Exhibition honours Pemba’s work
FAMILY members of renowned Port Elizabeth artist George Mnyaluza Milwa Pemba were among the guests at an exhibition opening in his honour curated by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum this week.
The occasion marked the donation of three new Pemba paintings to the art museum’s permanent collection in a generous gesture by an unknown philanthropist.
Representing the Pemba family at Wednesday’s opening was Welekazi Prudence Pemba Mosia, 62, Pemba’s eldest daughter, who thanked the museum for the exhibition honouring her late father, who died in 2001.
“I won’t be talking about the painter, the shopkeeper, the singer, but rather about my dad, and share some things about him that people might not know,” she said.
“My dad wanted to do everything for us himself. He was a good dad and we’d go fishing with him for the whole day, waiting for the fish to come until one day he caught two.
“We were so excited because he seldom caught anything.”
Mosia, a jazz singer and a former member of Jazz Queens, said she inherited her father’s love for jazz but not his love of painting, because he would be in his studio from 6am to 6pm.
“His paintings still talk today. When he cries it’s through the paintings, when he laughs it’s through the paintings. He was an introvert, not an easy person. And he wasn’t easy to talk to,” she said.
Mosia said her father had not studied art and that a Pemba was born with the gift of creating.
Mosia, who has a twin, said she had sold the one Pemba painting she owned many years ago, after her father had asked her to do so.
“I had a landscape painting and, at the time, we didn’t have money so my dad asked me to sell it, which I did and it was fine,” she said.
Pemba’s oldest son from his first marriage, Keke Titus Pemba, 84, is an artist and architect. He said his relationship with his father had been difficult at times and that his father had inherited his creative gifts from his mother, a builder.
Black Sash regional manager Alexa Lane reflected on the first time she met Pemba at an exhibition hosted by the Black Sash when she was a teenager.
“I first met him about 30 years ago. There was a small exhibition at a Black Sash member’s house and I was by far the youngest person at the exhibition. In the dining room, there was George sitting on a chair looking at his paintings,” she said.
“We were the only two people in the room. I blurted out the first thing I thought of, which was: ‘Hello, what are you thinking?’
“He looked at me and said: “What I’m thinking is that there have been times in my life where I’ve had to let go of some of my artworks without having the opportunity to properly catalogue them. I’m wondering where they wound up and where they are now.”
The first two donated paintings show a scene of New Brighton in 1957 and an image of the Horse Memorial from 1965 respectively. The third piece is a large oil painting of New Brighton pensioners collecting their pensions, which Lane said Pemba donated to the Black Sash in 1993.
ý For gallery hours and more information about the exhibition, contact the art museum at 1 Park Drive on (041) 506-2000.