For eighty-six-year-old Tampa, Florida, native Dolores Lolita Rodriguez, yard decorating was more than just decoration; it was a form of therapy. Her yard was a massive assemblage of found objects arranged into a personalized visual vocabulary that involved honoring the deceased, her Spanish identity, and local spiritual practices. The yard also upheld a unique conception of beauty. Her creations were an articulation of, and remedy for, a life of tremendous loss. They were also the cause of her stroke and confinement to rehabilitation in November 2002. Dolores property was visually cognate with a mode of yard decoration, called the African-American yard show, which defends the home from evil spirits and honors the deceased. Although Dolores was not African-American, but of Spanish-American descent, it was important to explore possible influences from the local African-American community. It also became necessary to interact with Caribbean religious practices present in her west Tampa neighborhood in order to understand her coded yard. After a year and a half of meetings with Dolores in her rehabilitation center room, it was determined that no academic paradigm or any one religious practice could be used to explain her world. Dolores did not abide by any specific set of rules other than her own. Her daily act of decoration was a make-do phenomenon. She improvised with found objects and elements of local spiritual practices creating a bricolage of meaning. She surrounded herself with an autobiographical sketch of her past, something she found to be beautiful. Her twenty-five years of hard work were completely destroyed in May 2004, by her long-lost grandson. The property was erased of everything Dolores en put up for sale. Dolores Lolita Rodriguez died of a heart attack in her rehabilitation center bed in November 2005. All that remains are her words and the photographs of her work as they have been presented in this project. I do hope that my research serves her legacy well.

The Pretoria Art Museum opened its doors to the public on May 20, 1964. At that time the Johannesburg Art Gallery had already been established in 1910 and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1895. The realization of the Pretoria Art Museum was an accomplishment of the City’s clerk’s push for the city to have a museum of its own that would enable it to showcase works that the city owned which until then had been confined to its administrative offices and the City Hall. This nucleus collection which had been inaccessible to the general public, consisted of South African Old Masters and 17 Century Dutch art. On 15 April 1964, about a month before the museum opened officially to the public, the Selection Committee of the Board of Trustees of the Art Museum instituted by the City Council of Pretoria met to deliberate on how the collection of the museum was to be built in order to expand this nucleus collection further.The result was a series of eight resolutions that favoured the acquisition of South African Old Masters and The Hague School (19thcentury Netherlandish art). In the minutes of that meeting no mention was made of the acquisition of 20thcentury South African black artists. By 1994 about 2 404 units of artworks by white artists had been acquired in contrast to about 86 units of artworks by black artists. The eight resolutions tabulated by the board, can be taken as an informal policy thatthe museum adopted during the thirty-year period of its existence from 1964 to 1994 to acquire artworks. No formal acquisition policy existed as a part of the museum’s acquisition strategy during that three decade period. Fortunately, as the collection grew, there were deviations in the ‘acquisition strategy’ because works by black artists, though collected at a far lesser frequency than those by white artists, found their place in the collection. This research paper is a homage to the contributions of 20thcentury South African black artists’ contributions to the history of South African art. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSocSci / Unrestricted

No description available.

D. Tech. (Department of Visual Arts and Design: Fine Art, Faculty of Human Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / Studies on art made by women have been deprived of their place in the history of art, globally, however, within the South African context, white women were placed firmly within the arts while black women were marginalised. This study makes two assertions, that culture was used as a weapon during apartheid in the 1980s, and that black women, as artists, contributed to South African art history through conferences and exhibitions. The process adopted in securing these two stated positions was to use the frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and grounded theory as methods to elicit personal experiences through interviews with six women involved in the arts and who contributed to the apartheid struggle during the 1980s. The process used to structure the research and collect data, was an argumentative review of selective literature. Exhibition reviews, conference presentations and proceedings, as well as journal publications between 1982 and 1990. The review concentrated on ‘what’ and ‘how’ statements made on black artists, specifically black women, to understand the reasons for the neglecting of black women artists in the construction of South African art history in the 1980s. Culture as a weapon of the struggle constructed a substantial part of this research as the study considered aspects that constituted struggle culture during the 1980s and the role of black women within this culture. Important to the role of black women as cultural activists was the inclusion of the oppressive nature of class, gender and race as experienced by black women during apartheid to expose the complexities that impacted black women’s roles as activists. A discussion of conferences, and festivals (with accompanying exhibitions), and the cultural boycott against South Africa, the official adoption of culture as a weapon of the struggle, and the resolutions taken at these conferences is investigated. Also of importance was the inclusion of women as a point of discussion at these conferences: their poor position in society, and support for the inclusion of more women into the visual arts. In support of black women’s contribution to South African art history, a discussion on black women as cultural activists is included. This includes interviews with six activists who were part of the liberation struggle during the 1980s who shared their experiences. The study asserts that black artists, specifically black women artists, were prejudiced during the 1980s. This did not however serve as a deterrent to their contribution to a South African art history. Anti-apartheid movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the anti-apartheid movement (AABN), Amsterdam, played an integral role in creating alternative cultural platforms that supported a ‘people’s culture’, that enabled the use of culture as a ‘weapon of the struggle’ against apartheid.