Art exhibition highlights Mother City’s drag history and pageantry

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The Michaelis School of Fine Art launched an exhibition this week that ‘casts a light’ on the preservation of the historic events centred around Cape Town’s gay and drag community.

Among featured works are the archived collections of Salon Kewpie, a collective whose work centres on the Kewpie Collection.

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The collection is an ‘important archival resource’ that documented life under apartheid for the gays and girls of District Six, held at the GALA Queer Archive, as reported by IOL.

In another section of the exhibition, the famous Miss Gay Cape Town, now known as Miss Sovereign Western Cape, showcases all the years of the pageantry, dating back to Enigma Von Hamburg being the first queen that was crowned in 2009.

The ‘Sequins, Self, and Struggle’ archive, held at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Centre for Curating the Archive, researches, documents, and disseminates archives of the Spring Queen and Miss Gay Western Cape pageants that are performed by coloured communities in Cape Town.

The exhibition ‘draws on materials’ from the Miss Gay Western Cape collection in particular, connected to the Kewpie Collection by the spirit of gay, queer and trans self-expression.

The exhibition is curated by Jade Nair, for Michaelis Galleries, and Nina Milner, for Salon Kewpie, while the exhibition text was written by Nair and Dr Ruth Ramsden-Karelse.

With the help of Barry Reid, Director of Miss Sovereign Western Cape, the art collection was brought to life at the Michaelis Galleries, Michaelis School of Fine Art, on Thursday, 18 July.

‘The exhibition is important to preserve and showcase not only the history, but the legacy of our previous queens and participants. We have seen from Kewpie Project how important honouring and respecting those who have come before us and paved the way for us to be free and able to do what they as our elders were not allowed,’ said Reid.

‘It is wonderful to see that different projects, legacies, and archives are able to cross pollinate and enhance the history of our country so wonderfully […] I am so happy to see Miss Gay Western Cape deservedly have the recognition of being so impactful in our society,’ Reid added.

‘I grew up on the Cape Flats and Kewpie is an important cultural figure for the coloured communities, so I have always loved and adored Kewpie. I have also worked on the Miss Gay Western Cape collection for a long time and so it’s been important for me to platform these stories and communities,’ said Nair.

‘I want to bring forth the message of the importance of self-archiving, especially people telling their stories that are not archived by the mainstream institutions and also the importance of community and how strong that sense of community is in the LGBTQIA+ community,’ Nair added.

The Salon Sequins exhibition, a collaborative project with Milner of Salon Kewpie, received institutional support from the Centre for Curating the Archive, the District 6 Museum, GALA and the University of Pretoria, according to Nair.

‘This exhibition forms part of the HEAT Winter Arts Festival programme whose theme this year is ‘common ground’. I am constantly inspired by the ways in which LGBTQIA+ people find and foster community and family, often in defiance of prejudicial behaviour and legislature,’ said Nair.

‘The exhibition showcases the strong community spirit of Cape Town’s LGBTQIA+ people though the materials of two important archives, the Kewpie Collection (GALA) and Sequins, Self and Struggle: Miss Gay Western Cape Collection (CCA) and the work of the Salon Kewpie collective. It is a moment to celebrate these communities and the self-archiving practices of people like Kewpie, without whom these collections would not exist,’ Nair added.

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