eBusiness Weekly
Kumbirai Tarusarira
An art market provides a great platform for all-and-sundry raring to be well-versed in culture. One of Zimbabwe’s struggles is the cementing of cultural aspects in the face of strong forces of cultural-alienation that has inundated the African social-fabric, leaving a few resilient communities well hinged on their respective cultural details.
In recent years, Zimbabwean artists have seen their work increase in value as they attracted global interest.
There has been a significant rise in prices paid out for major art works, prices for major Zimbabwean artefacts are estimated to have increased in tandem with a boost in tourist traffic over the past five to 10 years.
Trade in modern and contemporary African art, long understood to be very slow, has begun moving towards what optimists consider full-on bull market territory.
Showing a second consecutive year of positive growth, the global art market research states that in 2018 arts and crafts reached $67.4 billion, up 6 percent year-on-year.
This brings the market to its second highest level in 10 years, with values advancing 9 percent over the decade from 2008 to 2018.
Zimbabwe’s local artists situated at Newlands Art and Craft Centre are seeing their business booming with the availability of tourists and local customers.
The 11 year-old Newlands Arts and Crafts Centre along Enterprise Road, has now become one of the country’s vast cultural hubs where tourists and locals alike enjoy the beauty of Zimbabwean cultural artefacts
The market started in the year 2008 when most of the artists were displaced after a clean up campaign that was carried out in 2005.
Market chairperson Itai Hardlife Doriro told Business Weekly that artists came together and started their own art and craft market.
“At first it was exciting that people of different talents had come together. Some could do only basketry, others stone sculpture among other talents found here.
“We had to take this to our own advantage and start up an Art market that is when we named this place Newland Arts and Crafts centre,” said Doriro.
“We mostly do wood work, metal work, basketry, tyre mending as well as a market for traditional foods and we bardic (tie and dye) to mention a few.”
“We get our raw materials locally but we import some fabric material especially for tie and dye designs,” said Doriro.
There is a huge bubble of extraordinary prices being paid for contemporary work, and artists take this as a knock.
Doriro said: “The number of people buying serious art in Zimbabwe is still small but most of the foreign white businesspeople promote this market. The country’s emerging black middle class and wealthy have not yet started buying Zimbabwe contemporary art in the same way the newly monied classes snapped up art in China and India.
“Buying directly from artists is extremely popular with collectors of contemporary African art therefore as a group, we export some of our goods to foreign markets.
“Africa there is very little local buying of contemporary art and that why a number of artists go abroad where art is well appreciated. But that will change, slowly,” said Doriro.
