August 08, 2026 - August 31, 2026
The Viewing Room Art Gallery, 492 Fehrsen Street, Brooklyn, Pretoria
ZAKES MDA – BRIEF BIO AND ARTISTIC STATEMENT
Zakes Mda is a South African writer, music composer, and painter. His practice as an artist integrates all those disciplines. For instance, his music compositions may be for his musical plays such as The Bells of Amersfoort or score his animations and installations.
His art celebrates the coalescence of the materials and traditions of the diverse regions of the world in which he has worked. These include Johannesburg, the rural Eastern Cape, Lesotho, and the Appalachian USA.
His practice is largely intertextual; utilizing mixed media dominated by acrylic or oil on canvas, collaged with fabric, newsprint and an assembly of conceptual three-dimensional found objects. Each painting functions as a narrative of domestic, gender and workplace tensions.
Some works pay homage to performance – particularly dance and music – in a manner these art forms function as a healing force in society. He also engages in conventional modes of expression occasionally, focusing on the media of acrylics and oils on canvas, pre-Renaissance encaustic wax on canvas, and black-and-white and color linocuts on paper.
The works are a fusion of styles drawing variously from Basotho traditional murals called litema and lipatrone, and European expressionist modes, particularly Braque-inspired Cubism (itself inspired by various African mask traditions). Quite often there is symbiosis between his painting and writing as some of his art is influenced by or loosely interprets scenes and characters of his novels.
His paintings have been exhibited in South Africa, Lesotho and the USA and are in collections in those countries and in Spain, Switzerland and Sweden. His most recent solo exhibitions were at the SA Consulate in New York City (2021), The Viewing Room, Pretoria (2022), Keys Art Mile in Rosebank Johannesburg (2023), William Humphrey Art Gallery in Kimberley (2023/24), Springs Art Gallery (forthcoming June 2026) and St Lorient Gallery in Pretoria (forthcoming August 2026). Recent group exhibitions include at the Polokwane Art Gallery with Khehla Chepape Makgato (2022), at the BKhz Gallery in Rosebank Johannesburg (2025), with a number of other artists, and at an invitation-only Colours of Compassion art exhibition and auction alongside William Kentridge at The Venue, Melrose Boulevard, for the Smile Foundation.
Mda holds an MFA (Theater) and an MA (Telecommunications) from Ohio University, and a PhD from the University of Cape Town. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in literature by the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of the Free State, in technology by the Central University of Technology and the Durban University of Technology, and in art by Dartmouth College in the USA.
He has published 30 books, eleven of which are novels and the rest collections of plays, collections of essays, an autobiography, a biography, poetry and a monograph on the theory and practice of theater-for-development.
His writings have been translated into more than 25 languages, including Mandarin, Estonian, Catalan, Korean, Serbian, German, Swedish, Dutch, Turkish, Norwegian and Italian. They have won many awards in South Africa, the USA and Italy, including the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the M-Net Prize, Sanlam Prizes (twice), The Pringle Award, the Sunday Times Literary Prize (twice), the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, Premio Narrativa Sud del Mondo, the University of Johannesburg Literary Prize and the American Library Association Notable Book. He is a recipient of the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, a national award of the South African government. He is Professor Emeritus at Ohio University where he taught Creative Writing, Rhetoric, and Literature for 15 years, and was a beekeeper on Dyarhom Mountain in the Eastern Cape (running a project he established in 2000 with rural women). His grandfather was a beekeeper on the same mountain, hence the title of this exhibition.