Esther Mahlangu: the Ndebele painter who took her mother's art from house walls to the world
Taught by her mother and grandmother, she painted a full-size house in Paris in 1989, became the first woman to design a BMW Art Car and opened a school to pass on Ndebele painting.
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Middelburg — Esther Nikwambi Mahlangu was born on 11 November 1935 on a farm outside Middelburg, in Mpumalanga, the eldest of nine children. She is a member of the Southern Ndebele people. At ten, she began learning to paint from her mother and grandmother, following the tradition in which girls learn to decorate the outside walls of their homes.
Paris, 1989
From 1980 to 1991 she lived at the Botshabelo Historical Village, an open-air museum of Ndebele culture. In 1986, researchers from the French Embassy saw the paintings on her home and invited her to the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre in Paris. When she arrived, she found the organisers had built a full-size copy of her house, which she painted in front of thousands of visitors. By 1990 she had been invited to paint and exhibit in more than 12 countries.
A car, a theatre, a school
In 1991 BMW asked her to create an Art Car, following artists such as Andy Warhol and David Hockney. She was the first woman and the first non-Western artist to do so, painting Ndebele patterns onto a BMW 525i to mark the end of apartheid. The car was later shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington and at the British Museum. In 1992 she painted a five-storey mural for the Johannesburg Civic Theatre.
She has also worked with Rolls-Royce and adapted Ndebele designs to canvas, metal and clothing. To keep the tradition alive, she opened an art school in her home town to teach younger generations. This week she turned 91.
Background: Wikipedia.
