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Sue Williamson / Voices / 2011

19 February - 26 March 2011
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Sue Williamson has been a key figure on the South African art scene since the early 1980s when she produced A Few South Africans, a groundbreaking series of portrait prints featuring women in the struggle against apartheid.   Voices, which opens at the Goodman Cape on February 19, is Williamson’s first solo exhibition in Cape Town in a number of years. Important selected work from the past three decades will be shown alongside her latest two series – Other Voices, Other Cities, an international series of projects documented in photographs, and The Diaries of Lady Anne B.  Also on view will be Last Supper at Manley Villa, a portfolio of black and white photographs taken in the home of one family in the final days of District Six in 1981.

The theme running through all of these rather different works is that of personal history, and in many cases, the exact words people use to express themselves and to describe their situations.

Williamson’s work has always been about addressing social issues and mediating contemporary history through the people who are living through it. After the end of apartheid she addressed the stories that came to light during the hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and subsequently addressed the HIV/AIDS pandemic in a moving series entitled From the Inside.

Artworks

Archival print on cotton rag
Image: 29 cm Work: 50 cm Frame: 56 cm
Unavailable
Photo etching/screenprint collage
70 x 64 cm
Unavailable
Photo etching/screenprint collage
70 x 64 cm
Unavailable
Photo etching/ screenprint collage
Image: 41 x 84 cm Frame: 88 x 109 x 3.5 cm
Photo etching and screenprint collage
Work: 70 x 64 cm
Photo etching and screenprint collage
Work: 100 x 70 cm
Archival print on cotton rag
50 x 67.5 cm
Unavailable
Photo etching/screenprint collage
70 x 64 cm
Unavailable
Photo etching/screenprint collage
Image: 70 x 52.5 cm
Lithograph with printed and collaged gel papers
Unavailable
Monotype
38 x 33 cm (paper)
Unavailable
Photo etching/screenprint collage
Frame: 86 x 109 x 3.5 cm Image: 46 x 86 cm
Photo etching/screenprint collage
Frame: 86 x 109 x 3.5 cm Image: 46 x 86 cm
Photo etching/screenprint collage
Image: 41 x 84 cm Paper: 55 x 94 cm
Archival print on cotton rag
Image: 38 x 41 cm Work: 49.5 x 67.5 cm Frame: 56 x 73 cm
Unavailable
Archival inks on Hanemuhle paper and laser cut type collaged
Work: 82 x 112 cm Frame: 100 x 112 x 7 cm
Archival inks on Hahnemuhle paper
Work: 82 x 112 cm Frame: 100 x 126.5 x 7 cm
Unavailable
Photo etching/screenprint collage
Image: 70 x 52.5 cm
Photo etching/screenprint collage
70 x 64 cm
Unavailable

About

Sue Williamson image

Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s). 

Major international solo exhibitions include: Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities at the SCAD Museum of Art in Georgia, USA (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, Netherlands (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited (2002) at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. Williamson has participated in biennales around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2019); several Havana Biennales as well as Sydney, Istanbul, Venice and Johannesburg biennales. Group exhibitions include, Resist: the 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy (2018) at BOZAR in Brussels; Women House (2017, 2018) at La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C); Citizens: Artists and Society Tate Modern, London; Being There (2017) at Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris) and Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (2014) at the International Centre for Photography New York and the Museum Africa (Johannesburg), curated by Okwui Enwezor, and The Short Century (2001-2) also curated by Okwui Enwezor, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York.

Williamson’s works feature in museum collections, ranging from the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Pompidou Centre, (Paris), Hammer Museum, (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg). Williamson has authored two books - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989). In 1997, Williamson founded www.artthrob.co.za, a leading website on South African contemporary art and the first of its kind in the country.  Awards and fellowships include The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California.

Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

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