2015 JJC Schools Art and Design Awards Exhibition: Announcing the winners.

Elá Aguiar, Narcissus. Installation

Reddam House Bedfordview
First prize.

FADA Gallery in association with the Johannesburg Junior Council (JJC) presents the 2015 JJC Schools’ Art and Design Awards Exhibition. A diverse range of art and design work was selected for the awards exhibition and includes artists’ books, paper sculpture installations and digital media (animation). Schools in the Gauteng province were requested to submit work produced by grade 11 and 12 learners.

Paper Installations by Elá Aguiar and Maia Lehr-Sacks respectively.

And the winners are!

Ela Aguiar, Narcissus. Paper installation.
Reddam House.

First Prize 
Ela Aguiar 
Narcissus

Paper Installation

Reddam House
Art Teacher:
Renee Koch

Victoria Bench, Untitled Coloured pencil drawings.
National School of the Arts.

Second Prize:

Victoria Bench

Untitled

Coloured pencils, drawings

National Schools of the Arts
Art Teacher:
Anthousa Soltiriades

Third Prize:

Victoria Bench

Adcock Ingram Advertisement

Animation 

National Schools of the Arts

(video to be uploaded soon) 

3 x Merit Awards.

Maia Lehr-Sacks, Nautilus. Folded Paper Mobiles
Greenside High School

Maia Lehr-Sacks, 

Nautilus 

Folded paper mobiles 

Greenside High School
Art Teacher:
Mrs S Van Zyl.

Avalon Gullan, Untitled. Wood sculpture.
St Stithians Girls

Avalon Gullan 

Untitled

Wood sculpture

St Stithians Girl’s School. 
Art Teacher: Gary McIver.

Giggs Kgole

Scarcity/surplus: initiation

Digital prints

St John’s College
Art Teacher: 
Lesley Mackensie.

Ela Aguir (First prize) receives her
award from the Vice Dean,
 Amanda Breytenbach with
Sango Socikwa, JJC Mayor.

The awards exhibition provides a creative platform to acknowledge and encourage creative skills development amongst the learners in the province. 

Sango Socikwa, the JJC Mayor,
announced the winners.

Those whose works were selected have the opportunity to view their art, professionally displayed, in a public gallery space. However we also wish to acknowledge the role played by art and design teachers at secondary schools in the Gauteng Province.

Gala awards event.

Exhibition Lower ground floor.

Giggs Kgole (St Johns College)
 receives his merit award, from 
John Adams and the Vice Dean, 
also present, the JJC Mayor, 
Sango Socikwa.

The organisers’ applied high standards associated with curatorial and display criteria in setting up the exhibition. The awards exhibition will hopefully encourage more pupils to embrace their creative skills, especially at a crucial stage in their career development, seen in the context of a knowledge and digital economy.

Victoria Bench receives the
second and third prize.
National School of the Arts

Personal expression is of far greater significance in the twenty-first century, as learners are expected to embrace new media in their quest to communicate with each other in a global village. This requires a variety of creative skills, technology and insight.

Awards Gala event.

Maia Lehr-Sacks receives her merit award
from John Adams and the Vice Dean.
Greenhill High School.

We also hope to encourage a culture of visiting museums and galleries in preserving and valuing our cultural heritage amongst the youth.  The exhibition has been held on an annual basis for the past six years and as in previous years a number of awards are made, sponsored by Herbert Evans. 

John Adams,
Handed over the prizes.
Inspired the audience
 with his few words.

Innovation, creativity, inherent meaning and technical execution are the key criteria in adjudicating the awards.

Alessia Landi Chairperson
Arts and Culture (JJC)
Giving her speech

We wish to thank all the art and design teachers of participating schools, and our sponsors Hebert Evans, for making this awards exhibition possible. Working closer with the Johannesburg Junior Council, we trust this annual awards exhibition will become more inclusive and manifest their creative endeavours, as captured in the following statement.

Art is not just pretty pictures and light entertainment: art is a great unifier, a tool for promoting awareness by critically reflecting on society and an educational tool that can provide useful skills development and simultaneously inspire self-confidence in the youth of SA.  JJC Arts and Culture. 2014. Available, Accessed 6 September 2014.

Aims and Objectives for the awards Exhibition.

• To Provide the youth of the province with a unified platform for creative expression, whilst honouring their art skills and talents.
• To acknowledge creative output produced at local secondary schools: as work made formally for an art and design (including Technology) subject portfolio and informally, as part of the school’s extramural activities.
• To raise awareness amongst schools of the significant role creativity plays in a pupil’s development.
• Contribute to the development of standards in art and design teaching and leaning amongst secondary schools.
• To promote art and design disciplines as a lucrative career choice and study option at tertiary institutions. 
• To stimulate the development of creative role models amongst school peers in awarding prestigious prizes normally associated with achievements in sport and other extramural activities.
• To create a ‘visual platform’ for teaching and learning art and design at secondary schools.
• Exposing work of a high standard produced at a secondary level in a formal gallery space, in a curated fashion, meeting museum standards.
• Encourage a culture of visiting museums and galleries in preserving and valuing our cultural heritage amongst the youth.

Annual Exhibition

We encourage schools to become members of the Johannesburg Junior Council to participate in next year's art and design awards exhibition. Follow the provided link to access information about the JJC on their Facebook page and website.

Follow this blog and or like the FADA Gallery Facebook page, to receive information about future exhibitions and events associated with arts and culture.

FADA wants to thank the judges, the participating schools and and our sponsor, Herbert Evans. A special thank you to Emme Stols, Director at Herbert Evans, for loyal support.

eye hand mind seeing making and understanding: Press Release. FADA Gallery 30 June - 24 July.

eye hand mind

seeing making and understanding

Learning departs from what is known. On the journey documented here, words spoken by particular master weavers, beadwork makers, potters and painters, each situated in a particular cultural landscape, are leading to successful learning ideas for the rural high school.

