Ben Arnold
Ben Wa Mokoena Arnold (b. 1942) is a sculptor and draughtsman whose formation at the Polly Street and Jubilee Art Centres placed him within one of the most consequential networks in the history of modern South African art. Born in Albertville, Johannesburg, he started his artistic training in 1957 under Cecil Skotnes at the Polly Street Art Centre, where he later became a pupil of Sydney Kumalo. In the 1960s, he served as an assistant art teacher at the Jubilee Art Centre and taught sculpture at the Dube Art Project Zenzele, a centre for children in Soweto ‒ a commitment to art education that has remained central to his practice throughout his career.
Arnold works predominantly in clay. As a child he collected clay from the spruit running through Albertville and later, at the art centres in Polly and Eloff Streets, brick clay suited his needs. His first commissions were made with terracotta. His drawings, though autonomous works of considerable distinction, function as explorations of sculptural possibility: form thought through on paper rather than translated from three dimensions. Produced predominantly in the 1960s and 1970s, they suggest sculptures in progress.
A significant dimension of Arnold's inner life and artistic vision is his spiritual formation. He converted to Islam in 1981, having grown up among Muslims in Albertville and been drawn to the faith from an early age. Despite a Protestant upbringing in which his father served as an elder of the Dutch Reformed Church, the ecstatic dancing of dervishes had captivated his imagination. This spiritual orientation is directly legible in his work. A drawing in the Campbell Smith Collection, long misidentified as Crucifixion after a review of his first solo exhibition at the Egon Guenther Gallery in 1964, was confirmed by Arnold himself to be titled Dervish. Across an even ground the dancer whirls upwards and stretches sideways, freeing himself from all material confines in remembrance of the Creator; the fading away of head, hands and feet sustains the esoteric nature of the image and foreshadows the gradual disappearance of figurative imagery from his later work.
Arnold has exhibited widely, including at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the National Museum and Art Gallery in Gaborone, the Africana Museum in Johannesburg (Tributaries, 1985) and at FESTAC, and the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria in 1977. His work is held in the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the National Museum and Art Gallery, Gaborone. He has taught sculpture at local art schools and maintained a studio at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg.
