Art Towards Social Development

This design is an example of an advertisement for an art exhibition in Botswana in 1982. Thami Mnyele designed this marvelous poster for the Art Towards Social Development exhibition. It was silk screened in black and dark red for printing on off-white coated paper using a lithograph. Thami Mnyele was a South African graphic artist. He educated and spoke with Africans, particularly those in South Africa and Botswana, about art, politics, and culture through his artistic creations.

This poster, which promotes the exhibition Art Towards Social Development at the Festival of Culture and Resistance, shows an artist balancing between the black and white realities of apartheid-era South Africa. Collaboratively curated by Medu Art Ensemble and fellow South African artists, the exhibition was one of the first attempts to evaluate the relationship between politics and art during apartheid.
A people who are "embattled, hopeful, and engaged in deciding how South Africa will emerge from the abyss of Apartheid fascism and which direction it will take," according to publicity materials, were recorded in the performance. Views of the show are available in the neighboring film. It later toured to Sweden and the African National Congress headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia.

The Medu Art Ensemble was defined as "comprised of more than 60 visual artists, performers, and writers, mainly South African exiles but with members from Botswana, Canada, Cuba, Sweden, and North America." The ensemble was founded in 1978 in Gaborone, Botswana (the word "Medu" means "roots" in Sesotho). Putting together the 1982 Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts at the University of Botswana in Gaborone was one of Medu's major contributions. Outlining the future of culture and the arts in a South Africa that is free and democratic was the aim of the conference.