Gerard Sekoto born in 9 December 1913. He was a South African artist and musician. He was the son of Andreas Sekoto, a leading member of the new Christian converts. He is recognised as the pioneer of urban black art and social realism.
As a child, Sekoto would draw with chalk, paper, and colored pencils. His art skills emerged in his teenage years, when he attended the Diocesan Teachers Training College in Pietersburg. Sekoto had a secret passion for doing art, but was divided between his love for teaching and art. He would hide his work whenever anyone came near it, and would only show his work to his closest friends.
In 1938 at the age of 25 he left for Johannesburg to pursue a career as an artist. He held his first solo exhibition in 1939. In 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery purchased one of his pictures, it was to be the first picture painted by a black artist to enter a museum collection.
In 1947 he left South Africa to live in Paris under self-imposed exile. The first years in Paris were hard, and Sekoto was employed as a pianist, a trendy nightclub that had reopened. He played jazz and sang "Negro spirituals", music became the way that he could pay his living and art school expenses. His drawings depict the places he visited and moved too during this time in his life. The photographs he captured were black and white and are of himself playing the guitar or piano.
Sekoto's paintings became political in the 1970s due to apartheid in his home country. In 1989 the Johannesburg Art Gallery honoured him with a retrospective exhibition and the University of Witwatersrand with an honorary doctorate. His work was exhibited in Paris, Stockholm, Venice, Washington, and Senegal, as well as in South Africa.
