Arts and Insights 22 Sep 2023

Heritage month

Sam Nhlengethwa was born in the black township community of Payneville near Springs (a satellite mining town east of Johannesburg), in 1955 and grew up in Ratanda location in nearby Heidelberg. In the 1980s, he moved to Johannesburg where he honed his practice at the renowned Johannesburg Art Foundation under its founder Bill Ainslie. Nhlengethwa is one of the founders of the legendary Bag Factory in Newtown, in the heart of the city, where he used to share studio space with fellow greats of this pioneering generation of South African artists, such as David Koloane and Pat Mautloa. Despite Nhlengethwa’s pioneering role in South Africa art, his work has received rare visibility in London. A major survey exhibition, titled Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things, was hosted by SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia in 2014, which was then co-hosted in Atlanta by SCAD and the Carter Center. Other notable exhibitions and accolades in South Africa and around the world include: in 1994 – the year South Africa held its first democratic elections – Nhlengethwa was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award; in 1995, his work was included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa in London; in 2000, he participated in a two-man show at Seippel Art Gallery in Cologne.

Prominent jazz musicians have regularly featured in Nhlengethwa’s work over the years.

This time around, the artist has widened his scope to incorporate both jazz and blues artists, bringing to the fore previously overlooked historical figures such as Johnny Lee Hooker and BB King. For Nhlengethwa, this decision reflects his desire to display the full extent of his inspirations. This works comes from the Jazz and Blues at Night exhibition which featured the first ever public display of pages from Nhlengethwa’s sketchbooks dating back to the 1980s. These drawings form a sort of note taking for Nhlengethwa who would carry along his sketchbooks wherever he went, finding inspiration in jazz clubs, restaurants and buskers on the street.

From the age of 15, Sam Nhlengethwa was exposed to the genre through his two older brothers who listened to everything from the classic standards of artists such as Miles Davis and Dave Brubek to the more experimental sounds of Sun Ra, Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus, to name a few.

“My life belongs to the jazz world because I don’t spend a day in my studio without listening to jazz in the background, I don’t think I could be who I am, what I’m doing in the art world, if there was no jazz. It is my daily inspiration.” says Nhlengethwa

Sam Nhlengethwa's first lithographs at The Artists' Press were a series of five prints around the Jazz theme and were published to coincide with his exhibition at the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year in 1994. Nhlengethwa has continued to return to the jazz theme over the years. Nhlengethwa was inspired by Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, and in some of his works he plays with the intensity of the blue he associates with this classic album. Sam Nhlengethwa is intrigued by people and their spaces "Throughout the years, all my pieces have dealt with the movement of people. I enjoy paying homage to people and places through my art." In the tributes prints, he pays homage to some of his visual art contemporaries and jazz legends.

Pierre Crocquet

Born in 1971 in Cape Town, Pierre grew up in Klerksdorp, a mining town to the west of Johannesburg.

He dutifully followed his parent’s wishes and graduated from the University of Cape Town with a financial degree and became a Chartered Accountant. He left South Africa for London in 1996 to take up a position at what was then Chase Manhattan merchant bank. Initially Pierre thought it would be a dream job but in a letter home he wrote, “The money paid here is obscenely high but I hate the work. I cannot see that what I am producing is meaningful and I feel I am leaving nothing worthwhile behind.”He abandoned banking and went to study photography at the London College of Printing. Pierre yearned for home and just after the millennium he returned to South Africa and his work then focused on life in South Africa and on the African continent. Two books, Us (2002) and On Africa Time (2003) were published.

About the work
In early 2002 Pierre discovered South African jazz and he spent the next several years photographing the artists producing the sounds he loved. The work was noticed by the Standard Bank Art Gallery which bought 25 large prints and held an exhibition, Sound Check, in 2005. A book with the same name, sponsored by the bank, was also published that year.