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From iconic public artworks (discover a few of our favourites), interesting street art, established galleries and museums to trailblazing indie spaces, and the hardworking artists' studios in the City Centre, Johannesburg is a city for art lovers. We update this guide weekly to help you navigate the ever-changing array on offer, with a curated selection of solo and group shows, artist-led walkabouts, workshops, guided tours, and other art-related events worth your while.
For a full guide to what’s on in Joburg, explore our events calendar. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter published every Thursday morning. For extra daily updates, follow our Instagram page.
Beyond the gallery walls
Though many art spaces close for a period over the festive break, there's still plenty to see. Joburg is home to excellent public art installations and sculptures, often paying tribute to local legends. To experience the city from a fresh perspective, design your own art tour of Joburg with stops at these iconic works. For even more, check out a directory of Joburg's public art – a brilliant resource by the City of Johannesburg's Arts, Culture, and Heritage directorate.Albertina and Walter Sisulu: Two great South Africans, Albertina (Nontsikelelo) and Walter Max (Ulyate) Sisulu are immortalised in a clay sculpture by Marina Walsh (2009) installed in a small square on historic Diagonal Street in the City Centre.
Angel of the North: The five-metre-tall concrete winged angel by Winston Luthuli, installed in 2010, stands near Constitution Hill, welcoming all to Hillbrow.
Brenda Fassie: Artist Angus Taylor’s life-size bronze sculpture of Brenda Fassie (2006) – one of South Africa’s biggest homegrown music stars and South Africa's original "bad girl" – in the Market Theatre precinct.
Paper Pigeons: The three grey, three-metre-tall steel pigeons created by Gerhard and Maja Marx (2009) on the corner of Main Reef and Albertina Sisulu roads look like they are origami figures.
Shadow Boxing: In 2013 sculptor Marco Cianfanelli returned Nelson Mandela as a public figure to Johannesburg and specifically to the places he inhabited in the 1950s. At close to six metres tall, Shadow Boxing towers between Chancellor House and the Johannesburg Magistrates' Court.
Art highlights
Opening hours of these galleries and museums will vary over the holiday season (Dec 2024 – Jan 2025). Call ahead to avoid disappointment.Until Mon, Jan 20, 2025 – In 1991, before South Africa's first democratic elections, Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi was invited to exhibit her work in Sweden. But the pieces were lost, leading to more than three decades of grief and many unanswered questions. It is remarkable that 32 years after they disappeared, 28 of Sebidi's artworks were found in the attic of Nyköping Folk High School in Sweden and have since returned home – read more about the story here. Following the debut of these lost and found artworks in April 2024, Sebidi's solo Ntlo E Etsamayang (The Walking House) gets a second showing in Joburg at Everard Read's Circa Gallery, alongside three new large-scale sculptures. A trailblazing South African artist, Sebidi's work rouses that which is most ancient and enduring, and offers a vision for the future.
Until Sun, Jan 26, 2025 – Human connection, play, poetry, and curiosity are central to Odette Graskie's philosophy, as well as her creative process. We see this in Side Quest, a new body of work from the artist exhibited at Berman Contemporary, one of the galleries at 223 Jan Smuts Creative Hub. The exhibition is an ode to uncertainty, with Graskie saying, "Within the making process, all the work felt like me trying to answer a different question every time, each work leading to more and more questions. The tunnels, the embroidery, the hanging paper works are diaphanous, each one more see-through than the previous. [...] These pieces, while separate, thread together in this space and become site-specific attempts at embracing the light and the location." Read our review of Side Quest here.
Until Sun, Jan 26, 2025 – Home isn't a physical space, it's a sense of belonging within oneself. This is the notion that Solomon Omogboye explores in his solo, ILÉ (THIS IS HOME), at Candice Berman Gallery on the ground floor of 223 Jan Smuts Creative Hub. The exhibition title is derived from the Yoruba word meaning home, while Omogboye's charcoal, acrylic, and oil works invite us into the artist's quest for belonging, identity, and inner peace. From the exhibition text: "Inspired by personal experiences, cultural heritage, and the human condition, this body of work navigates life's twists and turns. Children often appear as central subjects, symbolising innocence, vulnerability, and resilience. Their presence reminds us that home is where our journeys begin and end."
Until Sat, Feb 1, 2025 – In his mixed media solo exhibition Masks of Modernity at Keyes Art Mile's Origin Art gallery, Samurai Farai explores his dual heritage – Zimbabwean and Afrikaans – to uncover the complexities of hybridisation and cultural legacy. It's a poignant theme in a country like South Africa, where these kinds of dualities are part of so many of our identities. "With a deliberate homage to ancestral ties and a heartfelt celebration of hybridity, Farai bridges the ancient and the modern by channelling inspiration from historical African civilisations. His sculptures, crafted from Zimbabwean stone in reverence to Shona masterful sculpting traditions, breathe life into his paintings' characters, embodying them in three-dimensional form," reads the curatorial statement.
