Yebo! Art Gallery is pleased to announce that our intern, Bulelwa Kunene has been selected for the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa’s joint fellowship program with the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town South Africa. Bulelwa, who graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2021, has been working at Yebo since April of this year and has contributed to 3 of our exhibitions and taken part as a facilitator in our handcraft training program in partnership with the International Trade Center’s Alliances for Action Program funded by the European Union.
She is one of 5 other African curators, artists and writers who have been selected for this fellowship which will be running from February 2023 to January 2024. This program will offer fellows practical museum experience at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. The fellows will also be attending classes at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa as part of the university’s humanities department. Their fellowship will culminate in a research paper from each fellow as well as an honours degree award upon completion of the program.
When asked how she feels about this opportunity, Bulelwa stated, “I am really excited about the prospect of being part of these two really great institutions for a year and I am appreciative of the efforts being made by both Zeitz MOCAA and UWC to grow the pool of young African curators. As someone who has been engaged in the arts in Eswatini through Yebo for about a year, I have had the privilege of being able to see the massive amount of potential our creative industry has that unfortunately is so untapped because of a lack of resources for many people working in this sector. I hope that upon completion, I will be able to share my experiences and the new perspective I am sure to gain from working in and learning from such well established and positioned institutions.”
Bulelwa adds, “I have gained a lot of new experiences as an intern at Yebo, so I am looking forward to a continued relationship between myself and the gallery.”
Through her experience here at Yebo, Bulelwa has gained a huge appreciation for the handcraft sector. “My research will be focused on the curatorial considerations of exhibiting handcraft work in creative institutions and ways the creative sector in Eswatini can contribute to amending existing power imbalances and exploitative practices between artisans and the art market. The particulars of my research are still being hashed out but I am really interested in how we can protect women, specifically low-income rural women within the handcraft space.”
Yebo is happy to have been part of Bulelwa’s growth as a curator and to have watched her development in her confidence and overall curatorial practice.
We are excited to see her journey as a young African curator continue to develop.