BOYS CHALLENGE
initialed SN lower right; labelled and titled on the reverse
pure karakul hand spun wool
86.5 x 138cm; 34 x 54 1/4in
unframed

Property of a Private Collector, Cambridge

Provenance
Acquired from the ELC Art & Craft Centre, Rorke's Drift, circa 2001
Private Collection, Canada
Private Collection Johannesburg
The DinksFãStan Private Collection, Cambridge, UK

The Rorke's Drift tapestries originated from the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre in Rorke's Drift, South Africa, beginning in 1963. This initiative was significant for the Swedish facilitators at Rorke’s Drift, who saw historical storytelling as a means for artists to assert their self-identity and resilience, all while remaining cautious of attracting suspicion from the agents of apartheid.

Primarily produced by local women, these tapestries served not only as an important source of income but also as a vehicle for personal expression. Through their work, the artists conveyed individual voices, often embedding political and social commentary on the apartheid regime using metaphors and adapted biblical narratives. The art centre nurtured creativity, and the resulting tapestries gained international recognition. However, interpretations often varied, with Swedish perspectives on cultural philanthropy sometimes diverging from the artists' own intentions.

Questions remain about how this cohort of women chose to represent the past, the sources of historical knowledge that informed their works, and the interactions between the two workshops—namely, weaving and printmaking—during the dynamic period of the 1960s and 1970s. Although these tapestries were displayed and acquired by South African museums, few received the attention of scholars.

South African institutions were slow to acquire artworks by black women. Among the first acquisitions were tapestries from the Swedish art centre at Rorke’s Drift. However, it is not widely known that many works by these marginalised African women were already present in Swedish collections, having featured in prominent exhibitions such as Woven in Africa, which debuted at the Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft in Göteborg in 1965.

Despite the scale of this initiative and the celebration of Sweden's role in the reimagining of African culture, much has been forgotten about these "stranded" works and the subjectivities that shaped them. Even when the tapestries echoed the iconographies of printed works, they acquired additional layers of meaning through artist preferences, scale, colour, and tactility. These visual strategies formed a persuasive part of the concepts that women articulated through their tapestries.

Artists such as Regina Buthelezi, Ester Nxumalo, and Philda Majozi developed complex iconographies, often by appropriating designs from fine art studios. The ongoing disappearance of these tapestries from public collections has only deepened the invisibility of the women’s contributions to art and history.

Having been completed in late 1966, it showed at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg, appearing in Bantu in January 1967. It was exhibited once more in 1976, at the Brooklyn Museum and Public Library in New York.

For an illustrated analysis of the development of the project pedagogy, see Hobbs, “Evolving a Tapestry Practice at Rorke’s Drift: Women’s Alliances, Agencies and Visual Syntaxes in the Loom” (2020).

The Centre’s production increased steadily, with 396 woven items completed in 1965 alone. Of these, 60 are listed as “tapestries”, rather than rugs, carpets and wall-hangings.