WAMHOVER

Last Thursday P and I had the privilege of attending the opening of the new Wits Art Museum in Braamfontein. It’s exciting to finally have a proper art museum in Joburg! The first exhibit is called ‘WAM! Seeing Stars’ and is filled with works ranging from bronze statues by Sydney Kumalo, to charcoal drawings by William Kentridge to wooden masks from Nigeria and beadwork from the Eastern Cape.

It’s housed in what was a former petrol station and re-designed by Nina Cohen, Fiona Garson and William Martinson into the current modern beauty, with a lovely view of the Nelson Mandela Bridge. My favorite pieces were a photo of the inside of the Ponte City building and a charcoal piece by William Kentridge that is the left pane of a tryptich. It features a the Businessman from his animations, and on the bottom is noted “London is a suburb of Johannesburg.’ Ha! Indeed.

Scroll your mouse over the picture to get the address and opening hours of WAM, which opens to the public on May 19th.

**For my WAM image I layered three pictures I took of the opening to get a multiple exposure effect, and used the gradient tool to get the pink ombre, as well as the Super Braggadacio font to create a clipping mask in Photoshop, and some html/css code to create the image rollover. The entire(ly tiny) scope of my Photoshop knowledge is entirely because of the lovely blog Pugly Pixel, and how to do all of these things can be found on her generous and helpful blog.