FADA Gallery Schedule 2018.

February 1-15.

2017 Dean’s Award Exhibition.
Extended for first-time registering students - until 15 February.

15 March – 30 March

South African Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition &

2017/18 Thuthuka Jewellery Awards Exhibition

13 April – 31 May.

Black Chronicles IV, an exhibition curated by Renée Mussai (Senior Curator and Head of Archive & Research at Autograph ABP)

12 July – 17 August (provisional dates)

2018 FADA Alumni Exhibition honouring Dr Carol Hofmeyer, founder and director of the Keiskamma art project Trust

18 September – 28 September (provisional dates)

2018 JJC Schools Art and Design Awards

1 October – 2 November

Peter Magubane, A Photographic Review.

 5 - 23 November (provisional dates)

Visual Arts B Tech exhibitions.

29 November - 6 December (provisional dates)

2018 Dean’s Award Exhibition.

February 1-15.

2017 Dean’s Award Exhibition

The work on this exhibition is of finalists nominated for the 2017 Dean’s Award Exhibition. Each department selected a student, mainly Honours and a few undergraduate candidates, who demonstrated innovation and creativity in their body of work on display. The exhibition showcases work from the following disciplines; Interior Design, Architecture, Industrial Design, Visual Arts, Multi Media, Jewellery Design and Manufacture and Design Communication (Graphic Design). This year’s winner is Pia Findlay, a BA Honours (Industrial Design) graduate.

15 March – 30 March

FADA Gallery hosts the following jewellery awards exhibitions; 
South African Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition
                                    &

2017/8 Thuthuka Jewellery Award’s Exhibition.

South African Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition.
CREATIVE Feel in partnership with FADA Gallery will host the inaugural South African Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition. The awards exhibition aims to bring together established jewellers, including young and aspiring artists, in the creation of one-of-a-kind expressive or installation pieces. There are no limitations as artists are called upon to visualize and realise their ideas. The winner and runner-up of the competition will be announced at a gala awards ceremony on 15 March 2018 after which the South African Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition will open at the FADA Gallery on the Bunting Road Campus of the University of Johannesburg.

2017/8 Thuthuka Jewellery Award’s Exhibition.
The Thuthuka Jewellery Development Programme is proud to present an exhibition of jewellery designed by students from the community schools and universities across the country. This annual exhibition celebrates an extraordinary mentorship programme that focusses on design and manufacturing skills development. The competition enables each student's design ability; to explore their creativity using silver and other precious metals.

The Thuthuka Jewellery Awards theme for 2017/18 was interesting and personal. The theme “Origins”, referred the students to explore their own cultural roots, traditions and experiences. This has resulted in unique designs and manufacturing techniques. The design diversity and beauty of the jewellery and tableware created will make for an interesting and stimulating exhibition this year.

13 April – 31 May

Black Chronicles IV

Black Chronicles IV, an exhibition curated by Renée Mussai (Senior Curator and Head of Archive & Research at Autograph ABP) at the FADA Gallery. This VIAD facilitated exhibition centres on the visual presence of black figures in Victorian Britain through the prism of studio photography, the exhibition explores politics of subjectivity, representation and agency, and continues Autograph ABP’s critical mission of annotating the cultural histories of photography by addressing its ‘missing chapters’, in tandem with VIAD’s focus on historical redress within photographic archives and the role of positionalities in their production and reception. Black Chronicles IV will also feature the sound-image installation The African Choir 1891 Re-Imagined (songs composed by Phillip Miller & Thuthuka Sibisi) and a special display of The Paris Albums 1900, with more than 200 photographic reproductions from W.E.B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Using the exhibition and photographic portraiture as a departure point, a VIAD organised conference will build upon a critical rethinking of curatorial practice, as traditionally bound to a colonial logic of collection, arrangement, ‘safe-keeping’ and display.

University Winter Recess – 13 June - 8 July.  Gallery closed for renovations.

12 July – 17 August (provisional dates)

2018 FADA Alumni Exhibition

This year’s Alumni Exhibition honours Dr Carol Hofmeyr, the founder of the Keiskamma Art Project Trust. The Trust is a community organisation, centred in Hamburg, a rural area in the Eastern Cape, which works to foster hope and offer support for the most vulnerable. The Trust strives to address the challenges of widespread poverty and disease through holistic and creative programmes and partnerships.

