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Creative inner-city hubs bring bold new art to Johannesburg

An Antidote project piece. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

14 Apr 2025

A network of studios across the city is reviving Jozi’s art scene, with artists bringing to life bright, often mixed-media pieces that have a distinct African flavour.

It’s a busy-busy late Saturday morning in Newtown when I stop at the Antidote art project, which comprises a group of young creatives upcycling fashion waste into wearable art.

Compared with the outside, inside feels purposefully calm and industrious. My eyes are drawn to 20 pairs of hands busy stitching, snipping, tacking, measuring and darning. Discarded denim and old saris are being turned into bags and shirts, each one unique and all inspiring. There is quiet chatter, the purr of sewing machines punctuated by occasional bursts of laughter.

The Antidote project is a collaboration between designers, makers and artists who are committed to local African fashion, to non-exploitative practices and to ridding the world of fashion landfill.

Antidote puts people through a yearlong programme, with intense workshops like these – from which the best work is selected and sold at pop-ups, in shops and online. It’s all about the creative economy. They also have a studio at the fabulous Victoria Yards, across town in Lorentzville, one of Jozi’s premier creative hubs.

One learns quickly that collaboration is key in all of this. The Antidote workshop is inside the lovely industrial vibe studios of the Imbali Visual Literacy Project, which teaches art, design and critical thinking to young and unemployed people. And they both work alongside Art Aid, Clothes to Good and 10 Million Makers, all of which in turn are supported by Jozi My Jozi.

Joburg art Jozi Fumani Walter Maluleke uses reed mats as a canvas. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

A cityscape at Living Artist Emporium. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

If the Antidote project is kick-starting conversations about conspicuous consumption, the Asisebenze Art Atelier in the very middle of the CBD is buzzing with discussions about African identity, urban and rural divides, and making sense of external chaos.

Rows of taxis are neatly parked along Plein Street and the pedestrian walkway along Joubert Street is buzzing with hawkers, vendors, shoppers and sternum-thumping loud music. Inside are pockets of creativity and productivity.

Asisebenze is showcasing work at the Latitudes Art Fair in May and is also heading to an art fair in Miami soon.

Like many of the studios across the inner city, Asisebenze is home to a mixed bunch of artists from across South Africa and the continent.

Originally from KwaZulu-Natal, Siphamandla Ex stands in front of a rich and colourful triptych he hopes to sell in Miami. Mutla Mushishi, a talented sculptor from Limpopo, has his studio on the rooftop, where his amazing sculptures gaze out across the city and fill his own lounge and kitchen. Patrick Seruwu is originally from Uganda but has been living in Jozi for some years now, experimenting with big and bold portraits, fabrics and figures. Patrick Lahore’s work feels like a Jozi version of Edward Hopper, an American realism painter.

A piece from the Living Artist Emporium. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

The Antidote project buzzing with activity. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

Two different buildings make up Asisebenze’s gallery and studio spaces, the old Hi Riagan heritage building, which is connected to another building that was once the offices of an insurance company. Mncedi Madolo has the entire floor as his studio and living space and shows us his bedroom inside an old safe.

“I’m the most valuable thing here,” he laughs. Life imitating art. He had a party on the weekend and the decorations are still hanging up in between his mixed-media collage artworks, which talk about life in the inner city.

Upstairs, Steve Maphoso poses in front of a huge painting that he’s finishing off for the Miami show. He is self-taught, but says: “Art is in my blood, my grandfather was an artist.”

Another floor up, inside the spacious studio of Fumani Walter Maluleke – his shirt says Never Stop Training – a group of artists are chatting about painting products, politics and life in the inner city. Maluleke is from Giyani in Limpopo and is working on a series of paintings using traditional reed mats as a basic canvas. He sources the mats from Eswatini, Limpopo and KZN and has been living and working at Asisebenze since the pandemic, which, for most creatives, was a difficult time. But with the revival of a network of studios across the city, Jozi has kick-started the creative economy again.

Joburg art Jozi Mutla Mushishi’s sculpture. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

A piece from the Living Artist Emporium. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

Frans Thoka explores themes of ancestry. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

Known fondly as the Blanket Man in inner-city art circles because of his use of blankets as a canvas for his powerful work, Frans Thoka shows me his studio in the New Centre in Selby.

He is one of about 20 artists who have moved here in the past two years. It’s quieter, he says, than deeper in the inner city. Thoka is from Polokwane in Limpopo. He studied fine art at UJ – initially he was going to study finance – and his work explores the themes of ancestry and belonging, trauma and healing, featuring trees, rocks and mystical figures. He works in layers of charcoal to create deeply textured pieces, as well as stitching ancestral shapes on his famous blanket canvases.

Home to more than 60 visual artists, makers, artisans and changemakers in the arts landscape in Jozi, the Creative Uprising Hub @ Transwerke at Constitution Hill is where old buildings meet future ideas. Once the Queen Victoria Maternity Hospital and then later a nurses’ residence, this marvellous Art Deco building was wrested from dereliction and turned into a creative hub. As was the 1913 Victorian building where the famous Lilian Road studios are in Fordsburg, near the Bag Factory, also one of Jozi’s longest-running studios.

An Antidote project piece. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

Across town, the old Troyeville Tennis Club, of all places, has been turned into the Living Artist Emporium, and it is indeed an emporium, packed with more than two floors of contemporary African art, which is also sold online. The artworks are eclectic and colourful, with big prints, fabric patterns, beading and graphic-style contemporary themes.

Outside, you can hear the thwack of tennis balls and the thud of netballs. The spaces inside the Living Artist Emporium are also used for exhibitions and gatherings and upstairs is a fabulous rooftop patio with views of the iconic Ponte building and surrounding Ellis Park, which has been a turnaround success story. Another great rooftop is that of August House in Doornfontein, not far from here, which is one of Jozi’s biggest and most famous art studio spaces, featuring more than 50 artists.

Perhaps Jozi’s most signature art space, Victoria Yards in Lorentzville, continues to showcase the diversity of talent in the city and surroundings, featuring shops, galleries, studios, workshops, coffee shops and a gorgeous edible garden.

Their first-Sundays-of-the-month markets are a huge success and a testament to how art is being used to create stronger communities and to deepen our understanding of each other. DM

Bridget Hilton-Barber is a freelance writer who writes for Jozi My Jozi.

For more information check out: Imbali Visual Literacy Project; 10 Million Makers; Clothes to Good; Asisebenze Art Atelier; Living Artist Emporium; Constitution Hill; The Adopt a Project initiative by Jozi My Jozi

For guided art tours in the inner city: 58 Seconds offers bespoke tours with insight, email [email protected]

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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