16 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Monday 19 August 2019ARTS
Above: a student
from the Spier
Arts Trust helps
to install a
mural by Clive
van den Berg at
Nando’s, King’s
Cross, London.
Left: artists’
‘blocks’ on
display at
Nando’s,
Birmingham
New Street
Jonathan Bankssizes are available, with commensurate
prices, ranging from R1,500 ($100) for
an 18cm square block to R4,200 ($275)
for a 38cm square.
More than 250 artists have partici-
pated in this income-generating pro-
gramme so far, with around 85 at any
given time. Nando’s currently owns
about 12,000 such blocks, some ofwhich can be seen on the walls of its Bir-
mingham New Street and East Croydon
restaurants, for example.
Some artists continue use the blocks
even once their careers are more estab-
lished. These include the Iran-born
artist Sepideh Mehraban, who now
works in Cape Town. “The blocks
are my bread and butter,” she says. “Plus
I can use them to experiment and be
a bit more playful, they don’t need to
be masterworks.”
Nando’s is behind other forms of
patronage that often stem from an art-
ist’s Creative Block commitment. At
Victoria Yards, a 30,000 sq m redevel-
oped industrial zone in Johannesburg’s
inner-city Bez Valley neighbourhood,
two of the city’s artists, Ludumo
Maqabuka and Nkosinathi Quwe, are
sharing a spanking new studio space for
a year, thanks mostly to the restaurant
chain. “We have a bigger platform, more
audience and more opportunity here,”
says Maqabuka, whose work reflects the
hip-hop community of the township in
Bramley where he grew up.
Increasingly successful artists who
have come through Nando’s pro-
grammes include the Kinshasa-born
Patrick Bongoy, whose rubber-based
works now attract an international mar-
ket, and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, whose
work was a sellout at Frieze New York in
May through Mariane Ibrahim (the
artist also shows with South Africa’s
Stevenson gallery).
A different Nando’s-backed project,
the Spier Arts Academy, trains
unskilled workers — many from disad-
vantaged backgrounds — to become
professional mosaicists or ceramicists.
The three-year apprenticeship pro-
gramme in Cape Town is “tough”,
Wessels says, but its graduates (25 a
year, chosen from 600 applications)
leave with an accredited business quali-
fication and the skills to operate their
own studios, should they wish. The
development programmes also inter-
twine: Creative Block artists can getI
t is famed for its flame-grilled peri-
peri chicken and cheeky takea-
ways. But Nando’s restaurant chain
also has a lesser-known distinction:
it owns the world’s largest visible
collection of contemporary art from
southern Africa.
Nando’s support of artists, mostly
emerging artists, runs deep. Majority-
owned by South Africa’s enterprising
billionaire Richard Enthoven and his
family, who also buy art privately,
Nando’s has a growing collection of
about 22,000 works. Through the Spier
Arts Trust consultancy, which has been
managing the corporate collection since
2002, many of the works hang through
the group’s 1,300 restaurants across the
world. The trust manages a further
7,000 works for the insurance group
Hollard and the Spier Wine Farm, both
also Enthoven-owned businesses.
Mirna Wessels, chief executive of
Spier Arts Trust, is reluctant to put a
value on the collection but says that,
over the past four years, the trust has
bought around $600,000 of art per
annum. Most of this is now in Nando’s
global collection.
“For us, it is more than a budgeted fig-
ure,” Wessels says, and the artists they
support agree. Diana Hyslop, a painter
who now has more than 250 works in
the collection, says, “What Nando’s does
is amazingly generous; they come here
and buy something every two months.”
We meet in her studio in Johannesburg’s
Bag Factory, a chaotic, non-profit space
that houses up to 17 artists. “We’ve
needed them,” Hyslop says of Nando’s,
explaining that, as the country has been
in and out of recession these past few
years, “South Africa’s art market disap-
peared with the economy.”
Many of the artists in Nando’s collec-
tion have been trained through its own
development programmes. At their coreis the engaging “Creative Block” starter
initiative. Artists apply for this and, if
approved by the Spiers chief curator
Tamlin Blake (also an artist), earn the
right to work on a set of small blank
blocks, which are regularly provided.
The resulting works — mostly paintings
— get critiqued by Blake and, in many
cases, are bought for the collection. FiveRestaurant chain serves up a side-dish of art
South African-owned
Nando’s has shown a
long-running and deep-seatedsupport for art and artists.
Melanie Gerlis reportsPODCASTS
Fiona
Sturges
In 1999, on a rural intersection nine
miles from the Mexican border in
California, a pick-up truck was
reported as having ignored a stop sign
and collided with a car, causing the
truck to roll over and throw the driver
from the vehicle. This unnamed man
was left with severe brain damage and
has spent the intervening years in a San
Diego nursing home on life support.