The Keiskama Trust began as the Keiskama Art Project, created by doctor and artist, Carol Hofmeyr, in response to the extreme poverty and high percentage of HIV/AIDS affected families in the area. The Keiskamma Art Project later became the Keiskamma Trust inclusive of an Art, Health and Education Programme. In 2006 Helen Vosloo, one of the country’s foremost classical musicians, founded the Keiskamma Music Academy as the fourth Trust programme.

18 September – 29 September (provisional dates)

2018m JJC Schools Art and Design Awards

The awards exhibition, now in its 10^th year, is hosted annually by the FADA Gallery. Working in association with Johannesburg Junior Council, the aim of the exhibition is to promote This year’s competition will be launched at FADA in April – further details to be posted in due course. Prizes are sponsored by Herbert Evans.

1 October – 2 November (provisional dates)

Peter Magubane

A Photographic Review. Presented by the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg

Bringing together a unique selection of images by iconic South African photographer Dr Peter Magubane, this prestigious exhibition will afford viewers an opportunity to imaginatively revisit the everyday experiences and aspirant struggles of black South Africans living (and dying) under apartheid. Developed in conversation with Dr Magubane, and marking the centenary celebration of former President Nelson Mandela’s birth, the exhibition programme will include workshops, conversations, walkabouts and screenings, encouraging students and the public to engage critically with the images, as well as the intersecting histories they represent. The exhibition will run from the X October to X November 2018 at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg, Bunting Road Campus.  

3-20 November (provisional dates)

Visual Arts B Tech exhibitions.

Two consecutive exhibitions featuring the work of final year Visual Art Students.

4 -15 December

2018 Dean’s Award Exhibition. (provisional dates)

The work on this exhibition is of finalists nominated for the 2018 Dean’s Award Exhibition. Each department will select a student, mainly B Tech and Honours candidates, who demonstrated innovation and creativity. The exhibition comprises bodies of work from the following disciplines; Interior Design, Architecture, Industrial Design, Visual Arts, Multi Media, Jewellery Design and Manufacture and Design Communication (Graphic Design).

Transparency 2017 - Art & Design Competition

Formal opening and announcement of the Winner of the Transparency Art & Design Competition 2017

Opening: Monday 18 September 2017, 17h30 for 18h00, FADA Gallery - Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.

Exhibition run until: 30 September.

The Embassy of Sweden in association with the FADA Gallery at the University of Johannesburg will announced the winner of the Transparency Art and Design Competition at the opening of the Exhibition on Monday 18 September 2017.  

“Transparency is necessary for a vital democracy and an efficient economy. It ensures the citizen's influence in society." Ambassador Cecilia Julin

The competition was launched in January 2017 to all artists, architects and designers in Fashion, Interior Design, Jewellery, including Graphic communication. 

The theme Transparency is aimed at stimulating creative dialogue in various formats across disciplines on a national level. Creatives individuals were invited to explore concepts and creative ideas that are expressive of the competition theme. The jurors for the Art competition are the Ambassador of Sweden Cecilia Julin, the Director of the FADA Gallery Eugene Hön, and the Curator of the Constitutional Court Art Collection Melissa Goba.  The winner will win a trip to Sweden with a personalized programme from the Embassy of Sweden. His or her art work will also receive media coverage and exposure.

For more information visit Facebook page. 

Shaping Modernity in the mid-twentieth century South Africa: Ernst de Jong (1934-2016)

The exhibition in the FADA Gallery (lower ground) focuses on the artist and designer Ernst de Jong’s (1938-2016) contribution to design in South Africa in the years 1957-1975. Video recordings of interviews with the designer, as well artwork and artefacts sourced from the de Jong collection, contextualise the display.

This selection provides a link to the accompanying exhibition of Helen de Leeuw’s modernising rhetoric that evinces interesting   parallels of circumstance and purpose with that of de Jong.  Both individuals could be said, as Chris Barron claims for de Leeuw, to have ‘created an alternative way of living for … South Africans suffocating in a stuffy aesthetic inherited from the British colonial past’.

The de Jong exhibition is part of an ongoing project by Lizè Groenewald to document, record and communicate the history of an extraordinary personality in his pursuit to domesticate modernism in twentieth-century South Africa.

