Dumisani Sibisi (#3265)

Dumisani Sibisi was born in March 1962 in Soweto. He attended the Emaweni Primary School, where he started copying drawings from textbooks. At the tender age of nine, he started sketching everything around him. Thereafter, he attended Enkanyezini Higher Primary School where an art teacher gave lessons as part of the curriculum. While studying technical drawings at Jubalini Technical High School, he met Sydney Khumalo and Ezrom Legae and was asked to join them at their studios where he worked with them for three years. He left high school and participated in joint exhibitions with them and other artists at the Community Halls in Soweto. Dumisani taught art part-time in 1986 for two years and assisted the teachers at Winnie Ngwekazi – a program sponsored by DuPont. He was commissioned in 1990 to do illustrations for James Sofasonke Mpanza, the "Father of Soweto". In 1975 he won an award in the Maize Board Art Competition ‘Group show SA’ as well as at the Association of Art Johannesburg 1977. In 1989 he once again helped out as a teacher of art and craft to assist the teachers at Winnie Ngwekazi. Dumisani’s collages and three-dimensional images are chiefly of townships, which he paints only to record a particular reality, actually wishing for it to disappear. Sibisi does not idealize, showing plainly the poverty and deprivation that millions of black Africans continue to struggle with. He collects the scraps, wastes and off cuts that litter township streets and incorporates them into his paintings, recycling discarded materials and giving them a new function. His streets are starkly empty but for a few monumental figures, burdened by the physical loads they are forced to carry as they walk for miles to their destination, or wait to catch a taxi. Township houses are covered with ads for detergent and toothpaste, while the roofs are protruded with corrugated metal and somewhere a well-dented motor vehicle lies. But despite the bleakness of such images which Sibisi paints in a muddy brown and grey palette, there prevails a message of hope. A dove with an olive branch carries a potent message: let there finally be peace in this broken land. He has sold works both locally in South Africa and abroad. Notable events: 2002 : Dumsani created one of the adverts on billboards placed all over SA to welcome the British Cricket team to the ICC week 2001 : Commissioned to do a book cover for the book of languages for MBV Consulting Group 1990 : Commissioned to do illustrations for the "James Sofasonke Mpanza, The Father of Soweto" book 1984 : Detained during the public violence at Jabulani because of the political nature of his drawings and paintings at that time.