people outside the country could see what was going on outside South Africa,” said Liza Essers.
Fifty years later, Essers, who acquired the gallery from Goodman in 2008, still holds on to the very values that started the gallery in 1966 with, according to its website, a three-tiered focus: “working with southern Africa’s most significant artists, both established and emerging; those from the greater African continent; and international artists who engage with the African context.”
Essers marked the gallery’s 50th anniversary with In Context, a curatorial mission brought on by the gallery in 2010 that seeks to fill the void of a city biennial that was shuttered. With it came a two-part exhibition in Johannesburg co-curated by Essers and New York-based artist Hank Willis Thomas that explored notions of African identity in both the United States and the continent, and its Cape Town counterpart, Where We Are, an exhibition that focused on a new generation of African artists. In Context also featured Black Portraitures, a conference “where artists, activists and scholars from around the world will share ideas about the current state of African, African Diaspora and African American art and art history.” The conference featured talks with titles like Portrait as Politic and Pride Feels No Pain: Feminist and Queer Perspectives from the Media(n) of Black Struggle Forty Years after 16 June. “It’s a privilege for me to open up very important dialogues and conversations, especially because we have so few spaces in South Africa for discourse and dialogue,” said Essers at the press conference for In Context.
The gallerist had her own run-in with the Zuma government in 2011 when it asked her to take down a painting by Brett Murray that parodied a 1967 Lenin poster by representing South African president Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed. Essers, who was on maternity leave at the time, opposed the government-imposed censorship, keeping the painting hanging on the gallery wall. “It was too important in terms of our constitution and freedom of expression to keep the painting up,” recalled Essers.
Today, the gallery also has a Cape Town location, participates in major art fairs like Frieze London and Art Basel, and also represents nearly four dozen artists, who span the diversity of the country where the gallery is based. Apartheid may have ended in 1991, but racial tensions still run strong in South Africa. Their work is imbued with the social injustices and complexities that come with living in a country where segregation was the norm until apartheid was abolished 25 years ago. There’s 61-year-old William Kentridge, who is arguably the most important living artist to come out of South Africa, known for his animated films and full-length operas. Then there’s Tracey Rose, one of the continent’s most accomplished performance artists, who is poised to make a comeback in 2017 in several global exhibitions. Also in the gallery’s roster is Mikhael Subotzky, who documented the residents of- Ponte City — a 54-story building that once housed middle-class white residents until apartheid ended. It soon became the symbol of Johannesburg’s downturn, turning into the home of illegal immigrants and the city’s downtrodden minority residents before it was purchased by developers who had hopes of restoring the building to its middle-class glory, but failed. There’s also photographer Jabulani Dhlamini — who hails from Soweto, the township where Nelson Mandela is from, and Haroon Gunn-Salie, a twentysomething artist who has highlighted the vibrancy of the colorful dyes used to mark protestors in photographs of demonstrations around the world.
The gallery is a contrast to the profit-driven galleries in the market who are motivated by the sole purpose of selling art to make money. “We’re a completely different space in our essence because so much of what we do is about making a difference, about creating a platform where there really can be engagement,” said Essers.
