Tom Blomefield (95) one of the initiators and pioneering promoters of contemporary Zimbabwe Shona sculpture has died in Holland. Blomefield who founded Tengenenge Art Community at his farm in Guruve in 1966 died on Wednesday morning. In a statement on facebook, his son Stephen Blomefield said his father will be sorely missed by tens of…
In Zimbabwe, the Shona people were traditionally known as “the People of the Mist”, since they inhabited the mist-shrouded Inyanga Mountains, from whose stone their descendants have been creating extraordinary sculpture over the past century or so. The Shona are the oldest and also the largest ethnic group in the country, and the legendary guardians…
Tom Bloemfield is eulogized for having ‘persuaded’ his farm workers to, “try their hand at sculpture” purely for altruistic reasons; out of concern for their livelihoods and after he became aware of a huge deposit of black serpentine (rock) situated on a hill on his farm. This, however, is a fallacy. His farm workers were…
Henry Mudzengerere Munyaradzi is considered as the inward looking magus of Zimbabwe sculpture. Born in Guruve, in the north of Zimbabwe in 1931, Munyaradzi’s life and work is as deceptively simple as it is remarkable, hence a paradoxical salience is resultant from his body of work. He eventually worked in various ways with the natural…
Art centres play an important role in the creation and promotion of visual arts in Zimbabwe. The growth and development of the Shona Sculpture movement was greatly influenced by the establishment of formal and informal art centres.