The passing of artist and writer David Koloane at eighty-one not long after the opening of the first iteration of this traveling retrospective at Cape Town’s Iziko South African National Gallery reignited the questions he posed almost two decades prior: “What defines a South African expression? What paradigms would typify the expression? And what criterion to employ in a society virtually divided into distinct and separate worlds?” Though these queries were asked twenty years ago, their urgency remains, unsettling any cavalier mention of a “South African art.” These demands, easily taken for

The passing of artist and writer David Koloane at eighty-one not long after the opening of the first iteration of this traveling retrospective at Cape Town’s Iziko South African National Gallery reignited the questions he posed almost two decades prior: “What defines a South African expression? What paradigms would typify the expression? And what criterion to employ in a society virtually divided into distinct and separate worlds?” Though these queries were asked twenty years ago, their urgency remains, unsettling any cavalier mention of a “South African art.” These demands, easily taken for