Two exciting new programmes were added to the Festival repertoire this year. The Smirnoff Jazz Festival – a festival within the Festival – had been a popular feature of the Fringe from 1989 to 1991 and had, by all accounts, been sorely missed in 1992. In 1993, it was not only welcomed back with great enthusiasm, but became a featured part of the curated programme. Here, it joined another art form being raised to greater prominence: Craftart.

‘Craftart’ is a term that was coined quite specifically for the South African context. In a fantastic essay in the souvenir programme, Dr Marion Arnold – a well-known artist, author and art historian – explains it as a term of reconciliation, designed to reunite the spheres of Art and Craft.  

By including this discipline alongside the  other curated genres, the Festival committee aimed to acknowledge the creative realities of traditional visual practice in Africa, the post-modernist dissolution of boundaries between creative arts disciplines, and current Western theories about the relationship between aesthetics and social structures. In the Western tradition, ‘fine art’ had been conceptualized as fulfilling intellectual needs, ‘craft’ as meeting physical and material ones. This rift – now seen by many in the artistic community as largely unfortunate – did not develop in the same way in African cultures. ‘Craftart’ was an exciting new platform for festival goers to engage with crafting forms which may have emerged from a functional context, but which encapsulate extraordinary visual sensibilities and skill.