Beauford's Man in African Dress in Cape Town

For what may be the first time, a Beauford Delaney work is on display on the African continent!

I plan to investigate this possibility further, but for now, suffice it to say that Beauford's Man in African Dress (ca. 1970) is being shown at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, South Africa.

The exhibition entitled When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting opened on November 20, 2022.  (The title derives from Ava DuVernay's 2019 miniseries When They See Us.) The museum describes the show as exploring "how artists from Africa and the African diaspora have reimagined, repositioned, memorialised and asserted themselves throughout the 20th and 21st centuries..." 

Swiss-Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh says the show "places Black self-representation front and centre."

Beauford's Man in African Dress is on loan to the exhibition from the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.*

 

Man in African Dress, c. 1970
Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC
New York, NY

According to journalist Sean O'Toole's report in Wallpaper.com, it hangs near the midpoint of the exhibition and is "a fitting place to pause and draw one’s breath in preparedness for the thrilling surprises still to come." 

Find a Les Amis article that spotlights this painting HERE.

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting will run through September 3, 2023. 

*Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC is Special Advisor and Representative of the Estate of Beauford Delaney.