Every day, thousands of commuters look up as they cross the intersection of Jellicoe and Jan Smuts avenues in Rosebank to see the slatted ammonite of a building that is Circa Gallery.
The elliptic architectural gem, fashioned by StudioMAS and widely praised by both lovers of good design and influencers who can’t resist a sun-dappled snap on its curved walkway, occupies what was a gravel parking lot before 2009.
More than a decade later and Circa is alternatively home to, say, gargantuan Angus Taylor sculptures and Teresa Kutala Firmino interactive art happenings. It’s where socialites sip glasses of rosé at exhibition openings and acts as a fulcrum around which many ideas swing — for a wide variety of thought leaders, not only artists and art enthusiasts.
This contemporary space is also one of the satellites of a planet that is an entrenched part of the Joburg galaxy — it’s elegant, tickey-creeper-covered neighbour, Everard Read Gallery.
True, it has outposts in Cape Town, Franschhoek, and London, but as the oldest commercial gallery on the continent, it’s hard to separate the story of the Everard Read mothership from that of the wild golden city it has been part of for 110 years.
As Everard Read chair Mark Read puts it: “Our gallery has always reflected the vibrance of Johannesburg — a city with a mining town mentality — different and difficult. But Everard Read is an institution that has been part of generations of Joburgers.”
Many of these are too young to know Everard Read is, in fact, one of their urban ancestors. “Ev”, Mark’s father and a stalwart gallerist of the city after World War II, took a family business in the centre of town and turned it into the CBD gallery of its day.
Situated across from the Rand Club, the Pieter Wenning Gallery, as it then was, would eventually become named for the man who brought it to life. Mark and the extended Read clan still run the business, but it was Everard who relocated the gallery to the jacaranda-lined Jellicoe Avenue in the 1980s.
“Increasingly,” says Mark, “what’s exciting for me is that we have evolved into a young, aggressive business with an old name. At heart we are a self-questioning and analysing gallery that seeks to be a home for the future of African art and design.”
Today this calm, interconnected series of exhibition spaces, juxtaposed with bright-blue highveld skies and indigenous plants peeping through windows, displays a kaleidoscope of works by big names such as Blessing Ngobeni, Lady Skollie, Deborah Bell, Thonton Kabeya, and Nandipha Mntambo.
It is perhaps unusual to think of a gallery that sells art, instead of a museum, as being a resolute, public-facing fixture of a city, but in a metropolis where residents increasingly rely on private entities to get their cultural fixes, Everard Read is just that.
“Our city is in a period of declining standards in so many ways, but we’re focused on keeping our precious Everard Read as an absolute shining light of what excellence can be,” says Mark.
“This is a space in our beloved Joburg where all are welcome to come and enjoy and learn about culture. You don’t have to spend a cent — just have a look around.”
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