William Kentridge: Tapestries

On December 12, 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will open the first U.S. exhibition of tapestries by South African artist William Kentridge (born 1955), whose work encompassing drawing, video, sculpture, and theater has made him one of the most eloquent artistic voices to emerge in South Africa. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will present a series of discussions and readings as part of Art and Social Transformation--a new program at the Philadelphia Museum of Art devoted to social and political dimensions of art making--that will amplify the context of Kentridge's practice by exploring themes of landscape, literature, and South African history.

William Kentridge: Tapestries (on view through April 6, 2008) will include 11 large-scale tapestries from a series conceived by and executed under Kentridge's artistic direction between 2001 and 2007. On loan from public and private collections in Europe, South Africa, and the United States, the tapestries and 23 additional works--etchings, bronze sculptures, drawings, and an artist's book--will reflect the development of Kentridge's iconic images of porters and processional characters that have come to represent the transitional conditions that have plagued South Africa both under the apartheid regime and after its decline in the mid-1990s.

The exhibition features 11 of Kentridge's Puppet Drawings of 2000 that were the point of departure for the tapestries on view. To transfer images from drawings into tapestries, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Diepsloot, a suburb of Johannesburg, whose mission focuses on weaving as an artistic medium. The Puppet Drawings were photographed and enlarged to make photographic templates from which studio director Marguerite Stephens drew cartoons the size of the tapestries. Using mohair weft that had hand-carded, spun and dyed in Swaziland, studio weavers worked on a vertical loom. Kentridge was intimately involved in producing the tapestries--from, in some instances, redrawing atop the enlarged photographs to selecting the dyes to use on the mohair.

"Kentridge initially thought of his tapestries as 'permanent projections,'" said Carlos Basualdo, the Museum's Curator of Contemporary Art, who organized the exhibition and oversees the Notations installations. "While they evoke the moving image, his tapestries also illuminate the centrality of drawing in his practice. He uses the language of one medium to talk about another medium, while at the same time dealing with societies that are themselves in a state of transition." Kentridge's motifs evoke daily existence in the face of adversity, speaking both to South Africa specifically and to the world at large.

William Kentridge: Tapestries is the fourth and most ambitious of the Museum's ongoing Notations series, and it will occupy three galleries (the Gisela and Dennis Alter Gallery (176) and adjacent galleries 172 and 173). Notations is an ongoing series of gallery installations named after the 1968 book by American composer, writer, and visual artist John Cage, who was widely celebrated for his experimental approach to the arts. Cage's Notations was an international and interdisciplinary anthology of scores by avant-garde musicians, with contributions from visual artists and writers. At the same time, it was an exhibition in book form--in which the scores doubled as drawings. The "Notations" series serves as a flexible tool to explore contemporary art in the Museum's expanding collection, allowing for experimentation with various exhibition alternatives.

Catalogue William Kentridge: Tapestries is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Museum and Yale University Press (118 p.). A sourcebook on Kentridge’s work in the medium, it explores the artist’s tapestries in relation to his work in other media and the connection between the tapestries and South African literature. The catalogue includes over 120 high-quality color reproductions, among them images of the related drawings and sculptures and documentation of the weaving process. It contains essays by Carlos Basualdo, South African writer and critic Ivan Vladislavic, Italian art critic Gabriele Guercio, and Okwui Enwezor, a leading scholar on African art who is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute. It will be available for purchase in the Museum Bookstore, in the Museum Store online at http://www.philamuseum.org or by calling 800 329-4856.

William Kentridge: Tapestries