Malangatana Ngwenya

Who is Malangatana Ngwenya?

Malangatana Valente Ngwenya was born on 6 June 1936 in Matalana, a village south of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), in what was then Portuguese Mozambique. Raised attending mission schools while helping on his family's farm, he moved to the capital at age twelve to find work, eventually becoming a ball boy at a tennis club, where he took night classes and discovered a passion for drawing and painting. Encouraged and materially supported by club members including the architect Pancho Guedes, he held his first group exhibition in the mid-1950s and his first solo show at twenty-five, going on to exhibit internationally across Africa and Europe. His paintings are known for dense, crowded compositions of human, animal, and supernatural figures rendered in vivid color, blending Mozambican folklore with the trauma and hope of a colonized and then newly independent nation. In 1964 he joined the FRELIMO independence movement and was imprisoned by the Portuguese secret police for eighteen months. After independence he helped establish Mozambique's National Museum of Art, served in parliament, and was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 1997. He died in Portugal on 5 January 2011, widely regarded as the leading figure of modern Mozambican art.

Sources: Wikipedia, 'Malangatana Ngwenya' · Museum of African Art (momaa.org), 'Malangatana Ngwenya' · Art Institute of Chicago, 'Malangatana: Mozambique Modern' exhibition notes