Uthando Baduza has been appointed as curator of Art Exhibitions and Galleries for the University of Pretoria (UP) Museums. His credentials include a master’s in Public and Visual History (cum laude) from the University of the Western Cape; experience at the Red Location Art Gallery in Gqeberha and the District Six Museum in Cape Town; and being one of the Mail and Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans for Arts and Culture.

Baduza is a ministerial appointment to the Project Steering Committee for the South African Cultural Observatory, which charts the socio-economic impact of arts, culture and heritage and the creative industries. And he has played a key role in the recognition of academics’ creative outputs as research; he wrote the concept paper for the task team established to consider it.

His passion for his work is reflected in a comment he makes almost in passing: “I’m just a lover of beauty and it has inspired me.”

Yet Baduza does not only have qualifications, experience and an awareness of aesthetics – he brings with him resilience and the ability to think outside of the box, qualities sharpened over years. This is because his UP appointment in May follows nearly a decade of running a gallery that effectively exists only in name.

The Red Location Museum in New Brighton, a cultural precinct dedicated to the struggle against apartheid, opened with much fanfare in November 2006. It won many international architectural awards for its design of 12 memory boxes, or rusted shacks, including the Royal Institute of British Architects Lubetkin Prize for the most outstanding work of architecture outside the UK and the European Union. The design was even exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But the surrounding community was less enamoured, referring to it as “a house for dead people” when they need proper housing. The museum was forced to shut its doors and has since been vandalised. Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism’s website states: “The Red Location Museum has been closed since 18 October 2013 due to community protests around RDP housing issues. The municipality is working closely with the community on reopening it soon.”

It is a complex dispute, and one that has attracted academic analysis, including a PhD candidate in Development Studies at UP who grew up in the area. Baduza says when the municipality interviewed him for the job of chief curator of its gallery, the building was still open. By the time he started working, it had been closed for a few months. But Baduza and his staff did not give up. They simply redirected their energies.

“We conceptualised a programme called Precinct without Walls,” he explains. “That programme really was to say, okay, the buildings are closed, but even if the buildings were open, we would still be doing outreach, we would still be engaging with communities, we would still be doing the work that requires us to leave the buildings. So let’s do that. The buildings are closed, but we need to deliver the services.”

Using the revised White Paper on Arts and Culture as their guide, they created opportunities for people to enjoy art and engage with their heritage, and for artists to gain skills and exhibit. Their flagship project was Sketchbook, a visual arts residency. To actualise these projects, they partnered with organisations, such as Nelson Mandela University, that had venues.

After that stormy experience, Baduza is finding UP extremely organised. He is also marvelling at the beauty of its well-maintained Hatfield campus where he is familiarising himself with UP’s art collection.

“It’s one of the best university collections in the country. I have been really impressed so far in terms of the depth and scope of the collection. I’m primarily responsible for exhibitions and the gallery space to make sure our collection is exhibited and accessible, and also contributes to the teaching and learning mission of the University. Working with other departments to achieve that is a key focus area of my job.

“My job is about exhibitions, but it’s also to provide an opportunity for scholarship around some of the works in the collection. We will need to surface artists and give them proper recognition. There is not a lot written about some of these artists. The problem is not limited to black artists. A lot of female artists have been largely ignored, and not exhibited.”

Baduza has already co-curated an exhibition, drawn mostly from this collection, with Gerard de Kamper, curator of the Museum Collections. Homage to Pretoria is being hosted at the Javett Art Centre’s Bridge Gallery, which has been taken over by the museum division, and is on until 6 December.

His developmental work has made him fascinated about what it is that makes artists successful. Is it only art schools that produce successful artists? This is now the essence of his doctorate in Development Studies which, under the supervision of Professor Noëleen Murray, Research Chair in Humanities at UP, looks at the role of personal attributes and art education in enabling success among artists in South Africa.

“I’m passionate about the arts,” Baduza says. “Particularly arts education, because it’s not something that’s really valued in terms of the holistic development of a child. My passion in the sector and from a curatorial sense is to create opportunities for kids and the general public, especially from the communities I come from, to experience the arts.

“There’s always this assumption that to initiate art projects you need oodles and oodles of money. Funding is likely to follow a good art project, at least that has been my experience. You just need the dedication and the passion of someone to say, ‘I want to do something, so let’s do it.’”

And Baduza is in Pretoria to do it, to create a buzz about art and exhibitions at UP.

Ironically, it has taken him a long time to reach UP, considering it was one of his choices after matriculating from Cambridge High School in East London.

“Strange how the world works,” he muses. “I was accepted here to do drama and I really wanted to come. My father said, ‘Uthando, drama is a hobby, not a solid career.’ So I opted to go to Cape Town to study law, and my parents only found out much later that I had changed my course to politics and history.”

UP is honoured to have him at last.