Some notes on the work on display

Various items of student work 1951-1956

De Jong was born in 1934 in Pretoria. He spent much of his time during his school years either at the Hillcrest Swimming Pool or painting in his mother’s kitchen. Both these pursuits would serve him well in later life: as a talented diver, he was awarded a sports scholarship to study at the University of Oklahoma (OU)in the USA, where he enrolled for a BA Degree in Fine Art and majored in Painting and Information Design. In 1957, de Jong and his American wife, Gwen Drennan (1935- ), a fellow student at OU, returned to Pretoria where they opened Ernst De Jong Studios (EDJS) in 1958.

Items on display in the vitrines include a watercolour of a landscape with houses, executed when de Jong was sixteen and still at school, a set of hand-drawn roman letters crafted by Gwen as part of a typography project at OU and the University of Oklahoma Year Book for 1956 (in which the newly married couple appears). The delicate patterning and colours of The Successors, a stone lithograph, foreshadows the early style of EDJS, evident in the cover designs for the cultural journal, Lantern, and the Automobile Association Touring Guide of South Africa.

In the time that de Jong was diving for OU, the swimming team achieved unprecedented success and the exhilarating experience of winning in an American sporting arena would inform de Jong’s approach to all things once he returned to South Africa. In 1973 he was instrumental, with his brother Gerrie de Jong, in designing and building the De Jong Diving Centre, which is still maintained by the Tswane City Council. Arguably, de Jong’s use of a vibrant turquoise in several of his early designs, such as the cover design for the October/December 1958 Lantern, was prompted by his life-long attachment to the aesthetics of swimming and swimming pools.

Early work 1956 -1966

The 1956 fantasy landscape in oils, The Colonnade, is typical of de Jong’s painterly style when at OU. Despite the claim that his encounter with American Abstract Expressionism brought about a ‘sea change’ whilst he was studying in the USA, the visual language that he brought back to South Africa was more akin to the whimsical mark-making of American artist / designer Ben Shahn (1898-1969), whose work de Jong admired. De Jong’s commitment to Hard-Edge abstraction appears to have occurred only after he relocated to Pretoria in 1957, a shift which is evident in the other works displayed in this group. De Jong’s Degree Programme at OU included information design, painting and stone lithography. The latter was presented by Emilio Amero (1901-1976) who was an acclaimed muralist who taught an excellent technical course in print making.  De Jong himself became both a prolific muralist and an expert print maker, producing several series of serigraphs, of which a selection are on display.

Books and magazines

In 1960 de Jong designed and built a ‘white house’ in the modern style in Hill Street, Pretoria, where he lived and worked until his death in 2016. De Jong, by his own admission, was not a great reader, but the books in the Hill Street collection, amassed over more than fifty years and of which a small sample is displayed in the exhibition, reveal the influences and obsessions that shaped the designer’s life. A 1963 Vogue magazine features the glamorous de Jong couple in their avant garde home. His father, who was a civil servant (but would have preferred to be a painter), bequeathed his son a modest little book on modern painting. The formal principles of art are explained in an ancient copy of Helen Gardner’s Art through the ages, presumably a prescribed text at OU. The rules of fencing vie with Sam Haskin’s erotic photography, swimming pool design, cowboys, Picasso and yellowing texts on lithography.  Robert Motherwell’s ‘black balls’, Jasper Johns’s Flag and Ben Shahn’s illustrations for an idiosyncratic dictionary of peculiar words attest to the importance of American modernism in de Jong’s approach to art making. In 1983, Esme Berman’s encyclopaedic Art and artists of South Africa, declares triumphantly, “Ernst De Jong’s career furnishes a story of success”.

Johan Hoekstra (1939 — )

Johan Hoekstra worked as a designer for Ernst De Jong Studios from approximately 1960 to 1963.  Hoekstra met de Jong while studying commercial art at the Pretoria Technical College, where both Gwen and Ernst de Jong had been employed as design lecturers after arriving in Pretoria from the USA. Hoekstra brought to the studio his excellent illustration skills and an amusing quirkiness that was well-aligned with de Jong’s decorative approach and the frivolity of American modernism that was growing in popularity in South Africa.

Hoekstra designed several sun-emblems for de Jong, including the first EDJS logo, which was an illustrative symbol that evokes the robust earthiness of early Renaissance woodblock books. Hoekstra’s work captures the mood of an ebullient and hip Pretoria in the early 1960s. He left EDJS in the mid-1960s.

