About Us

Quality writing on the arts that helps connect audiences to art

African Arts Content is committed to sustaining and developing new arts writers. The primary subjects or focus of our journalistic products are emerging artists, organisations, galleries and platforms that promote them. In short, we aim to support the work of those most in need of visibility and engaged writing so as to assist in their development and promotion.

Our texts, in terms of the language and approach and the journalism platforms that we partner with, are driven by our interest in
developing audiences for the arts. We view writing as a bridge between artists and the public, bringing the essence of their work to a reader's attention.

AAC has established a pioneering new model to sustain arts journalism in South Africa. Our writing and writing programmes are funded by non-profit organisations that share our interest in sustaining and developing and promoting the arts. We supply this kind of content to various media partners, who under financial pressure cannot afford to commission texts on arts events or artists.

We encourage arts organisations, galleries, museums, collectors, artists, publishers and other stakeholders to support our work either through donations, sharing our work on social media or through commissioning texts. As such we do create sponsored texts that can generate a study income for our writers.

Founder

Editor-in-Chief

Mary Corrigall is an award-winning art journalist, commentator and independent researcher. While working for a decade at the Sunday Independent in Johannesburg, she established her voice as an outspoken arts commentator and won numerous awards for her art commentary from CNN African Award to the prestigious Thomas Pringle Award for Reviews, which she was awarded twice by the English Academy of South Africa. Parallel to this she was appointed a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Visual Identities in Art & Design. In 2012 she founded the South African Arts and Critics Association and created writing mentorship programmes, which supported a rising generation of curators that included Same Mdluli. With the support of the Goethe Insitut in Johannesburg she ran dance writing workshops linked to the annual Dance Umbrella in that city and founded and edited the Dance Umbrella Gazette. In 2015, she founded an arts research consultancy in Cape Town. Building on her career as an arts journalist and academic, she undertakes research into different sectors of the creative economy. She regularly produces reports for the South African Creative Observatory and has expanded her purview to the digital arts – gaming and animation. Under the Corrigall & Co imprint, she has published 7 reports analysing different aspects of the Contemporary African art market from curating to pricing patterns and auction trends. She continues to write on art for Latitudes Online, the Mail & Guardian and The Sunday Times.