InRoom 20, a new podcast from LA
Times Studios, the investigative
reporter Joanne Faryon chronicles her
efforts to discover the identity of the
man known by carers as Sixty-Six
Garage — the name was taken from the
repair shop where the van was towed
after the accident. First responders
found no belongings on him save for a
few pesos and a phone card, and
assumed he had entered the US
illegally. Faryon combs through
newspaper archives, highway patrol
reports and hospital records, and sits at
his bedside, talking to him and playing
him music.
Her interest in the case, she says, is
“unfinished business” linked to the
death of her own mother years earlier
after a period spent in a coma. It was
Faryon’s decision to turn off her lifesupport. “All these years later,” she
says, “I still wonder whether I killed
my mom. Did I act too quickly? Not
sk enough questions? Being here...
it’s like I’ve walked back in time to
that decision.”
It’s a common trope in investigative
podcasts that the host must engage in
some soul-searching. It’s not enough to
tell other people’s stories when they
can also reveal something about
themselves. Your heart goes out to
Faryon for her loss but, in the context
of this narrative, her personal
reflections feel shoehorned in.
Far more compelling are her findings
about the broader context of Sixty-Six
Garage’s story, specifically in the
hundreds of migrants who die or go
missing each year when trying to
get to the United States. She takes
tours of the border both with a border
agent and a migrant rights activist whooffer contrasting views in how the area
is policed.
Elsewhere, we hear from Ed
Kirkpatrick, the nursing home director
who, in his keenness to discover his
patient’s identity, says, “We need to
CSI the hell out of it.” In many ways, it
is Kirkpatrick who provides the
conscience of the story as he reflects
on the existences of those in his care
with a mixture of weariness and
compassion. We hear him fielding
inquiries from people searching for
missing relatives who wonder if the
man in lying in his hospital is their
brother, cousin or son, and eventually
delivering some startling news about
Sixty-Six Garage.
In sharing such moments,Room 20
provides a poignant portrait of its
unnamed protagonist and the scores
of people like him who risk their safety
in search of a better life.The mysterious case of Sixty-Six Garage
Reporter Joanne
Faryon with
Sixty-six Garage
at the Coranado
Nursing Home
in San Diegotheir work turned into a larger-scale,
site-specific mosaics by the Academy
students, which are often commis-
sioned for a Nando’s restaurant. Exam-
ples can be seen in London’s King’s Cross
branch of Nando’s, where Clive van denBerg’s intricate and huge (3m x 18m)
“Coming to the City” was made and
installed by 10 Spier students in 2011,
while a 600kg mosaic mural by John
Murray surrounds the façade of Nando’s
in Notting Hill, London, with images
including animals and sandals (“Don-
key”, installed 2018).
Sales of the art mostly take place pri-
vately. On behalf of the Enthoven busi-
nesses, Spier Arts Trust generally buys
work straight from the artists (though
they may also go through galleries when
relevant). There are few public selling
opportunities, though the Trust hasorganised occasional pop-up offerings
of Creative Blocks during Nando’s res-
taurant refits, such as in its Frith Street
branch in London’s Soho in 2017. When
these works don’t sell, Nando’s commits
to buy them, with proceeds going in full
to the artists.
This is also the case for the works that
Nando’s brings to London’s 1:54 Con-
temporary African art fair, which it has
sponsored since 2016. Mehraban is
among the artists coming to its booth
this year, with works that draw parallels
between post-revolutionary Iran and
post-apartheid South Africa. Other art-
ists on show will be the Maputo-based
Nelsa Guambe, whose paintings deli-
cately reflect women’s everyday emo-
tions and circumstances, and the cross-
disciplinary Port Elizabeth artist
Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta. Works made by
the Qaqambile Bead Studio, which sits
alongside the Spier Arts Academy in
Cape Town, also come to 1:54 this year.
Art on the Nando’s booth is generally
priced under $10,000.
“The Nando’s space at the fair allows
more people to know and meet some of
these talented artists and buy their orig-
inal work. It also lets visitors learn more
about Nando’s art story and later appre-
ciate the art in the restaurants,” says
Touria El-Glaoui, founder and director
of 1:54.1:54ContemporaryAfricanArtFairisat
SomersetHouse,London,October3-6,
1-54.com/london‘X (After Betty
Shabazz)’ (2013)
by Thenjiwe Niki
Nkosi, from the
Nando’s collectionMore than 250 artists
have participated in
the ‘Creative Block’
income-generating
programme
‘Birds of a Feather’ by Diana Hyslop,
from the Nando’s art collectionAUGUST 19 2019 Section:Features Time: 16/8/2019 - 18: 29 User: david.cheal Page Name: ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 16, 1
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