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Colour This Labour Dirt Cheap - Image 1
Colour This Labour Dirt Cheap - Image 2

Gavin Jantjes

Colour This Labour Dirt Cheap

1974-1975

Colour This Labour Dirt Cheap — thumbnail 1
Colour This Labour Dirt Cheap — thumbnail 2
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Gavin Jantjes

Colour This Labour Dirt Cheap

1974-1975

Physical Qualities Screenprint on paper with mixed media, Sheet: 602 × 452 mm. (23 11/16 × 17 13/16 in.)
Portfolio/Series From the series "A South African Colouring Book"
Credit Line Art Acquisition Fund, and Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia & Pacific Islands Acquisition Fund
Object Number 2016.115.5
These newly acquired works are within an eleven-part suite that is canonical today. Gavin Jantjes made A South African Colouring Book at a time when Black Consciousness led anti-apartheid activism within his nation. This key ideology is cousin to Black Power in the United States; leaders read many of the same anti-colonial texts. Initially led by Steve Biko (1946–1977), Black Consciousness remains active in many parts of the world, as do central tenants of Black Power. Jantjes’ series critiques apartheid’s classification of people by color, and it doubles down on disenfranchised people who willingly embraced their oppressor’s culture. In Colour This Labour Dirt Cheap we see repeated prints of a woman cleaning a bath she can never use, and art handlers ferrying precious cargo they cannot afford. The True Colours of the State reproduces a famous 1960 photograph by Laurie Bloomfield of policemen beating people who protested being evicted from their homes in the state’s forced removal campaign. Read the script clipped to the top of each work. Here are the words of Prime Minister B.J. Vorster (1915–1983). In one script he understands the people imaged only as units of labor; in another he wonders whether other countries have laws that secure the same “peace and order” as South Africa.
The Baltimore Museum of Art by purchase, 2016; Helen Jackson, Washington, DC
Shannen Hill, The Baltimore Museum of Art, "Shifting Views: People & Politics in Contemporary African Art," December 18, 2016 - June 15, 2017.

Artist

Gavin Jantjes

South African, born 1948, active Norway

Meet Gavin Jantjes

Explore the Collection Further

Gavin Jantjes
Dead
1974-1975
Rockwell Kent
Love's Labour's Lost
1936
Gavin Jantjes
Gold Market
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
Colour These Workers Sold Out
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
Colour These Blacks White
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
Classify This Coloured
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
Whites Only
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
The True Colours of the State
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
Colour This Slavery Golden
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
Colour This Whites Only
1974-1975
Gavin Jantjes
A South African Colouring Book
1974-1975
Christoph Nathe and Rostische Kunsthandlung
Title Plate from "Sammlung Radirter Blaetter von Nathe"
c. 1800