BY SITHA MALIWA:
From the streets of Soweto to the grand halls of Atlanta, two South African artists are taking their stories, visions and distinctly African voices to one of America’s most dynamic art fairs.
Gallery MOMO will present acclaimed artists Fhatuwani Mukheli and Blessing Blaai at the Atlanta Art Fair, running from 1 to 4 October 2026 at Pullman Yards in Atlanta, USA.
For Gallery MOMO, the appearance marks more than a first at the Atlanta fair. It is another chapter in the Johannesburg gallery’s steadily expanding American footprint – one that has seen it exhibit at EXPO CHICAGO since 2019 and present Mukheli and Blaai at Chicago’s Navy Pier in April this year.
Now, the spotlight moves south to Atlanta. The presentation brings together paintings and mixed-media works that explore identity, memory, perseverance and presence – while placing contemporary South African artistic voices firmly within a broader international conversation.
Among the works travelling to Atlanta is Mukheli’s A Study of Freedom, a large four-panel painting, alongside Blaai’s Surmount, a 2026 mixed-media work.
Mukheli, born in Soweto in 1985, works across painting, photography and film. His portraiture is intensely psychological, often drawing the viewer into moments of stillness, gesture and introspection.
His recent paintings engage with the visual language of Renaissance and classical art – monumental figures, dramatic light, drapery and composed stillness – while bringing those traditions into conversation with his own cultural inheritance.
Earthy reds inspired by his Venda heritage meet warm sepia tones, creating images that are at once rooted in South Africa and engaged with the long history of Western picture-making.
For Mukheli, taking the work beyond South Africa is not about leaving its origins behind.
“That is the beautiful thing about art leaving home: it doesn’t lose where it comes from, but it can gain new meaning through the people who meet it.”
Blaai, born in 1994, brings another distinctive visual language to the presentation.
Working across oil, acrylic, watercolour, ink and mixed media, the Johannesburg-based artist combines figuration with layers of symbolism. Architectural fragments, birds, domestic objects and saturated colour emerge from densely worked surfaces, creating images where memory and environment appear to collide.
His 2026 Gallery MOMO solo exhibition, Surrogate Emotions, explored the relationship between memory, environment and representation – asking how emotions can be constructed and experienced through the picture plane.
Blaai’s international trajectory has already taken him beyond South Africa. He was an artist-in-residence at EuropaHaus in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2024, exhibited with Gallery MOMO at EXPO CHICAGO 2026 and has participated in exhibitions including African Mobilities, This Is Not a Refugee Camp.
His Atlanta presentation includes Surmount, a work he describes as a reflection on endurance and the reward that can follow prolonged adversity.
“This piece speaks of the reward of one’s perseverance after a period where trials became a norm. This is what I would need Atlanta to know.”
For Gallery MOMO, the Atlanta Art Fair is part of a much larger international project.
Founded in 2002, the Johannesburg gallery has established itself as one of South Africa’s significant contemporary art platforms, representing artists from South Africa, the wider African continent and internationally, while also administering the estates of twentieth-century masters.
In 2026, the gallery was named Outstanding Art Gallery at the National Arts Council Awards, adding another distinction to its growing international profile.
Its work in the United States has included a long-running presence at EXPO CHICAGO and an artist residency partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Its wider international footprint includes projects connected to the Venice Biennale, Dak’Art Biennale, Freedom Park, the Johannesburg Development Agency and the South African Pavilion at the Aichi World Expo in Japan. Artists represented by the gallery have also exhibited at the Havana, Beijing and Lyon biennales.
But for Mukheli, the significance of Atlanta goes beyond geography.
“Gallery MOMO is not taking my work to Atlanta simply to represent African art. They are taking it because they believe the work belongs in the larger conversation of art history. We are not coming to ask for space. We are coming because we belong in it.”
That statement captures the ambition behind the presentation.
This is not simply a South African gallery arriving in Atlanta with two artists in tow. It is a meeting between histories, cultures and visual languages – Johannesburg encountering Atlanta, while two artists bring works shaped by South African experience into an international arena.
With more than 70 galleries expected at the third edition of the Atlanta Art Fair, the Pullman Yards venue will become a meeting point for collectors, curators, advisors, artists and art lovers from across the world.
And among them will be two Johannesburg voices carrying something unmistakably their own.
Mukheli and Blaai are not arriving in Atlanta to explain where they come from. They are arriving with work that insists on being seen. – @NewsSA_Online
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