Zimbabwean art

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See also: Sculpture of Zimbabwe

Zimbabwean

African cultures in general that art touches many aspects of life, and most tribes have a vigorous and often recognisable canon of styles and a great range of art-worked objects. These can include masks, drums, textile decoration, beadwork, carving, sculpture, ceramic in various forms, housing and the person themselves. Decoration of the body in permanent ways such as scarification or tattoo
or impermanently as in painting the body for a ceremony is a common feature of African cultures.

Spoken or musical art is also a prominent part of Africas generally. Various instruments including drums, lamellophones and stringed bows have been used in Zimbabwe, while oratory, poetry, fable telling, praise singing and tribal ritual chants are also prominent.

In recent decades Zimbabwe has become widely recognized internationally for its sculpture.

History

It is useful to examine Zimbabwean art through time, by area, by main tribal division and as indicative of recent historic and political changes.

There is an artistic tradition in

six soapstone birds and a soapstone bowl were found in the eastern enclosure of the monument, so these Shona-speaking Gumanye people certainly produced sculpture. Each object was carved from a single piece of stone and the birds have an aesthetic quality that places them as genuine "art". In comparing them to other better-known African stone sculpture, for example from the Yoruba culture, Philip Allison, writing in 1968, stated "The stone sculptures of Rhodesia are few in number and of no great aesthetic distinction, but Zimbabwe itself has a place of peculiar importance in the study of African cultures".[6]

Stone Age

In prehistory the area was widely settled by Kung peoples, the so-called

oxides, fat, vegetable juices and possibly fluids from larval
insects. Certainly they have lasted for thousands of years.

Their descendants, who live mainly in Botswana and Namibia, sing a variety of uniquely structured and tuneful songs, accompanied sometimes by a plucked or struck bow. They also have a repertoire of dances, and there is no reason to suspect their ancestors did not do the same thing.

Iron Age

These Stone Age people were supplanted by Iron Age

WaRozwi/Barotse people and by derivation the Amashona peoples. The art of these people can be seen in many decorated first-fired clay pots, where typically a repeated dhol-dhol (linear herringbone) motif or similar edging was applied. Other artwork is harder to source, though it can be assumed they decorated the body and had beadwork
and other art styles related to typical styles of the East and Central African Nguni peoples. A recurrent motif in Shona art is the transformation of a human into an animal of some.

Later prehistory

At around the same time as the earlier incursions of these Bantu-type people (200BCE) there were sporadic expeditions by South-East coastal dwellers, probably by the

Monomotapa Kingdom, whose capital was Great Zimbabwe
. Arabs took up residence in Sofala around 900AD/CE

Early sculpture

Archaeology at Zimbabwe has shown several distinct phases of building and styles of stonework. It is likely the original complex was rather functional - essentially a

Zimbabwe flag
.

Amandebele incursions

The origin of Amandebele speaking peoples in southern Zimbabwe received its main impetus from settlement around 1840 under Mzilikazi, a Khumalo chief who rebelled against Zulu rule. However, it is likely that such tribes began crossing the Limpopo sporadically from about 1800 onwards. Amandebele conflict with the Amashona drove them northwards into what was dubbed in colonial times Mashonaland. These Amandebele/Matabele peoples had several distinct art forms differing from the Amashona: in pottery styles, bead aprons and headpieces, house decoration, carving and decoration of war implements such as clubs / knobkerries and shields.

19th and early 20th century

Art in Zimbabwe lost most of its spiritual power with the conversion of the majority of the population to Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Missionaries harmed the local cultures by demanding destruction of anything they regarded as anti-Christian, in particular masks or carvings thought to have votive powers, that is, to be appealing to some god that was not the Christian one. By the second world war most art objects produced in Zimbabwe were simply that: produced for tourist and local white settler consumption. With the advent of guns, animal skins prepared and decorated with small panels of other hides also began to appear more frequently in the early 20th century, as well as 'karosses' or fur blankets influenced by BaTchwana styles from Botswana to the south.

As for travelers to the area during the

Victoria Falls. John Guille Millais spent six months of 1893 sketching and hunting in Zimbabwe.[7]

In the 1940s a Zimbabwe philanthropist named Jairos Jiri began to teach disabled people various artistic skills and centralised their production for sale in several outlets nationwide. These proved very popular and returned money to persons otherwise excluded from normal commercial activity. Jairos Jiri centres remain an important part of the artistic output in Zimbabwe. Typical items include tiles, tiled tables and wall plaques, basketwork, beading, carvings in wood and stone, jewellery and paintings.

