Gary N. van Wyk

Background

Gary van Wyk was born in 1960, in Southern Rhodesia, to Alphonso and Avril Ann (Cowden) van Wyk.

Education

Gary van Wyk received a Bachelor of Arts in 1981, a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) in 1984, and a Fine Arts degree in 1986, all from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Active in the anti-apartheid Resistance Art Movement, Gary van Wyk was exiled in 1986 to Zimbabwe, where he continued graduate studies in African Art History by correspondence with University of South Africa.

Van Wyk was a Fulbright Scholar in Art History at Columbia University, received a Rockefeller Award for his research in South Africa and Lesotho on Basotho art, and received his Ph.D. in 1995.

Career

While a graduate student, Gary van Wyk worked as assistant to the Curator for African Art at Brooklyn Museum. His critically acclaimed 1994 photography exhibition on Basotho arts at Columbia University later traveled to museums in the US and France, and led to his 1998 book African Painted Houses, a New York Times Architectural Book of the Year.

He assembled a collection of classical African art from South Africa for repatriation, which was integrated into the South African National Gallery / Iziko as the Heritage Collection on Heritage Day 1995.

Appointed Editor of Special Projects at Rosen Publishing Group, in New York City, in 1995, he edited 42 volumes of the Heritage Library of African Peoples for young adult readers, and was commissioning editor of the 12-volume African Civilizations series (Franklin-Watts).

In 1997, he co-founded Axis Gallery with his partner, Lisa Brittan, which the New York Times remarked “made New York history by putting African art - old and new - on the map” in Chelsea, and produced many “museum-like” exhibitions over the years. He has consulted with several American museums on exhibitions and display issues, collection identification and building, and education and outreach.

In 2013, he curated “Shangaa: Art of Tanzania” at CUNY’s QCC Art Gallery (which also traveled to Portland Museum of Art, Maine), the first exhibition and scholarly volume in English devoted to the traditional arts of Tanzania. In 2014 as Program Chair of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association Triennial Symposium held at the Brooklyn Museum, van Wyk was honored to shape the international conference of African-art scholars.

Gary van Wyk has been a visiting professor at Vassar College, University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and a frequent public speaker on art topics.

Gary van Wyk is Executive Director of Alma On Dobbin, a not-for-profit that promotes cultural exchanges among and between the United States, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe. For Alma, he curated two photography exhibitions for Modernity X Hungary, programed parallel to the Guggenheim Museum's Moholy Nagy exhibition, and authored József Jakovits: Surrealist, Primitivist, Kabalist (2014).

His other books include Pop Art: 50 Works of Art You Should Know (2013) and Our Anthropocene: Eco Crises (2018), which accompanied an exhibition he curated at the Center for Book Arts, New York.

Achievements

• Van Wyk has been curator of several critically acclaimed exhibitions in South Africa and the United States. He has published and edited more than fifty articles and books related to African art and culture, including Shangaa: Art of Tanzania, which the New York Times described as "stupendous." His African Painted Houses was a New York Times Book Review top architectural book for 1998.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Shangaa: Art of Tanzania

    (Shangaa: Art of Tanzania is a lavishly illustrated survey...)

    2013
  • Jozsef Jakovits: Surrealist, Primitivist, Kabalist

    (The 174-page volume, including a bibliography and illustr...)

  • Our Anthropocene: Eco Crises

    (The artists in this exhibition at the New York Center for...)

    2018
  • Pop Art: 50 Works of Art You Should Know

    (A critical and pithy history of Pop Art told consecutivel...)

    2013
  • African Painted Houses: Basotho Dwellings of Southern Africa

    (This New York Times award-winning book explores the mural...)

    1998
  • Chokwe: Art and Initiation Among the Chokwe and Related Peoples

    (Text editor for collection of scholarly essays and exhibi...)

    1998
  • Basotho

    (Surveys the history, culture, and contemporary life of th...)

    1996

Membership

Gary van Wyk is a member of arts council of African Studies Association.

Connections

In 1987, Gary van Wyk married Lisa Brittan.

Father:

Alphonso van Wyk

Mother:

Avril Ann (Cowden) von Hirschberg

Wife:

Lisa Brittan