Background

Gary van Wyk was born on February 22, 1960, in Zimbabwe, to Alphonso and Auril Ann (Cowden) van Wyk.

Education

Gary van Wyk received a Bachelor of Arts in 1981, a Bachelor of Laws in 1984, and a Master of Fine Arts 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 had been born. There, he continued to study African Art History by correspondence with University of South Africa, receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1988.

Van Dyk completed his Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar in 1995, and received a Rockefeller Award for his research in South Africa and Lesotho.

Career

In 1989 Gary van Wyk began working as an assistant to the curator for African art at Brooklyn Museum, a position he held for a year. He also was an executive curator at African Art Heritage Collection of South Africa from 1990. In 1995, Gary van Wyk became an editor of special projects at Rosen Publishing Group, in New York City. He edited the 56-volume series Heritage Library of African Peoples (Rosen) for young adult readers, and was commissioning editor of the 12-volume African Civilizations series (Franklin-Watts, 1998-99).

In 1997, he became a curator at Axis Gallery, in New York City, 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 worked closely with many leading American museums on exhibitions and display issues, collection identification and building, and education and outreach.

In 2008 - 2012 and 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 is also an outstanding photographer, with work exhibited in Africa, Europe, and the United States, including Wallach Art Gallery and Guggenheim Museum. In 1994 he produced an exhibition of his photographs at Columbia, critically acclaimed by the New York Times’ writer Holland Cotter.

Throughout his career Gary van Wyk also held the position of a visiting lecturer at the University of Cape Town in 1992 and in 1994 and at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1993. He worked as a lecturer at Bard Graduate Center in 1998.

Nowadays 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, and helps to found an institute for Central and Eastern European art under the aegis of the CUNY system.

His most recent books are Pop Art: 50 Works of Art You Should Know (2013); József Jakovits: Surrealist, Primitivist, Kabalist (2014); and Our Anthropocene: Eco Crises (2018).

Achievements

• Van Wyk is most commonly known as a consultant on African art to such famous museums as Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and South African National Gallery and curator of several critically acclaimed exhibitions in South Africa and the United States.
  
  Gary 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", a 56-volume series Heritage Library of African Peoples for young adult readers, and the 12-volume African Civilizations series. His African Painted Houses was a New York Times Book Review top architectural book for 1998.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

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

    (The Chokwe, the most artistically prolific ethnic group i...)

    1998
  • 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...)

  • Pop Art: 50 Works of Art You Should Know

    (The most important and best-loved artists of the Pop art ...)

    2013
  • African Painted Houses: Basotho Dwellings of Southern Africa

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

    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, a filmmaker.

Father:

Alphonso van Wyk

Mother:

Auril Ann (Cowden) van Wyk

Wife:

Lisa Brittan