Ezrom Legae And Art Under Apartheid At High Museum Of Art In Atlanta

They’re animals. They’re people. Stand-ins. Code.

Black artists working under apartheid in South African didn’t have the luxury of being literal. Artists living under or observing extreme cruelty have always used animals to represent people.

Francisco Goya in Spain in the late 18th century. Picasso with the bombing of Guernica.

Ezrom Legae (1938–1999).

Not even the nerdiest of art nerds will know that name. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta hopes to change that, staging the South African’s first major museum exhibition in the United States, “Ezrom Legae: Beasts” through November 16, 2025.

After apartheid was established in 1948, many artists in South Africa contended with its corresponding oppression and bodily violence by presenting the human figure in animal form or abstracting it. For them, animals traditionally sacrificed, such as goats and chickens, served as allegorical figures for activists who endured sacrificial violence and suffering under apartheid. South Africa’s Indemnity Act of 1961 made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture, or to kill in line of duty. Larger animals, such as bulls and contorted horse-like creatures, represented the autocratic government and agents of said violence.

The High’s exhibition focuses on Legae’s own bestial compositions, with each work an imaginative study articulating the artist’s political consciousness of his surroundings while living in South Africa’s apartheid era. Legae was just 10 years old when he witnessed the National Party win federal elections and instill the system of racial and ethnic segregation that later became a centerpiece of his career’s subject matter.

“For Legae in particular, there’s obviously an interest in being subversive and encoding your messages for safety and to protect yourself,” Lauren Tate Baeza, the High’s Fred and Rita Richman curator of African art and exhibition curator, told Forbes.com. “Using animals or observations of animals as a way to better understand the human condition is as old as human consciousness. You see cave drawings of animals and you can infer there’s a way of trying to understand being taking place in those renderings. Religious allegory, sci-fi, satirical things like ‘Animal Farm,’ metamorphosis in literature. We’re so used to animals meaning something else it’s familiar to us that it is a code. Even if you don’t intrinsically understand what that code is, it encourages the viewer to seek what that code might be.”

Art Under Apartheid

Legae’s work is outstanding. His story important. But why is the High Museum in Atlanta the one telling it?

“My charge is to seek out opportunities, gaps and omissions, and I try to do that until they become redundant, and they become more mainstream, and other scholars are responding to it, and then I move on to other gaps and omissions,” Tate Baeza said.

Legae individually–and African modernism generally–represent a significant gap in the canon of 20th century art.

Additionally, the High already possesses as a collection strength other examples South African art. It also owns a significant drawings collection.

“He’s one of the most important artists in South Africa–full stop–of the 20th century, but also a particularly impressive draftsman, and speaks very different languages, if you will, in his line making,” Tate Baeza said. “I thought presenting a sample of his different modalities of drawing, his approaches to drawing, would be a wonderful way to introduce him to a new audience.”

“Beasts” presents 38 drawings from 1967 to 1996 and two small sculptures by Legae, his other specialty.

The 1970s, amid mounting unrest and anti-apartheid protests such as the Soweto Uprising, are considered the artist’s most prolific period. He produced pencil, ink, and charcoal depictions of animals as covert representations of apartheid’s players and impact–activists and civilians enduring increased violence, exile, and imprisonment, often without trial and including solitary confinement.

His production dropped off until the 1990s when he reemerged during South Africa’s political transition out of apartheid.

“He was concerned and warning about intra-South African tensions of a different kind,” Tate Baeza explained. “When an authoritarian government ends, people who are very different from one another, who were previously unified under one enemy, now don’t have that enemy, and there’s a power vacuum, and often that creates tension with respect to control for that power. There was a concern about people becoming vicious to each other now that they had their relative freedom, and were trying to sort out a new way of governing the growing pains of that.”

Legae was also conscious of events around the continent in the 90s and motivated to comment on them. He visited Rwanda when his passport was returned to him following the demise of apartheid. He documented the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide through his drawings, again incorporating his bestial, animal-for-people representations.

Exhibition loans come almost exclusively from South African institutions, including Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery which represented the artist in life and handles his estate today. Throughout their relationship, the gallery helped protect and defend Legae when he was arrested by the apartheid government, had Legae shows shut down by officials, and was targeted as being an enemy of the state itself for showing his work and hosting mixed-race gatherings.

Kim Chong Hak

Along with South Africa, visitors at the High can also travel to South Korea this summer through the paintings of Kim Chong Hak (b. 1937; Sinuiju, Korea). “Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan,” through Oct. 26, 2025, features more than 70 works, including new acquisitions from the High’s collection spanning the arc of Kim’s mature career while presenting an aspect of Korean art in the late 20th century little known outside of South Korea.

Like Legae, Kim is virtually unknown in the United States despite being a prominent voice in his home country where he’s popularly known as “the painter of Mount Seorak,” the highest peak in South Korea’s Taebaek mountain range. This represents his first American museum exhibition.

Starting as an abstract painter in the 1960s, Kim ultimately rejected the adoption of Western-style abstraction which he viewed as a response to national melancholy brought on by previous decades of hardship and deprivation. In the late 1970s, he settled in Gangwon Province, eastern South Korea, home of Mount Seorak. There, he moved away from the monochromatic painting popular in Korea at that time toward his unabashedly expressive style.

He has since dedicated his life and work to interpreting the environs of Mount Seorak, developing an artistic and emotional attunement to the natural world during decades of self-imposed isolation in the mountains. The turning of the seasons, cycles of life, death, regeneration and ever-changing atmospheric conditions, have provided Kim with a subject of endless scrutiny and spiritual rapport.

His work reasserts the expressive potency of mountain imagery in traditional East Asian art while demonstrating the influence of international movements of the 1970s and 1980s.

Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold (1930–2024), on the other hand, is famous in America. About as famous as a visual artist can get, anyway. Her paintings and narrative quilts are featured in the nation’s most prestigious art museums. Her award-winning accomplishments as a children’s book creator are less acknowledged. Beginning June 27 and running through October 12, 2025, The High presents “Faith Ringgold: Seeing Children,” the most comprehensive exhibition to date of Ringgold’s original paintings and drawings made for her children’s books, including several artworks that have never previously been exhibited. The exhibition will be the latest in the High’s popular series celebrating children’s book art and authors.

The exhibition will feature more than 100 works from a dozen of Ringgold’s books, including original paintings from “If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks” (1999), “Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House” (1993) and “Tar Beach” (1991), in which Cassie, a Black child in 1930s Harlem, imagines a future where she can go anywhere that she dreams of from her apartment’s rooftop. Also on view will be complete artwork from the fable “The Invisible Princess” (1999) and “We Came to America” (2016), which examines the history of immigration in America. Together, the artworks in the exhibition illuminate critical aspects of Ringgold’s practice and convey how Ringgold, a lifelong educator, presents children as creative, purposeful art makers.

“Faith Ringgold started her career as a teacher and believed that all children are artists and should seriously consume art,” Andrew Westover, exhibition curator and the High’s Eleanor McDonald Storza deputy director of learning and civic engagement, said. “Often a child will first encounter visual art on the pages of picture books, and they can help children feel valued and empowered. Through this exhibition, we will underscore the importance of those discoveries while at the same time giving due recognition to a lesser-known facet of Ringgold’s art.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center presents “Rhythm & Thread” through August, a theatrical show for young audiences inspired by Faith Ringgold’s quilts that will celebrate family, imagination, and the beauty of storytelling through the art of quilting.

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