Exciting announcements at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) could herald a ray hope for the embattled institution.
HuffPost can officially confirm that the department of arts and culture has finally appointed KwaZulu-Natal-born academic and historian Khwezi Gule as the JAG’s new curator-in-chief.
The announcement comes after years without an official leader at the helm of the institution, seeing the JAG suffer a severe maintenance crisis (with the gallery flooding in 2017 due to roof leaks), a previous curator who left abruptly without a vision plan, and repeated questions from the arts community about the gallery’s relevance to the next generation. Gule, who has already begun working in his new role, was previously chief curator at the Soweto Museums, (which include the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum and the Kliptown Open Air Museum). Read more