Deering Estate Arts Eleven Voices Exhibit Catalogue | Page 12

ART FROM SOUTH AFRICA AT THE
DEERING ESTATE, PALMETTO BAY.
PETRA MASON
While the close-by Caribbean islands add exotic flavor and color to Miami’s already extravagant
palette, there is little evidence of far-away Southern Africa’s influence and art. By referencing
South Africa with ELEVEN VOICES, Deering Estate curator Kim Yantis and Rosie Gordon-Wallace,
the founder and curator of Miami’s Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, pulled together the
seemingly-impossible exhibition late last year, all the way in Palmetto Bay. By ‘inciting a
conversation about cultural struggle, memory, and identity,’ Yantis and Gordon –Wallace
curated the pleasingly-subversive exhibition at the historic site. Located on a 444-acre natural
and archeological preserve inside the former home of American businessman and philanthropist
Charles Deering, the ELEVEN VOICES artworks were showcased throughout the buildings, from
the hallways to the stairwell, the prohibition cellar to even what was once a kitchen.
Growing up as I did in the 1980s in South Africa, in an art and publishing family, my mother, an
artist, my father, a professor of archaeology, many of the books and objects that surrounded us
are the same things I treasure and collect today. African artifacts from my archeologist father,
artifacts and delicate drawings and oil paintings by my artist mother, lithographic prints from
The Broederstroom Press and The Artists’ Press via the printmakers in the family.
Then, as now, contemporary South African artists frequently collaborated with local print studios to
make limited-edition lithographs. Prints would ‘bridge the gap’ between costly commissions and big-
ger exhibitions.
Claudette Schreuders and Anton Kannemeyer - two such artists in my collection - fit the curators’
directive of ‘memory and identity’ like a glove. Schreuders’s imagery in her triptych ‘Three Sisters’
from her ‘Crying in Public’ (2003) series jived well with Anton Kannemeyer’s darkly sardonic ‘D is for
Dancing Ministers’ lithograph from his 2005 – 2014 ‘Alphabet of Democracy’ series. ‘D is for
Dancing Ministers’ could easily get lost in translation in the United States. ‘Ministers’ in South Africa
being members of government, not church ministers. Gordon-Wallace, born on the island of
Jamaica, also a former British colony, got the reference immediately. Interestingly, both Schreuders
and Kannemeyer are represented in the US by New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery and both have work in
the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) print collection and were featured in the critically acclaimed
‘Impressions from South Africa 1965 to Now’ at MoMA in 2011.
Artists’ book, AFRO has been in my collection since 2004. Artist Peet Pienaar explained the
impossible to place piece: “It was about new writing and exploring African principals in design. No
linear engagement. Appropriating Western symbols and logos with new African meanings. Like, Nike
means ‘cool and urban’ and Coke means ‘shop.’ The writing was all from new and then-unknown
writers and photographers from all over Africa.” There is no codex in ‘AFRO’, and it reads like a
concrete poem. To open it you have to unwrap it like a giant wrapped candy. Putting it back together
is a puzzle. The Warren M. Robbins Library, at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC
owns a copy. According to them, cataloging it was very tricky: