Cape Town is a city bursting with expressive design. It seems the city has had to house and display this range of creativity almost overnight, resulting in streets of art galleries appearing in the city bowl. Because of this, attaining an internship at a Gallery proved astonishingly easy. During snowy January in Durham I decided to email a handful of Galleries that I had found online. To my delight I received quite a few offers. Choosing which one to accept looked a daunting prospect, but then I discovered that one of my offers, the ‘Mogalakwena Craft Art Gallery’, was running an exhibition called ‘A Glimpse: Dress and Fashion in Africa’ and so the decision suddenly became an easy one for me to make.
Mogalakwena Exhibition Brochure
I did slightly wonder what I had got myself in for when on my first morning I was immediately shown the electronic buzzer for the metal gate door and the panic button! However, after realising that this was simply a precaution which most shops take in Cape Town I began to relax and focus on work.
I had a couple of days to learn about the Gallery before I had to take tours through the ‘Dress and Fashion’ Exhibition. I found myself discussing the missionaries influence on Namibian clothing and dye techniques of the Bamileke people from Cameroon. These were things that a few days previously I had never even imagined existed and all of a sudden I was explaining them to other tourists. The highlight for many visitors was a pair of high heels painted with a chicken feather by the famous South African artist, Esther Mashlangu.
Esther Mashlangu Shoes
I loved showing visitors the room full of 18 embroidered self portraits by the Mogalakwena craft artists. Each woman had to do a self portrait using embroidery because it is the medium they are most comfortable with using. They were asked to depict themselves in their favourite outfit. Many of them dressed up in their traditional clothes which they save for church and other special occasions. They were then photographed and interviewed about dress and fashion topics, a favourite subject was trousers and how women shouldn’t wear them.
Embroidered Self Portraits
Whenever I wasn’t taking tours through the Gallery I had lots of other things to be getting on with. The most exciting was helping the owner curate a new room. We began to transform the old store room into a marine themed space. I was also busy with a proposal for the exhibition space at the five star hotel around the corner. I had the time of my life interning in Cape Town and couldn’t be more thankful for that cold, miserable, January that encouraged me to send off my applications.
The Gallery