Colin Bridgeford (1938 — )

Colin Bridgeford was one of the first student designers employed by EDJS. However, his most important contribution emerged in the late 1960s when he re-joined the studio after a period spent in the advertising industry in Johannesburg. Bridgeford introduced the neutral language of the International Style to EDJS. He transformed Hoekstra’s rustic sun-symbol into a signifier of needle-sharp precision and efficiency. In his purity of vision, he echoed the hard-edge imagery and ascetic beauty of de Jong’s serigraphs. Bridgeford’s consistent use of sans serif letterforms and the grid conveys a heightened commitment to the modernist project in South Africa but also the increasingly anxious mood of the 1970s. Bridgeford left EDJS in 1975.

DASHING SDSA CRYSTAL AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DESIGN ACHIEVEMENT 1986

The Society of Designers in South Africa (SDSA) made this award only once, and it was presented to Ernst de Jong for his contribution to South African design. The jury’s decision to honour a producer of ephemeral trademarks (as opposed to the architects of the South African Reserve Bank, who only received a merit prize) attests to the high esteem in which de Jong was held in the South African design community at the time.

The 1970s had seen the emergence of the graphic designer as superstar and in the 1980s this trend probably reached its peak. De Jong himself had promoted the cult of design hero as early as the 1950s when he signed his cover illustrations for Lantern. The legendary American designer Paul Rand (1914-1996) followed the same practice, although de Jong was unaware of Rand’s work until much later in his life.

Before the 1990s, it was relatively common for a creative director to take the credit for the work of junior designers. Thus, the iconic logo of the 1972 Munich Games, although more usually attributed to the designer Otl Aicher (1922-1991), was the inspired idea of a lesser-known colleague, Coordt von Mannstein (1937- ). Similarly, the EDJS design for The Gift Horse trademark featured in the exhibition is attributed to de Jong in the New York Art Director’s Annual, but was in fact designed by his studio manager, Colin Bridgeford. In a field where creative outputs are invariably the result of team work, it is often difficult to determine with certainty the authors of past graphic design experiences, a challenge that contributes to the difficulty of constructing a history in this regard.

The Oklahoma motor hotel corporate identity

The Oklahoma campaign was executed as part of a collaboration with de Jong’s older brother, Gerrie, a property developer who built the iconic Oklahoman Motor Hotel in Pretoria in 1969. Both brothers had studied at OU and The Oklahoman project celebrated their love affair with American modernity, an experience that they re-imagined in the capital city of South Africa.

In addition to styling the visual identity of the hotel, de Jong produced a striking series of serigraphs (not on display) that anticipated the Shield Series (1975), the Night’s Passage Series (1976) and the Western Series (1977). Somewhat like the more recent South African restaurant franchise Spur, The Oklahoman appropriated Native American iconography as part of an emancipatory frontier narrative that sought alternatives to a conservative Christian Nationalist ideology and British imperialist aesthetics.

Everite mural

De Jong executed more than twenty-five mural commissions, thereby shaping the visual rhetoric of architectural spaces as diverse as the Atomic Energy Board, Arcadia Shopping Centre, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the State Theatre in Pretoria. One of his earliest commissions, completed in 1963, was for two glass mosaic murals in the Transvaal Provincial Administration Building. EDJS also designed the programme, on display in the vitrines, for the inauguration of this iconic modernist building in Pretoria. In the case of the undated mural design for Everite — a company that produces building products — de Jong capitalised on the outcome by re-using the design on the company’s corporate calendar.

De Jong, never one to bypass an opportunity to promote himself or his studio, ensured that, on the desk calendar, the designer of the mural received as much attention as the client. Although this strategy may appear conceited, Everite was, in fact, benefitting considerably from its association with a creative practitioner that exemplified modernity and excellence in international design at the time.

Irmin Henkel (1921 — 1977)

Henkel’s portrait of de Jong at the height of his success in 1970 provides an interesting counterpoint to the more recent video recordings of the designer reflecting on his life. Henkel, an orthopaedic surgeon, immigrated to South Africa in 1951. Largely a self-taught painter, he pursued a dual career of medicine and art and painted the portraits of several prominent political figures in the National Party government. In 1969, he completed a large commissioned canvas depicting the South African Cabinet of 1961, the year that South Africa became a Republic. Henkel was a central figure in the Pretoria social scene. He was well-acquainted with the de Jongs — they attended one another’s stylish parties — and he painted the portrait of de Jong as well his father, Gerrit de Jong, the latter, by request, in the style of Paul Gaugin.

Lizè Groenewald can be contacted by email lizeg@uj.ac.za or by phone +11 559 1024.