Inspired by Romare Bearden and Ernest Cole

Sam Nhlengethwa
Inspired by Romare Bearden and Ernest Cole, 2018
Mixed media on canvas
Work: 120 x 220 cm

Both Romare Bearden’s practice and Ernest Cole’s photojournalism sought to tell a story of African-American, pre and post Civil rights era, and South African life under apartheid, respectively. According to Nhlengethwa, “Cole used photography to tell the story of the brutal life and suffering of our people. In his images you seldom see people happy. He dealt with hard labour, the bad conditions in hospitals, everything that made us suffer under apartheid. Here was someone using a different medium to express the environment within South Africa.” Nhlengethwa first came to learn of Bearden’s work through Bill Ainslie, a teacher, mentor and seminal figure in establishing various art institutions in South Africa. “I was just experimenting”, says Nhlengethwa. “I’ve never seen anyone else around me doing collage… and when Bill Ainslie introduced me to Bearden’s works, I was like a kid in a candy store.” Nhlengethwa recalls being “overwhelmed by the touch and the expertise” of Bearden’s collages. This encounter with the work of an established black collage artist, early in his career, gave Nhlengethwa’s own early experimentation with collage a vital form of validation. The canvas ultimately becomes a meeting place for the work of all three artists. Nhlegethwa sets the scene with a cityscape that contains elements that are unmistakably Johannesburg, but fragmented enough to resemble any major city in the world. Indeed for Nhlegethwa, the scenes recall Bearden’s depictions of New York City blocks. The work includes images from Coles seminal photo book “The House of Bondage” and figures inspired by Bearden’s “Prevalence of Ritual” catalogue from 1971, which Nhlengethwa first saw when visiting the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1991.