March/April, 2011

 

Sophia Ainslie is profiled by Franklin Liu in the March/April (5th Anniversary) issue of ArtScope Magazine as one of “25 Artists Who Have Captured Our Imagination”. Her exhibit “Inside Out” will be at Kingston March 30 – May 1, with the opening reception Friday, April 1, 5-7:30 pm.

The content of her art, even as she tackles salient social issues to increase public awareness, deals in a Zen-like fashion with abstract, as well as disparate, concepts of positive vs. negative, of presence vs. absence, of movement vs. stillness, and of interchangeability and balance. This is a tireless, ongoing, private conversation she conducts with herself, absorbed, spending hours alone in her studio delineating art.

Ainslie said that her current work has less political overtone, but one may argue that the corpuscles of activism may well have been coursing in her blood since her childhood days growing up, witnessing the unconscionable injustice of apartheid in racist South Africa.

Her late father, William Stewart Ainslie (1934-1989), was a celebrated artist, beloved teacher, and an honored humanitarian who, along with Sophia’s mother, Fieka, in 1971 founded the nonprofit, multi-racial Ainslie Studio in order to provide learning opportunities for black artists and students. As a result, her parents were subjected to frequent police harassments and suffered untold indignities from bigots; only one year later, the world would see Nelson Mandela arrested and imprisoned.

Ainslie’s parents persisted under challenging circumstances; the school managed to thrive, and in time became the Johannesburg Art Foundation, seeing the enrollment of numerous talented students like William Kentridge, who has since become widely recognized and celebrated for his animated visual and performance work.

Read more here: download pdf of full article