Community Mural Art in South Africa

South Africa has a long history of mural art, beginning with the ancient San painted rock shelter, continuing through various African traditions of decorating the homestead, the wall painting practices of European settlers, and the Afrikaner Nationalist murals commissioned by the state as a form of public art. More recently there has been an explosion of urban community murals, making the medium highly visible and popular. This sudden flourishing of urban mural art closely mirrors dramatic changes in the socio-political landscape. By nature ephemeral, the book intends also to document examples.

There are 145 beautifully presented colour illustrations that demonstrate a particular point. The approach is primarily iconographic and thematic, and trace a particular theme through a range of mural across the boundaries of region and time.

The seven chapters are: Framing South African Mural Art; Impulses: Murals in the 1980s; Liberating the People and the Brush; New Impusles in the 1990s; The Poetics of Politics: Imagining the New South African Nation; Negotiating Identities; Affirming African Culture; Recovering Cultural Heritage and Representing Ordinary People's Lives; and Conveying the Safe Sex Message: Aids Awareness Murals in the Second Half of the 1990s.