Founded by Sipho Sepamla, Benjy Francis and others in 1978 — in the wake of the Soweto uprising and the death of Steve Biko, and firmly in the spirit of the Black Consciousness Movement — the Federated Union of Black Artists (Fuba) became a fundamentally important safe space for the incubation and support of black artists working in the oppressive conditions of apartheid.
Forty years later and a new exhibition at the Keyes Art Mile, in honour of a recent grant by the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation towards the preservation of the Fuba archive housed at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), reminds us of the significance of Fuba as an incubator of some of SA's finest black artists.
The exhibition includes works by Fuba alumni David Koloane, Johannes Phokela, Samson Mnisi, Sam Nhlengethwa, Bongi Dhlomo and Helen Sebidi, to name a few.
Excitingly for those of us who get goosebumps at the sight of historical documents, the exhibit also features a lot of archive material - newsletters, newspaper articles and other ephemera produced during the height of Fuba's activity in the 1980s and '90s, when it was based in Newtown in Johannesburg.
The grant, just short of R1m, means this archive can now be digitised and made available to the public as an important resource that will be used for arts education. It will help to redress the lack of publicly available and accessible information about one of South African arts' most significant and productive movements.
As Eben Keun of the Friends of JAG points out, "The movement of Fuba is as important to South African art history as the Bauhaus was to European design history. The old government didn't want to promote this chapter in South African art history. It's essential to understand resistance art and without the Fuba movement there would have been no place for black artists during apartheid to hone their craft."
The grant, says Keun, "represents a chance for a body of information to be made available to the public that wasn't previously available. Previously if you googled half the artists there was no information on them. So we'll be able to make that information available and that will happen over the next three years."
Until then the current exhibition brings a lost piece of South African art history to light and serves as a reminder of the resourcefulness and dedication of black artists to ensuring that they were not silenced or prevented from creating during even the darkest of days.
It's a small but necessary and rewarding opportunity to right a historical injustice, and the work on display provides a strong and varied demonstration of the vibrancy of Fuba and its project and, of course, the ultimate goal of its mission - to produce artworks that still speak loudly and brightly to the issues and pressures of a dark moment while also standing out decades later in better days.
• The Friends of JAG and Keyes Art Mile Fuba 40th Anniversary Exhibition is currently on show in the foyer of the Trumpet Building at the Keyes Art Mile in Rosebank...