Prelude to independence

In the mid-1970s the nationalist guerilla incursions resulted in several atrocities against people in rural villages, including the sawing off of the upper lip of those perceived as collaborating with the government forces. The white government collated photographic images and a text list of these events into a propaganda booklet called 'Anatomy of Terror'. This was designed to show the brutality of the nationalists against innocent rural native people. Images from this publication are today to be found on YouTube (for example under 'Terrorists in the Rhodesian bush').

Other art from the white minority during the civil "Rhodesian Bush" (1968 - 1979) war consisted mainly of depictions of indigenous fauna and flora and landscapes. These subjects had always been popular and remain popular to this day among white artists. No individual white artist expressed any significant political sentiment during the civil war era. However, many film, still and sound clips celebrating the government forces' role during this time are currently available on YouTube.

Painting in the 20th and 21st centuries

While there were many well-known white artists in Rhodesia prior to independence in 1980, there were relatively few black artists of note. One of these was

Serima Mission Church.[9]

Although the Workshop School of the National Gallery supported and encouraged painters from 1957, Rhodesia had few Colleges for Fine Arts. The Bulawayo College of Fine Art and Design trained artists in fine art and graphic design for Rhodesian industry and it was not until 1963 that Alex Lambert set up the Mzilikazi Art School in Bulawayo specifically to encourage local people to take up art.

The

The BOC Group and Longman. Early winners of Awards of Distinction in the painters and graphics category included Berry Bickle (1987), Bert Hemsteede (1988), Rashid Jogee (1992) and Tichaona Madzamba (1992).[10]

Painters who have established reputations in post-independence Zimbabwe include Dumisani Ngwenya, Taylor Nkomo and Richard Jack.[7]

In 2018, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa held an exhibition by 29 Zimbabwean artists examining painting as commentary to the sociopolitical.[11] The exhibition statement says: "Painting has a long history in Zimbabwe... For decades, artists from Zimbabwe have manipulated this medium as a way of subtly articulating complex issues, speaking in intricate, allegorical codes."[12]

Sculpture in the 20th and 21st centuries

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
between concourses T and A
Main article: Sculpture of Zimbabwe

Since antiquity local artists have been using the steatite/soapstone deposits of the eastern Zimbabwe mountain ranges to produce artworks showing, among other things, the common Shona theme of animal/human inter-morphosis. These works became much larger under the patronage of white collectors in the 1960s (though the Zimbabwe birds of antiquity are massive) and now it is common to see monumental sculptures in hard Serpentine stone both nationally and internationally.

Atlanta's airport
.

Noted contemporary artists include sculptors Dominic Benhura and Tapfuma Gutsa, and painters Kingsley Sambo and Owen Maseko.[13]

Villa Mangiacane in Tuscany hosts one of the largest modern collections of Shona Art sculptures in Europe with over 220 pieces on display across its grounds. AVAC Arts now supports the adaptation and utilization of new technologies in sculpture and runs an online portal facilitating its international trade.

See also

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Art of Zimbabwe.
  1. ISBN 0908309147
  2. ISBN 0908309007
  3. ISBN 043594505X
  4. ^ Huffman T. (1986) "Iron Age Settlements and Origins of Class Distinction in Southern Africa", Advances in World Archaeology, vol. 5, pp.291-338
  5. ISBN 0582651115
  6. ^ Allison P., (1968) "African Stone Sculpture", p54. Lund Humphries, Great Britain
  7. ^
    ISBN 0908309147
  8. ^ Morton, Elizabeth (2003). "Ned Paterson and the Cyrene Mission Tradition". Retrieved 2020-10-08.
  9. ^ Morton, Elizabeth (2012). "Father John Grober's Workshop at Serima Mission". Academia.edu. Retrieved 2020-07-07.
  10. ^ See annual catalogues for Zimbabwe Heritage, produced by the National Gallery
  11. ^ Moloi, Nkgopoleng (23 November 2018). "'Five Bhobh' is a taxi to the end of an era". Mail and Guardian. Retrieved 30 November 2021.
  12. ^ "FIVE BHOBH – PAINTING AT THE END OF AN ERA". Zeitz MOCAA Museum.
  13. ISBN 9781856695480
    .


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