WIRED TELEPHONE WIRE ART FROM SOUTH AFRI

The long-awaited reprint of the sold-out first edition, Wired is the first book to document the development of wire weaving in African art. 

With over 270 magnificent full-color images, Wired showcases the works of the most renowned contemporary weavers. The decorative use of wire has long been a feature of African artwork and, with advancements in telecommunications, a new type of wire—multi-colored, plastic-coated copper wire, referred to as telephone wire— became available. In the 1960s, Zulu night watchmen started weaving scraps of this wire around their traditional sticks. The practice became popular among Zulu communities, and today, there is great innovation and creativity in the use of this medium. Artists have produced goods ranging from soft wire bowls and plates to glass bottle covers, tea sets, isikhetho (beer strainers), and pots, all created in a wide variety of colors and complex patterns.

The first major exhibition showcasing the spectacular art of telephone-wire weaving in any North American museum opens at the Museum of International Folk Art in NYC on November 17, 2024.  iNgqikithi yokuPhica / Weaving Meanings: Telephone Wire Art from South Africa was developed in consultation with artists, community members, and other experts with deep connections to wire-weaving communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Produced in collaboration with the Museum, scholars, and a committee of Indigenous Knowledge Experts, Weaving Meanings shares the histories of wire as an artistic medium in South Africa, from its use as a marker of social status in the 19th-century the early introduction of colorful telephone wire as a recycled material, to the dazzling styles weavers create for local and international markets today.

Exhibition schedule:

Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA), Santa Fe, NM
(November 17, 2024-November 27, 2025)

David Arment had travelled extensively in southern Africa when he bought his first telephone- wire basket in the early 1990s. He developed a passion for collecting baskets and since then has established the premier collection of baskets by contemporary wire weavers.

Marisa Fick-Jordaan developed her passion for baskets while she worked with the weavers of Siyanda (a residential area outside Durban). A renowned scholar of Zulu wire basketry, Fick-Jordaan set up ZenZulu, which supplies telephone-wire baskets to art shops around the world.

Karel Nel (b. 1955, South Africa) studied Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, St Martin’s School of Art, London and the University of California, Berkeley (Fulbright Placement 1988-89). He now lives and works in Johannesburg and is an associate professor at the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has taught fine arts in the division since the early 80s. Nel is a respected collector of African, Asian, and Oceanic art with a particular interest in currencies.

Southern African material is his area of expertise, and he acts as an advisor to several national and international museums on their collections of African art. He has also been part of curatorial teams for major international exhibitions on early Zulu, Tsonga and Shangaan art, and has contributed to numerous publications on this material. He is interested in early Modernism in South Africa, with a particular focus on Preller, Battiss, Villa, and the Amadlozi Group. Nel is a practicing artist who exhibits regularly and is represented in numerous museums. He is well-known for large public commissions in both South Africa and abroad.

Paul Mikula is a Durban, South Africa based architect who was the first local patron and collector of Zulu telephone wire weaving. A founding trustee of the Bartel Arts Trust (BAT), he is also the owner of the Phansi Museum which houses a comprehensive collection of South African indigenous artefacts.