PRETORIA.- MBR PROJECTS announced that Untiled (1962) by Gladys Mgudlandlu has been placed in The University of Pretoria Museums Permanent Art Collection.

Gladys Mgudlandlu (1917–1979) is often recognised as the first woman of colour in South Africa to exhibit her work to a multiracial audience during the period of grand apartheid. Just how and why this came about is a political narrative rarely told.

Gladys Mgudlandlu took up painting in early childhood in the Eastern Cape and was taught how to paint murals in the Mfengu tradition, using the ochre, red, blue and white clays of the Eastern Cape. The Mfengu, as early Xhosa Christian converts, developed a unique and hybrid set of traditions during the 19th century, many of which Mgudlandlu would reflect upon in her later paintings.

Mgudlandlu’s art career, due to a tragic set of circumstances, was painfully cut short, spanning from her first exhibition at the Liberal Party’s Contact offices in 1961 to 1971, after which a car accident led to injuries that stopped her from painting.

In 1944 she graduated with a teaching certificate from Lovedale College, the famous Eastern Cape mission school. After moving to Cape Town, she took up teaching at the Athlone Bantu Community School, where she began to teach art.





In 1957, at the age of forty, Mgudlandlu finally began to paint seriously. Her first solo exhibition was in 1961 at the Liberal Party offices in Cape Town. Her exhibition was part of an inclusive anti-apartheid initiative developed by the likes of Patrick Duncan and Randolph Vigne to introduce black artists and writers to white audiences. In Mgudlandlu’s case, it propelled her to becoming one of the most recognised and sought-after artists in South Africa. White art critics generally wrote of her work in glowing terms, including Neville Dubow, who stated that “as an artist her greatest asset is her freedom of expression.” Interestingly, it was only the writer of colour Bessie Head (a close friend of Vigne) who famously admonished her for her lack of political relevance.

Many of her compositions originated in reflections and memories of her childhood, while her application of paint derived much of its expression and vitality from her experiences of mural painting as a child. Most of her work was painted in gouache on paper or in watercolours with felt-nib pens. It was the medium she was clearly most comfortable in, and its application was closest to the methods she had used as a child.

Many of her works reflect groups of women in traditional dress conducting tasks that were part of her everyday life as a child. As she developed as a painter and storyteller, she broadened her tableaux to include the peri-urban or “rurban” spaces in which she lived in Cape Town, which contained both rural and ever-modernising settings.