With partners such as Corobrik, Ceramics SA and the City of Tshwane’s Pretoria Art Museum, the UP Museums are bringing a major collective of South African ceramics onto temporary exhibition. The exhibition brings a majority of the iconic Corobrik ceramic collection on display into a single gallery, the largest of its kind held under a single roof. Over 250 ceramics will be on public display and the online launch is the planning process. This rotational exhibition will run for an extended loan until December 2025. 

The Corobrik exhibition is intended to be on loan for a period of five years and has resulted in loan agreement between all parties, including a MOU signed on the 22 May 2021 with the Pretoria Art Museum and support from the City of Tshwane to promote the African tradition of ceramic making by local South African ceramicists as an art form. 

The title, Unspoken, moreover brings out the need to acknowledge the artist behind the ceramics, as well as their often forgotten histories and narratives, as contemporary ceramics are just as much a social medium of communication and personal expression as art itself. The exhibition highlights many unspoken narratives and the biographies of ceramic art by black female artists such as: Nesta Nala; Zanele Nala; Thembi Nala; Henriette Ngako; Euriel Mbatha; Josephine Ghesa; Gael Neke; Rebecca Matibe and Sisanda Mbanda among many others. The UP Museums will also use the opportunity to showcase our expanding collection of ceramics by Nic Sithole, a Pretoria-Mamelodi based ceramicist and some new acquisitions of his signature works.