Qhamanande Maswana’s artwork is being showcased in LA as part of The Billboard Creative’s exhibition titled “We The People”
Creativity knows no boarders and Qhamanande Maswana‘s artwork is a testament to that. The visual artist’s work has been featured on a billboard exhibition titled “We The People” curated by Mona Kuhn in the city of Los Angeles. The exhibition is a part of The Billboard Creative which is non-profit arts organisation that aims to “help emerging and underrepresented artists break through traditional career bottlenecks by raising their profile in a massive way – as part of LA’s annual billboard exhibition”. The billboard features 30 works in media; photography, painting, mixed media, collage, and sculpture by both emerging and established artists. These artworks were “selected through a curated, blind submission process open to all and will be shown alongside guest artist Bryan Ida”.
“The Billboard Creative celebrates artists from all walks of life and creates a supportive platform for artists to share their work at the massive billboard scale with the city of Los Angeles”, says curator Mona Kuhn
Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Qhamanande Maswana grew up in King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape. Maswana always had creative bones and with his drive to pursue a career in arts he studied and graduated in Fines Arts through institutions such as Lovedale College and the University of Fort Hare. Maswana’s has a distinct style of portraiture that echoes beauty and the everyday struggles faced in South Africa. He merges reality with imagination painlessly, often portraying his subjects in purple hues.
“Driven by a desire to document their individualities and narrate their stories through painting, I sometimes go out into the streets and observe people. I am inspired by their clothes, their hairstyles, how they carry themselves and I end up making stories about their lives in my head. Each portrait is an adventure, exploring the unique character and personal strengths of my subjects. It’s not about how they look, it’s about who they are as people.”
Maswana continues to say that “the people depicted in my work often come from economically depressed communities, so I paint their skin with purple hues, because purple is often associated with royalty, luxury, and power – it also represents wealth, creativity, wisdom, dignity, and magic. I see it as my duty as an artist who grew up in those spaces to recreate images of these bodies in a new light, one that portrays the royalty I see within each of them.”
