Masked Masterpieces: in R≡lational Folds

Abstract

This paper creatively re-thinks Masked Masterpieces, a COVID-19 public art fundraising initiative for financially at-risk students, organized by Stellenbosch University (SU) and underwritten by donors. The project features five portraits by famous South African artists, re-purposed with protective masks, and installed in large-scale reproductions around Stellenbosch town. In the paper, Masked Masterpieces serves as a generative critical prompt: not for a simplistic ‘unmasking,’ but for a female scholar’s process of thinking through ‘the fold,’ an ‘en/folding’ engagement that turns and returns, erratically reviewing difficult, overlapping subjects linked to masking and mastery. In exploring both the substance and the shape of my thought process, I draw loose inspiration from innovations in mixed-materials structural design, where ‘folded surfaces … respond to spatial inquiries by transforming not into aggregates of fragments but into catalytically interconnected elements’ (Vyzoviti and Sotiriou 524).

Keywords:

• Masked Masterpieces
• COVID-19
• public art
• autoethnographic folds
• ‘masking’

Notes

1 SU is no stranger to controversy around race and gender, vide the mid-2019 scandal around an article by SU researchers on the reputedly compromised cognitive skills of coloured women in the peer-reviewed journal Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, a study now retracted.

2 I recall the photocopied wheatpaste murals of Scott Eric Williams, a 2019 Mellon 30th Anniversary Artist in Residence in the SU VAP. He deliberately used ‘poor’ methods and materials, accessible and relatively inexpensive, in a collaborative process easy for students and communities to initiate in their own projects. Williams installed large-scale, haunting images of marginalized people and erased lives around Stellenbosch and adjacent historical worker towns like Pniel. The walls, pasted with anonymous figures from a lived past that escapes the archival impulse, were turned into thoughtful portals, openings that asked viewers to look anew into history, present amnesia, and hoped-for futures.

3 The original artworks featured in the campaign are on view as follows: the Tretchikoff at Delaire Graff wine estate; the Sekoto on loan to Stellenbosch University Museum from the Fort Hare collection; the Laubser at the La Motte wine estate museum; the Stern at the Steenberg’s Tryn Restaurant; while the Muholi is on show in 2020 at an exhibition at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town.