Until Fri, Feb 28, 2025 – It's all about the power of dress and remembrance with the installation series Fashion Accounts at Museum Africa. This thought-provoking showcase is a response to the relative absence of black South African fashion histories within museum collections. The rituals of collecting, archiving, memorialising, and resisting through fashion are explored, contrasting Museum Africa's rich ethnographic collection of items and images capturing the country's people, places, and history with clothing from the Bernberg Costumes & Textiles Collection of mostly European and white-owned items from the mid-1700s to the early 2000s. Contemporary artists and collectives working within the realm of fashion, Thebe Magugu, Sindiso Khumalo, The Sartists, and Ncumisa "Mimi" Duma, also have work in this exhibition.
Until Feb 28, 2025 – A curatorial project by the House of African Feminisms, Abafa(ba)zi – Those Who Die Knowing at Goethe-Institut unpacks the role of black women as custodians of stories and preservers of knowledge. The collaborative group showcase includes commissioned works and artistic experiments, as well as existing works by transdisciplinary artists and researchers from Africa. "This exhibition highlights the ways in which women have served as conduits of knowledge in ordinary settings and communities; it also positions us (black women) as preservers of our own narratives," reads the curatorial statement. The agency of African women and the qualities of femininity, imagination, and innovation present in African societies are celebrated in Abafa(ba)zi.
Until Sun, Mar 2, 2025 – Sophia van Wyk's mixed-media solo exhibition Love Default at the NIROX Covered Space (one of the galleries in the sprawling NIROX Sculpture Park) explores the complex behaviours we perform in intimate relationships, charting the spectrum all the way from affection to dysfunction. Homer’s Odyssey, existentialist philosophy, and pop psychology all find their way into Van Wyk's art practice. We spot a bit of Nieu-Bethesda outsider artist Helen Martins and her Owl House in there, too. "My attempt to find form is also an attempt to find meaning," says Van Wyk.
Until Mar 2025 – Off the back of his 2023 FNB Art Prize win, photographic artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa's solo exhibition Umkhondo: Going Deeper comes to Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). In this exhibition, two significant and interconnected bodies of work – namely I carry Her photo with Me and Ezilalini (The Country) – unite under the banner of introspection and discovery as Sobekwa navigates profound personal loss and grapples with his sense of belonging. "Photography is a powerful tool," says the artist. "It has enabled me to share the realities of smaller, more intimate narratives that project onto the larger map that is South African history." The storytelling potential of photography is central to the work of Sobekwa, who documents experiences as a form of excavation. He stitches together fragments of memory in a quest to unravel the mysteries of the past, and to find comfort and closure. Read our interview with Sobekwa here.
Until Mar 2025 – What does it mean to be "born free" in South Africa? Dutch photographer Ilvy Njiokiktjien's solo exhibition Born Free: Generation of Hope at the Apartheid Museum is a visual narrative of the past three decades in South Africa, since the dawn of our democracy in 1994. Through Njiokiktjien's lens, we encounter an intimate portrayal of the first generation to grow up after apartheid rule. It's a poignant body of work that delves into the promise of a "rainbow nation", dealing equally with hope and disillusionment.
Until Apr 2025 – We loved seeing Esther Mahlangu's major retrospective Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. Good news for Joburg: the solo travels to Wits Art Museum (WAM) for an extended run. Thanks to her marvellous skill and ability to carry her heritage and culture forward, Mahlangu is an icon in the local art world. She has been painting since the age of 10, learning from her mother, grandmother, and women in her hometown of Mthambothini village in Mpumalanga. Colourful and geometric, her work honours the symbolic and visual language of traditional Ndebele art. Mahlangu celebrated her 89th birthday on Nov 11, 2024. Her retrospective exhibition is a survey of her wide-ranging and in-depth work over the years.
Until Apr 2025 – What do you get following an intense artistic engagement with a scientific subject – the 2.5–2.8-million-year-old Taung skull, which was discovered in 1924? Joni Brenner's solo exhibition at Origins Centre, Impact, encapsulates her long-term creative reckoning with the child's skull, broadly exploring themes of "fragility and survival, destruction and creation, uncertainty, loss, pressure, and chance". Unusual, beautiful, and thought-provoking are a few more words that come to mind when describing Brenner's response to this ancient piece of the story of human evolution.
Closing soon
Until Fri, Dec 13 – Prolific Pretoria-born, Cape Town-based artist Zander Blom shares a new body of work in his solo at Stevenson gallery. With a dramatic painting dripping in front of the artist's busy studio space, seeing the title shot for Blom's exhibition, Monochrome Paintings, makes you wish you could view the works in situ. Though that's kind of the magic of Blom's work anyhow – his style is so distinct and his works so process-driven that you can't help but get swept up in his world. It's heavy black meets stark white and chaos meets order in these abstract, evocative paintings.
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