Inside Cape Town's thriving art scene

Books were hard to come by in Apartheid South Africa—at least those seen by the government as too provocative or revolutionary. Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art (1984), which tracked the timeline of street and graffiti art through the railways and roads of New York City, was one of those books. That’s a far cry from today’s Cape Town, where—with a younger generation of “Born Frees” whose earliest political memory was Nelson Mandela being elected president of South Africa—murals and street art are widespread across the city. They manifest a response to the relative dearth of opportunities for artists to show work, and an impulse toward political expression in a country whose democracy is so young.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-inside-cape-town-s-thriving-street-art-scene