WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The first contemporary art museum in all of Africa opened recently in
Cape Town, South Africa.
It features artists from across the continent, exhibiting modern expressions from a diverse
range of voices.
Jeffrey Brown has the story.
JEFFREY BROWN: It's a contemporary face of Africa captured in art created since the millennium,
the first of its kind on the continent.
The new Zeitz Museum overlooks the Atlantic Ocean on the waterfront of Cape Town, South
Africa, a spectacular setting in an old and long-abandoned grain silo converted by British
architect Thomas Heatherwick, who maintained the industrial feel and shapes of its past.
Inside, a giant atrium features a large sculpture of a mythical dragon-like bird by South African
artist Nicholas Hlobo,a grand new space, with grand ambition.
Mark Coetzee, a South African who's worked in Europe and the U.S., is the museum's founding
director.
MARK COETZEE, Founding Director, Zeitz Museum: Part of the mission of the museum is really
to reclaim the storytelling of our continent, of our countries, of our cities and of our
personal lived experience, where we can also contribute to the way that we want to be seen
by the world, the way that we want to be recorded.
JEFFREY BROWN: Spread across seven floors and more than 80 galleries, paintings, photography,
video and more by artists from throughout the continent and the African diaspora, including
several African-American artists.
One large exhibition features sculptures of human forms made of cowhide by 34-year-old
Nandipha Mntambo, who was born in Swaziland and raised in South Africa.
The unusual choice of material, she says, was a reaction to more traditional approaches
she first encountered in school.
NANDIPHA MNTAMBO, Artist: Because of our history of apartheid, there was a push to make me
work in woodcarving or in clay because I suppose that's what the lecturers at the time understood
other black people to have worked in before.
JEFFREY BROWN: Today, her work is sold to collectors abroad and, increasingly, she told
me in her Johannesburg studio, to a new generation of Africans interested in and able to buy
art.
Still, she says:
NANDIPHA MNTAMBO: I have had quite a complex relationship with the word African art, because...
JEFFREY BROWN: And what it is, huh?
NANDIPHA MNTAMBO: Yes.
The reality is that globalization, travel, how we have basically, even through television,
been overly exposed to American and Europe over the years, I think, has created a situation
where I don't know that there is a collective understanding of what is African art or what
being African actually is.
JEFFREY BROWN: These complex identities are on display throughout the new museum, including
the collage-like photography of Thania Petersen.
THANIA PETERSEN, Artist: People look at me and they don't perceive me as being African.
And then I always feel like I need to explain, actually, I am, because Africa and South Africa
is a very diverse, multicultural and modern society.
JEFFREY BROWN: Petersen is a Cape Town-based artist, a product of South Africa's melting
pot.
I'm looking around the room, and you're in most of these.
There is an element of kind of, look at me.
THANIA PETERSEN: Absolutely, because it's about creating visibility, you know, visibility
for people who are unseen, and people who are tired of being exoticized, who are tired
of being photographed for, you know, I don't know, archives.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFREY BROWN: The new museum has garnered enormous attention, but it's also raised important
questions about what it means to have an institution like this one in this particular city at the
very tip of Africa.
Apartheid era separations are still present: more affluent, whiter enclaves downtown and
along the oceanfront surrounded a short drive away by impoverished townships and shack communities.
It's a reality Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille, herself a veteran of the liberation
struggle, contends with daily.
PATRICIA DE LILLE, Mayor of Cape Town: Certainly, it's not just Cape Town who is struggling
with the legacy of apartheid, where all the good things were on the white side, and the
black and colored people were excluded.
We are building that inclusive city, and the museum will help with that.
JEFFREY BROWN: How does it help?
PATRICIA DE LILLE: It will help because no longer will art be the exclusive domain of
only rich people that can afford to exhibit the art, but also can afford to enter an art
museum.
JEFFREY BROWN: That goes to another question being asked of the Zeitz: Who exactly is it
for?
The museum was privately funded, at some $38 million, by the company that owns the V&A
Waterfront, an expanding tourism and shopping development where the museum now sits.
A small luxury hotel is housed in the same building.
There's free admission for those under 18, and school groups are coming by the busload.
Wednesdays are free to citizens of all African countries.
But regular admission, 180 rand, more than $13, is beyond the means of much of the population,
and everyone is acutely aware of the access issue, including the man whose collection
of African art provided the basis for the museum, German businessman and philanthropist
Jochen Zeitz.
JOCHEN ZEITZ, Philanthropist: The key is that we are accessible for everyone.
The key is that we have education programs that actually reach out into the townships,
into the communities, that we're deeply embedded into the community.
It's going to become a place that is socially accepted by everyone.
JEFFREY BROWN: You know the history of outsiders coming in.
And you're an outsider.
You're a European coming in.
JOCHEN ZEITZ: Well, I'm not the one who's speaking.
I'm creating a platform I'm supporting.
JEFFREY BROWN: It remains to be seen how much a museum can bridge historic divisions.
But for South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga, utopian visions is what art is for.
His work has reached audiences in Europe and the U.S. and now has a permanent place in
his own country.
ATHI-PATRA RUGA, Artist: I have 33 years of not having a museum in the townships.
I grew up in the townships in the Eastland.
And there was very little art to look at.
You had to travel quite a bit to go look at art or actually go to a library that's decent.
So, has much changed?
I think that I deal with that in my art when I actually work with the idea of re-imagining
a new world.
For me, access is the most important currency, you know?
And I think that education opens up access.
I think that imagination can act like -- give you access to wider ways of looking at things.
JEFFREY BROWN: Access and ownership of identity.
Museum director Mark Coetzee puts it this way:
MARK COETZEE: Africans want to define themselves according to their terms.
They want to say, it's much more complex than you imagine.
That's what I'm going to mark this institution on.
Who defines the language?
Who's the author of the voice?
Who's the participant and the consumer of the voice?
JEFFREY BROWN: It's a lot to ask of a museum, with much riding on the outcome.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Cape Town, South Africa.