From iconic public artworks (discover a few of our favourites) and interesting street art to established galleries and museums, 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.
Calling all artists, designers, photographers, and illustrators! Celebrate jacaranda season in Joburg with two fantastic opportunities – the Amex Jacaranda Art Challenge and our own #JacarandaInYourPocket photo competition. Scroll right to the bottom for details.
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.
Art highlights
Opening Thu, Nov 7 at 18:00 – Zimbabwe-born artist Raymond Fuyana trained as a printmaker at the Artist Proof Studio, but as a painter he's self-taught. The visual realm is especially charged for Fuyana, who is hearing impaired. In his surreal, mind-bending works the artist employs his own personal colour coding, while motifs around fantasy, technology, and the environment are regular fixtures. Beyond the Board is his first solo exhibition with Guns & Rain.Attend an artist-led walkabout with Fuyana on Sat, Nov 23.
Until Sat, Nov 9 – In a series of luscious, layered paintings, Athi-Patra Ruga creates avatars that probe the influence of historical tropes on agency and representations of black masculinities. "I welcome you to a part-speculative, part-historical frontier in which complex notions of collaboration and conflict between settler and native, coloniser and colonised are reflected in the sartorial choices of my avatars," says the artist of his solo Amadoda on the Verge… [1835–2025] at BKhz Gallery.
Ruga's lone avatars appear to be on the verge of something curious and uncharted. The uneasiness of the "frontier", both as a physical and psychological limit, as well as a threshold for new opportunities, fascinates him. "The dark history of settler occupation and religious domination has inspired me to focus on the continued effects of disembodiment on the black male body," Ruga explains. "Using costume and craftsmanship, I want to create a remedy, an alternative to a history of loss and disassociation."
Until Mon, Nov 11 – Step into a mythical world of ruby onyinyechi amanze's own making with the solo exhibition Light Blue Violet at Goodman Gallery. Born in Nigeria, the British-American artist adopts the role of choreographer with this body of work, intentionally positioning her signature cast of characters and structural elements on to paper surfaces and within the exhibition space.
"Amanze imagines the space in her drawings as rooms that can be physically entered," reads the exhibition text. "Figures and objects occupy these rooms in compositions that skew and call into question an assumed perspective. Although minor in their individual capacity, the effect of these smaller shifts produce a cumulative disorientation/reorientation. The disruption in the plane of the drawing spills out into how the artworks interact within the exhibition space."
Until Tue, Nov 12 – The result of Occupying the Gallery's recent collaboration with David Krut Workshop, the group show Reclaiming Quarters presents new works on paper by Mary Sibande, Lusanda Ndita, and Hoek Swaratlhe. Held at David Krut's The Blue House gallery space, the exhibition delves into the notion of "quarters" as a potent symbol of spatial control enacted against people of colour during apartheid South Africa. "Through each artist’s unique lens, the works presented transform these spaces of oppression into sites of memory, resistance, and possibility," reads the exhibition text. Read our #MyJoburg interview with Mary Sibande, a trailblazing South African artist, here.
Until Fri, Nov 15 – Phumulani Ntuli's solo exhibition Umfanekiso Uyopha Inkungu (An Image Oozes Mist) is an exceptional exploration of the merging of traditional printmaking methods with digital techniques. Featuring large-scale, mixed-media collages on canvas and a stop-motion animation video, Ntuli's work presents reconfigured and fragmented archival images of significant historical figures in South Africa. With his art, he questions the nature of archives and explores the politics of image-making. His ultimate aim is to decontextualise images so that the story they tell is interrupted, and the viewer is invited to reconsider the narrative at hand.
Join a workshop exploring the making of the artist's prints on Sat, Nov 9. RSVP here.
Until Thu, Nov 21 – Works on Paper at 44 Stanley's the gallery is all about the dynamic, wonderfully personal relationship between the artist, the medium, and the surface. Stephen Allwright, Deborah Bell, Janet Mbirimi, and more join in this exploration. "Each artist has a unique connection with their chosen surface, particularly with paper – one of the most unassuming and universal foundations for creating," reads the curatorial statement. From tissues to disposable containers, bags, and newspapers, we encounter paper in various forms every day. When it's used for the purposes of art, however, paper becomes more than an ephemeral, throwaway object. "It's a repository for ideas, a place for transitions, and even a symbol of absence."
Until Sat, Dec 7 – Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation's (JCAF) annual exhibition explores the natural world and our place in it. From Ernesto Neto’s deep sea-inspired installation to Ximena Garrido-Lecca's growing garden in the gallery, Ecospheres is a trip through the Global South that brings diverse cultures and ideas together. It's a useful accompaniment to thinking through our place in the world, particularly regarding stewardship and living together for the mutual benefit of all. What is refreshing is that no hard and fast answers are offered up – only ample space to explore. Read our reflections on Ecospheres here.
We loved our guided tour of this thoughtful curatorial project and can't recommend a viewing enough. By appointment only; make your booking here.
Until 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."
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 – 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 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 Sat, Nov 2 – See the 2023 Standard Bank Young Artist Award-winner for Visual Art, Stephané Edith Conradie's solo Wegwysers Deur Die Blinkuur at Standard Bank Gallery. Translated loosely, the title refers to a set of guides offering clarity during a period of transition. Though she trained as a printmaker, it's her bricolage sculptures (a type of mixed-media assemblage) that the artist is known for. These take centre stage in her winning exhibition. Created out of found objects, Conradie's ornate sculptures explore the home space as a demonstration of identity.
Until Sat, Nov 2 – Phillemon Hlungwani’s cinematic body of work Mitsheketo Yale Makaya (Stories From a Place I Call Home) shows at Everard Read. With his signature charcoal and pastel, Hlungwani brings to life a world vibrating with colour, patterns, and humanity. "Your eye must travel," the artist says of how the marks and figures draw one's gaze across an image. The exhibition is a commentary on home, people, and a community, with many pieces that speak to the artist's experience directly.
Until Sun, Nov 3 – The 2023 Sasol New Signatures overall winner Nosiviwe Matikinca's anticipated solo Ukungalingani Kwezemfundo (Educational Inequality) shows at the Pretoria Art Museum. Ceramic slip castings of hand-me-down school shoes again feature in Matikinca's new body of work, but take on a greater significance in the context of a solo exhibition that illuminates the struggles of underprivileged learners.
Until Sun, Nov 3 – Out of more than 1,000 entries nationwide, 137 works were selected for the Sasol New Signatures winning exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum. It's astonishing to see the breadth and diversity of the works in the winning exhibition, brought forth in practically every medium conceivable from paint and ink on plastic water carriers to sculpted sand. Among these, overall winner Miné Kleynhans' interactive installation and work by runner-up Tandabantu Nathaniel Jongikhaya Matola and the five merit award winners are on display. Meet the 2024 winners here and read our interview with Kleynhans here.
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