RARE! Qwaa Mangana (1920's- 1996/7), Kuru Art Project Artist, Signed, Numbered

Description

For Sale is a very RARE! Limited Edition Print by Qwaa Mangana.
Qwaa’s artwork is
artwork produced by the Kuru Artists that challenges what the art world has come to understand as Bushman Art.
Here is an excerpt from an email I received about this wonderful piece of Art:
---This is a true Qwaa Mangana print and is signed by him. Many of the members of the Kuru Art project were illiterate at the time and could only sign their names, hence the title and numbering are written by Pieter. It would date back to 1992.
Pieter Brown was the coordinator of the Kuru Art Project at the time this print was made. It is a colour reduction lino cut. ---
Size in frame is approx.. 21 ½” H x 20 ¾” W
Qwaa Mangana was born in the 1920's on the farm Sandspruit near D'kar (Botswana), he passed away in the mid 1990's. Qwaa spent his childhood in the traditional style of his hunter-gatherer parents. He received no formal schooling, but learnt the art of hunting with a bow and arrow and tracking animals. As an adult he worked as a lime-digger; cattle herder - trekking cattle across the Kalahari for various farmers; and as a laborer (carrying, sifting and washing sand) for an English prospector. Additionally he taught himself to make and repair saddles, shoes and other leatherwork items. It was his elegant sense of design evident in these products and his style of dress, which first caught the art project coordinators eye, which led to him being one of the first to join The Kuru Art Project.
Qwaa
was a founding artist at the Kuru Art Project whose vision remains the most original of all the artists who have worked at the project.
Mangana's favorite subject matter was animals, although from his very first drawing he depicted half-human figures (literally without a lower body) with round staring eyes, which he described as the equivalent of "Satan". Some of Qwaa's figures reflect the anthropomorphic figures of earlier San art, such as the ostrich lady who makes an appearance on one of the pages of the Quaqua book which was printed in 1997 with a very limited edition of 100. Qwaa was also a healer during trance dances.