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Zizipho Poswa featured in new book ‘Black Artists Shaping the World
27 Oct 2021 (2 min) read
The book is a celebration of the achievements and talents of Black artists working across the world, while also serving as a revelation to a new generation of aspiring young artists.
Zizipho Poswa is one of 26 contemporary artists included in Black Artists Shaping the World by author Sharna Jackson, published by Thames & Hudson. Accessibly written to engage young readers, the book is a celebration of the achievements of Black artists working across the world.
Featured artists include prominent American artists Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, portraitist to Michelle Obama Amy Sherald, and Kehinde Wiley; British Turner Prize-winning painters Lubaina Himid and Chris Ofili; renowned South African visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi; Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh; Sudanese painter Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq; Kenyan-British ceramicist Magdalene Odundo; Afrofuturist-inspired performance artist Harold Offeh; and moving image artist Larry Achiampong, among others.
Jackson, an award-winning Black children’s author, was assisted by American art historian and curator Dr Zoé Whitley.
Poswa is represented in the book by her pair of ceramic sculptures, Ukukhula I andUkukhula II, produced for Southern Guild’s 2018 exhibition, Colour Field. They were selected to tell the story of her growth as an artist – both in terms of her own studio practice and her reception within the art world. The pieces, which were acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “play with ideas that seem like opposites, but are in fact connected: femininity and masculinity, protection and aggression, the tradition and the new,” writes Jackson in the book.
About the publication, Poswa noted that it “draws on the civilisational splendour of our forebears, while also serving as a call for today’s Black artists to use their creative genius to reconfigure the face of the world once more and to humanise it through art”.
