Motlhoki Nono wins the Ernest Cole Award
The Ernest Cole Award was established to commemorate Ernest Cole by acknowledging the wider practise of photography and its fields of engagement, along with its potential for impact and change. Nono will receive R 75,000 to create her proposed project. She will be supported by a circle of mentors to work towards a public outcome. Nono is the first woman to receive the Ernest Cole Award since its inception. This year’s shortlistees included Lunathi Mngxuma, Phumzile Khanyile, and Theminkosi Hlatshwayo.
Curator Mark Coetzee has passed away
The South African curator, author and artist Mark Coetzee passed away on Tuesday morning, 12 July 2022. Coetzee studied Fine Art at Stellenbosch University and worked as a painter before starting the eponymous art gallery, Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, in the late 1990s in Cape Town. In 2001, he became director of the Rubell Family Collection – now known as the Rubell Museum – in Miami, Florida. In 2009, he joined the sportswear brand Puma – under the direction of then-CEO Jochen Zeitz – as program director of PumaVision and chief curator of Puma.Creative. He was selected to lead a Zeitz-branded museum, slated to open in Nairobi before its location was pivoted to Cape Town in 2012. This led to the opening of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in 2017. Coetzee served as executive director and chief curator of the museum until he tendered his resignation in 2018 amid allegations of misconduct and abuses of power. Over the course of his life, Coetzee published monographs on several artists and wrote for publications such as The Huffington Post, Mail & Guardian, Revue Noire and the Sunday Independent. “Mark understood the value and potential of art,” writes Luan Nel. “He knew that art could transform people, places and thinking.”
Finalists selected for the ANNA Awards
Sinalo Ngcaba, Soliana Tewolde, Nadine Mathenjwa, Lerato Nkosi, Charlaw Baragwanath-Barter, Fiona Davhana, Farhana Jacobs, Hemali Khoosal, Mbali Tshabalalala, Gugulethu Mnguni, Motlhoki Nono and Thembi Mthembu are the 12 finalists of the inaugural ANNA Award, an art prize awarded by ANNA and Latitudes. The aim of the award is to discover, recognise and nurture a new generation of women artists in South Africa. The selection committee is comprised of Makgati Molebatsi, Refiloe Mpakanyane, Candice Chirwa, Marianne Fassler, Jo-Ann Strauss and Nina Carew.
First Thursdays 10 Years Exhibition: Call for submissions
First Thursdays Cape Town will be 10 years old in September 2022. An exhibition at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery (18 August – 29 September 2022) will showcase work sourced from the broader public. The submission process to show work in the exhibition is open to the public. Anyone can submit artwork for consideration – one does not need to be a practising artist and there is no minimum age limit. The brief: artwork that features people or depicts the human figure in any way, in any media (painting, drawing, photography, collage, printmaking, etc.). Deadline to apply is Friday, 5 August.