The City of Joburg is finally moving ahead with a plan to relocate South Africa’s most valuable art collection from the compromised Joburg Art Gallery (JAG) in Joubert park – 10 months after first being served with a letter of demand by law firm Webber Wentzel to do so.
“Recognising the importance of safeguarding the JAG collection, the city has resolved to temporarily move the collection to a suitable and secure facility,” it announced last week.
“This initiative is part of the city’s commitment to ensuring the preservation, safety, and future accessibility of one of South Africa’s most valuable cultural assets, while its historic building undergoes essential restoration.”
It’s no small matter either; the gallery owns about 9,000 artworks (minus a loan of 145 of its greatest paintings, which are presently touring South Korea), and their value runs to hundreds of millions of rands. The process – which is for now being funded entirely by the city – “will involve a carefully co-ordinated logistical operation to ensure the safety, integrity, and security of all collection items throughout the relocation,” says the city.
But the move is seemingly independent of an initiative spearheaded by the presidency under the Presidential Joburg Working Group (PJWG7), which was called by Cyril Ramaphosa earlier this year to try and tackle the city’s many challenges. The seventh workstream is focused on the shocking state of its galleries and heritage sites, and a substream has been established to focus on the JAG. It is co-chaired by the department of sports, arts and culture under minister Gayton McKenzie.
“We fully support the work of the PJWG7 and want to see all parties collaborate through this forum to establish a better outlook for JAG,” says the Friends of JAG (FOJ), which has for months been at the forefront of efforts to catalogue and move the gallery’s immensely valuable collection. “Considering the city is also represented on the PJWG we are confused by this [announcement], which points to them working in isolation of the PJWG process instead of collaboratively.”
Asked about this, the city says: “The JAG restoration project began before the establishment of the presidential working group. However, the city provides regular updates to the group on progress based on the submitted project plan for JAG’s restoration.”
Safeguarding the collection
Where the art will be moved has been a key issue for the FOJ and the art gallery committee meant to steward the collection. It was the FOJ and the Joburg Heritage Foundation that spearheaded last year’s effort to move the collection out of the JAG’s Joubert Park building, given its location in one of the most crime-ridden and neglected parts of the city, not to mention the state of the building itself, which Webber Wentzel found to be “deplorable”.
In its news release, the city says it’s identified “potential facilities” for the collection’s interim storage, including the Ditsong Museum in Pretoria, Museum Africa, “and several commercial galleries such as the Anglo American Office – Main Street, FNB Gallery, Absa Gallery, and Standard Bank Gallery.”
But when asked by Currency, Absa’s art curator Paul Bayliss says: “No discussion has taken place to date between Absa and the City of Joburg with regards to a potential storage facility.”
Standard Bank says it has been in talks, though “due to ongoing discussions, we aren’t able to provide further details on the matter. All questions on developments can be directed to the City of Joburg.”
The FNB Gallery does not exist.
Confusingly, when we asked for clarification, the city told Currency that it has narrowed the selection down to “two city-owned locations in Newtown”, contingent on a “conditional assessment” to “evaluate the readiness of these properties for relocation”.
The issue for JAG’s insiders is twofold: that the city’s own properties have been so mismanaged that they shouldn’t be considered a feasible option to house the gallery’s artworks, while the involvement of the Joburg Development Agency (JDA) has set off alarm bells, given how it and the Joburg Property Company have botched previous renovations of the gallery’s building, a heritage site.
One of the contractors previously appointed by the city to fix the gallery’s leak-prone roof, say sources, had experience only in RDP housing and no experience in heritage or museum work. It led to the building’s copper roofing being stripped and stolen. The roof itself was never properly fixed and the building, which was designed by Edwin Lutyens, a contemporary of Sir Herbert Baker, remains badly susceptible to water ingress and highly damaging mould as a result.
Despite this, the JDA “has been appointed to oversee all procurement activities, ensuring transparency and compliance with municipal policies”, says the city.
The biggest unanswered question remains what to do about the final location of the JAG given that it’s in one of the grimmest parts of town. Only about 5,000 people visited it in 2023; a fraction of the 189,003 visitors who descended on Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.
Last year, of the 15 exhibition halls in the JAG, only two were found to be operational, while almost all of the gallery’s 9,000 artworks were in storage.
Incidentally, the hand-wringing over the state of the gallery is nothing new. In 2017 the city commissioned architect Jonathan Stone to draw up a conservation management plan for the repair, restoration and renovation of the JAG.
It asserted that “through a series of misdirected efforts, lack of proper action under suitably qualified and inexperienced professionals and contractors, the building and its contents have been put at risk of irreparable damage due to fire and flooding. The costs of an impending disaster cannot be calculated.”
Almost a decade later, little has changed.
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