The first portrait in the series is dedicated to Naz Ebrahim pictured in her home, Manley Villa. It dates back to 1981 when Williamson and Ebrahim were members of the Friends of District Six who were trying to prevent the State demolition of the last streets still standing in the. legendary Cape Town district. On the wall behind Ebrahim are handwritten messages recording friends and family who had once been present. At the time, Williamson was collecting rubble from the demolition sites to stage small items of household detritus for an installation, titled The Last Supper. Six chairs borrowed from Ebrahim and draped in white sheets surrounded the heaped rubble while a tape of the voices of the people of District Six is played.

Next in the series is Defiance Campaign heroine Annie Silinga, a fellow member of a women’s organization who famously refused to carry the racist passbook.

Silinga was photographed outside her home, in Langa, Cape Town, dressed in the robes of the Federation of South African Women. Another veteran activist, Helen Joseph, became a mentor for Williamson, and introduced her to other committed women for the artist’s series of photo-etched and silkscreened prints, A Few South Africans. When Joseph opened the artist’s first exhibition of this series at Gallery International in Cape Town in 1984, she said ‘Sue Williamson has taken our history out of the cupboard and put it on the wall.’

Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and 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). 

Major international solo exhibitions include: Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities at the SCAD Museum of Art in Georgia, USA (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, Netherlands (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited (2002) at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. Williamson 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. Group exhibitions include, Resist: the 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy (2018) at BOZAR in Brussels; Women House (2017, 2018) at La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C); Citizens: Artists and Society Tate Modern, London; Being There (2017) at Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris) and Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (2014) at the International Centre for Photography New York and the Museum Africa (Johannesburg), curated by Okwui Enwezor, and The Short Century (2001-2) also curated by Okwui Enwezor, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York.

Williamson’s works feature in museum collections, ranging from the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Pompidou Centre, (Paris), Hammer Museum, (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg). Williamson has authored two books - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989). 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.  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.

Current & Upcoming

Work by Williamson is currently featured on museum exhibitions in Shifting Dialogues: Photography from The Walther Collection at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 in Düsseldorf, Germany and A Decade of Acquisitions of Works on Paper – Part II at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, United States. 

Next year, The Barnes Foundation will present an exhibition dedicated to the work of Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye in the Spring. Williamson has also been invited to take up an artist residency at the Yale Centre for British Art in Connecticut in 2023.