The MEC for Sport, Arts and Culture Ms. Bernice Sinxeve will officially unveil the ArtLit (Art and Literature) exhibition at William Humphrey's Art Gallery in Kimberley on Tuesday, 08 October 2019. The unveiling forms part of 2019 Northern Cape Writer's Festival. The festival which is in its eleventh year is a partnership between the department and Sol Plaatje Univerity. The basis for the ArtLit (Art and Literature) is the history of collaboration across art forms. There are many such examples where poetry and music find a common outlet, or novels and film, theatre and poetry, music and dance and so forth. In this case the artists are showing us a conversation between literature, in particular African literature or literature by writers and poets of African origin, and visual art. Both art forms are telling human stories.
We also thought that it is important to have artists from two continents sharing the exhibition space and therefore seeing and beginning to treat each other as peers, with only the Atlantic Ocean between them.
The curator is Ms Jowhari Trahan from Oakland, California in the United States, who has a long track record in arts management and curatorship. She has intimate knowledge of the work of many American and South African artists, having been in this country every year since visiting for the first time in 2014 as a guest of the Northern Cape Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.