Sue WILLIAMSON (b. 1941)
Chobe Afternoon Drive
1978
etching
edition 3/20
42 x 31 cm
This impressionistic etching transmits a feeling of hazy heat and motion, as experienced on a drive through Chobe National Park in Botswana. On the surface of things, Williamson’s drive-by sketch might seem like a plainly representational landscape, but read in relation to her life’s work, it takes on a much more knotted and complex transnational legacy of skewed power relations.
The year in which the work was made – 1978 – is key. ‘Events in South Africa between 1978 and 1986 impacted Botswana and the broader southern African region,’ writes Unaludo Sechele. ‘South Africa implemented the destabilisation policy in an attempt to persuade neighbouring states to accept apartheid after failing to convince them to sign non-aggression pacts. This resulted in events that shaped Botswana’s political ties with South Africa and the latter’s economic links with the other southern African countries.’
BIOGRAPHY
Sue Williamson was born in Lichfield in the United Kingdom and immigrated to South Africa with her family in 1948.
Between 1963 and 1965, she studied at the Art Students League of New York.
In the 1970s, she started to make work which addressed social change in South Africa.
In 1983, Williamson earned her Advanced Diploma in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town.
By the late 1980s, she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s).
Williamson’s work engages with themes related to memory and identity formation. Trained as a printmaker, she has worked across a variety of media including archival photography, video, mixed media installations and constructed objects.
In 1997, Williamson founded www.artthrob.co.za, a leading website on South African contemporary art and the first of its kind in the country. She has also authored two major publications – South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989).
In 2007, she received the Visual Arts Research Award from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and in 2011, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship. In 2013 she was a guest curator of the summer academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
In 2025, a major retrospective of her five-decades long career, titled There’s something I must tell you, was shown at the Iziko South African National Gallery, following her United Kingdom and United States institutional exhibitions in 2023 at The Box, Plymouth and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
She has participated in biennales around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2019); several Havana Biennales as well as Sydney, Istanbul, Venice and Johannesburg biennales.
Major international solo exhibitions include: Between Memory and Forgetting, The Box, Plymouth, UK (2023); Other Voices, Other Cities, Las Palmas (2023); Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities, SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (2002).
Group exhibitions include: Tell Me What You Remember, Barnes Foundation (2023); Breaking Down the Walls – 150 years of Collecting Art at Iziko, Iziko South African Museum (2022); RESIST! The 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2018); Women House, La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C) (2017, 2018); Being There, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Centre for Photography in New York and the Museum Africa in Johannesburg (2014); The Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York (2001 – 2).
Collections include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg.
Awards and fellowships include: The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California.
Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.