adminNgqwele Dube Sunday Leisure Correspondent
THE National Gallery in Bulawayo is set to open space for art graduates through providing low rental studios. While the Gallery has mainly been home only to experienced artistes because of the rentals at the arts centre which were a bit prohibitive for the new art graduates, the low rental studios are expected to offer a better opportunity for art graduates to showcase their art work.
The Gallery has previously therefore remained out of reach of newly graduated students who have had to work at home before finding the requisite financial footing to invade the arts centre.
Gallery director, Voti Thebe said they have come up with a new programme called “Rent-an-Easel” which would allow emerging artistes to rent studio space at as little as $10 a month.
He said under the plan, the students would share a studio, with the Gallery providing a table and an easel from where the artistes would be working from.
Thebe said another critical feature would be the flexibility of the lease as the young artistes would be able to rent the space on a monthly-basis.
“If the student goes through a lean month and is unable to pay the rent for the following month, he can vacate the space and come back another time.
“We believe such an arrangement will make it easier for the young painters to maintain their presence in the Gallery while building their profile. The Gallery is the focal point of arts activities and being within the Gallery’s confines allow one to interact with various people involved in the art industry enabling you to raise your career prospects.
“We will initially start with four students and then expand going forward depending on the uptake of the available space,” he said.
Studio space at the Gallery is currently going for $200 for the first floor studios while ground floor ones are available for lease at $100.
Thebe also expressed concern at the low uptake of Gallery space by female painters saying out of the current 24 studios, only four had been leased out to female artistes.
However, he said the situation could be attributed to the fact that there were already few females enrolling for art at local arts colleges, namely the Bulawayo Polytechnic and Mzilikazi Art Centre.
On the overall performance of the Gallery in 2014, Thebe said they had managed to hold exhibitions on the last Thursday of every month, something that contributed towards the increased foot traffic at the Gallery.
“Another milestone was the fact that the Gallery has increasingly become a focal point for all arts genres such as performing and literal art and not just visual art with various fashion shows and music concerts held at the centre.
“We saw a general increase in exhibition attendances in 2014 although we were holding the exhibitions at zero budget. The quality of the exhibitions themselves was good and they were able to attract more people,” he said.
Thebe said the only challenge they had was failing to produce catalogues for exhibitions as it was a critical component in documenting the art displays.
He said they only produced two catalogues for Thatha Camera and Peace, Healing and Reconciliation but were hopeful of coming up with more exhibitions next year.
Thebe said they were planning on opening the year with a bang as they host the British Council-funded exhibition, Basket Case in January.
The Gallery will also line up various workshops in order to take the artistes back to basics while reintroducing life drawing lessons.
“Workshops will be on various subjects such as making paints, stretching canvas, how to frame and papermaking amongst a host of basics we believe can make a big difference to our painters.
“Life drawing lessons are critical because once an artiste masters drawing the human anatomy they will find it easier to draw animals. Any artiste with basic art skills is welcome for the lessons and we believe it will come in handy as most art schools shy away from life drawing because of the nudity involved but as a Gallery we are not hamstrung by such constraints,” said Thebe.
The Gallery will also hold a schools art exhibition as a way of giving room to art pupils in secondary schools, whose works will go for a national schools exhibition in Harare.
A recent visit by officials from the Namibia Art Gallery will see the local art house engaging in exchanges that will involve curators and artistes from the two galleries.
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