摘要：Community arts centres1 have served the
social, educational, economic and political
needs of a number of African artists and
communities in South Africa since the 1950s.
Examples are the Polly Street Art Centre,2
Katlehong Art Centre,3 Dorkay House,4 FUBA,5
Funda,6 Afrika Cultural Centre,7 and Alexandra
Arts Centre8 (all seven in the Witwatersrand
area), Rorke's Drift9 in KwaZulu-Natal,
Ditike10 near Thohoyandou, Mmabana Arts
Centre11 in Mmabatho, the Community Arts
Project12 in Cape Town, the Community Arts
Workshop13 and BAT14 centre in Durban and
ArtsforAll15 in Pretoria. These centres provided
access to arts training and production to black
people, who were denied entry to the formal
apartheid government institutions (1). Most of
the urban centres were also actively involved
in the political struggle, eg CAP (2). In addition,
the arts centres functioned as mechanisms for
access to the gallery system.16 Community arts
and community arts centres received strong
support at several conferences, from the State of the Arts conference at the University of
Cape Town (1979) to the National Arts Coalition
(later National Arts Initiative) conference
of 1993. Exhibitions like the 1985 BMW-sponsored
Tributaries and The Neglected Tradition
at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (1988) contributed
to the promotion of artists from some
of these arts centres. Publications like Art from
the South African townships (Younge, 1988),
The neglected tradition (Sack, 1988) and
Images of wood (Rankin, 1989), as well as the
Arts and Culture Task Group report (ACTAG,
1995) highlighted the quality of the artists' work
as well as the political, social and economic
obstacles that they had to overcome.
