Helen Sebidi

Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmangankato Helen Sebidi (born 5 March 1943) is a South African artist born in Marapyane (Skilpadfontein) near Hammanskraal, Pretoria, who lives and works in Johannesburg. Sebidi's work has been represented in private and public collections, including at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington and New York, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, New York, and the World Bank. Her work has been recognised internationally and locally. In 1989, she won the Standard Bank Young Artist award, becoming the first black woman to win the award. In 2004, President Thabo Mbeki awarded her the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver – which is the highest honor given to those considered a "national treasure".

Quotes about Helen Sebidi

• Her work represents a mode of African modernist painting and sculpture, wherein she depicts her experience of having grown up and living in the South African countryside, and later her experiences as a black artist, living and working under an apartheid regime.
  • Brown, Carol (1998). "The Zebra has lost its Stripes post-apartheid South African art". India International Centre Quarterly. 25 (1): 67–84. ISSN 0376-9771. JSTOR 23005605.

• Sebidi's portraits often depict abstracted African subjects in bright colours and a rich palette. She is often associated with the realist and quasi-expressionist schools, with her vivid paintings of life in both rural and urban South Africa and similarly striking clay sculptures.
  • Leeb-du Toit, Juliette (2009). Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi. Johannesburg: David Krut. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-9814188-7-2.

• The old people told us stories...about how people live and...about how to see. They "read" the clouds. We used to sit outside in the courtyard, and especially in the very bright moonlight when there were a lot of clouds they used to read the stories for us and tell us: look at that, look at the soldiers, look at this! And they would tell us: you're going to have to see other life that's coming.
  • Arnold, M. (1989). Helen Mmakgoba Mmapula Sebidi: Standard Bank Young Artist Award 1989. Johannesburg: Standard Bank. p. 7.

• As a teenager, Sebidi became a domestic worker and estranged from her mother and step-father. Sebidi sewed and knitted and decided to pursue her art in her off-time with encouragement from the wife of her employer, who also pushed Sebidi towards formal training.
  • Arnold, M. (1989). Helen Mmakgoba Mmapula Sebidi: Standard Bank Young Artist Award 1989. Johannesburg: Standard Bank. p. 7.

• Through her unique depiction of the human figure, we come to appreciate Sebidi’s representation of different forms of black being, and a search into the relationship between humanism, spiritualism and the contemporary black African condition.
  • Malatjie, Portia (1 September 2018). "Batlhaping Ba Re!". Retrieved 19 April 2019.