Official Event: Monday 20 July 18:00 for 18:30.

Daily viewing from Monday 13 July – Friday 24 July 2015.

Gallery hours: Monday to Friday 09:00 – 16:00.

‘It’s been here all along!’ exclaimed a Mathematics teacher, beading needle in hand, as she looked closely at the sophisticated geometric pattern of a beaded ubeshwana - a traditional beaded Zulu apron. ‘Why didn’t we see it before?’

Beauty Ngxongo. Finely crafted Izichumo (zulu basket)
Penny and Digby Hoets Collection.

Real learning departs from what is known.

Much is written about South Africa’s education crisis. But seldom does one read about the needs of rural teachers and learners. Their learning context is very different to the urban one due to a lack of resources we take for granted. The South African rural learning ecology, situated in more than one ‘cultural heartland’ (as the road signs signal on the N12 north-east, for example) is seldom considered for what it might have to offer the South African high school learner.

Beauty Ngxongo. Finely crafted Izichumo (zulu basket)
Penny and Digby Hoets Collection.

Ndebele Ijogolo.

The exhibition Eye hand mind: seeing, making and understanding, was curated by Eugene Hön and Helene Smuts to celebrate the work of rural master artists, national treasures all, as the expression of southern Africa’s relatively unacknowledged local knowledge systems. 

Nesta Nala, Masterfully crafted uphiso,
coiled and pit-fired Zulu ceramic vessel.

Zulu beaded waistcoat.

The exhibition also presents an extraordinary process of rural/urban knowledge exchange. The Africa meets Africa project (AmA), an independent educational NPC (Non Profit Company) has been facilitating this knowledge exchange in an ongoing conversation with artists and local leadership in particular rural communities and the AmA interdisciplinary team of foremost academic specialists.

Nthombifuthi Magwaza. Telephone wire woven basket.
Gold award winner FNB Crafts Now 1998.
UJ Collection.

Reuben Ndwandwe woven baskets. Collections Jannie van Heerden and UJ.

This primary research is published in a richly illustrated series of educator’s resource books and narrative documentary films (on sale at the exhibition, along with remarkable pieces of traditional beadwork, weaving and painting) which certainly open up the rural heartland for any one of us South Africans who seldom escape urban life.

Edited versions of the films, produced by Guy Spiller (Art, science and heritage filmmaker), together with ceramic vessels and art works are showcased in the black-cube, the lower-ground floor of the FADA Gallery (image below).

Ndebele beadwork, aprons on display. Collection Alex Zaloumis.

Out of its research Africa meets Africa has developed pragmatic solutions for the rural and urban South African classroom both, by looking to the broad diversity of interlinked southern African local knowledge systems, particularly as these are articulated in the skilled hands of rural artists. Exquisite objects, made for everyday use according to inherited styles of beadwork, weaving, pottery and homestead painting, reveal an astonishing integrity of design and innovation with contemporary materials and forms. 

Now Grade 9 and 10 teachers and learners make beadwork, weave and paint to find a concrete and a visual entry point to the abstract language of mathematics. Science is introduced through contemporary cutting edge South African art, astronomy and archeology and the act of sensitive observation these disciplines have in common.

 In short, the STEAM (Science Technology Art and Mathematics) versus STEM debate in education, well underway in the United States, has been explored in the work presented here for well over a decade. 

 

Esther Mahlangu homestead. Photo Helene Smuts.
Copyright Photographer.

And yet: the surviving iconic master artists of rural South Africa, like the famous Esther Mahlangu (image below), a key participant in the project, share great concern that their art might not survive beyond their own generation.

 

Esther Mahlangu. Photo Anina Bartlett. copyright photographer.

Francinah Ndimande.
Photo Helene Smuts.

The exhibition Eye hand mind: seeing, making and understanding also shows how Africa meets Africa brings these master artists and their knowledge into the rural classroom. AmA has developed a unique arts skills based learning methodology, which integrates the subjects Visual arts, History and Mathematics within the requirements of the national CAPS curriculum. High school learners do geometry with their hands as they make beadwork and weave according to inherited southern African styles.

Francinah Ndimande painting her homestead. Photo Helene Smuts.
copyright photographer.

The Theorem of Pythagoras is discovered in Ndebele homestead wall painting (images above and below below). Cultural expression is contextualized in relation to past and present needs. This visual language of learning successfully supports the many rural learners who experience textbook English as a barrier to learning, as it is most often their third or fourth spoken language.

Asked how she manages to paint straight lines by hand and why her complex patterns work out so perfectly, Ndebele artist, the late Francinah Ndimande answered: ‘ I use my eye only’. (image below)

The famous Mathematician Bênoit Mandelbrot wrote in his The Fractal Geometry of Nature published in 1982:

‘For me the eye is the most sophisticated instrument of thought. It sees similarities before a formula has been created to identify them’.

About Africa meets Africa.

Africa meets Africa introduces teachers to all its CAPS curriculum linked resource materials within training programmes presented in partnership with various universities and provincial or district government education departments. Ultimately each teacher works with the full series of Africa meets Africa resources developed in relation to particular places within a shared southern African cultural landscape. Each resource book and film in the Africa meets Africa series is on display in the exhibition: Eye hand mind: seeing, making and understanding along with some of the exquisite examples of southern African art which inspired them.

For additional information on Africa meets Africa, view the Website:  or contact the director Helene Smuts (Director). Email: helenesmuts@gmail.com. 

A wide range of works are for sale - price-list available on request.