Paper short abstract:

The Copperbelt has been an important producer of cultural outputs, with the mining industry acting as indirect 'patron'. In the twenty-first century, Congo and Zambia's visual arts are on the rise on the international scene. Yet this creates a new set of complex patron-artist relationships.

Paper long abstract:

The mining region of the Copperbelt, which straddles the border between Zambia and the Katanga province of DRCongo, is known for its production of distinctive, often politically engaged, visual arts. These developed over the course of the late colonial period and the first decades of independence under the aegis of the mining industry. Not only did the mines support galleries and other similar initiatives over the years but informants overwhelmingly cite the large number of expatriates as being their bread-and-butter customers. In fact, Katanga's first art schools - the 'Hangar' and the Académie des Beaux-Arts - taught their pupils to create "naive paintings" designed to appeal to a European clientele. Today these dynamics have taken on a new form. The state-like paternalistic companies of old have gone, and art has more or less disenfranchised itself from the mining industry. Katangese artists, such as Sammy Baloji, have been able to do well in the new globalized world, while Zambia's reputation for expressive paintings is growing. Yet here lies the rub. In order to be successful, art has to make it on the international scene. This usually means exporting it to New York, London or Paris, often via a non-African facilitator, thereby ushering in a new set of complicated patron-artist relationships. This paper will explore the way in which painting in the Copperbelt has been, and continues to be, uncomfortably entangled with the region's industrial past, and the way in which contemporary artists deal with the new realities of the twenty-first century.