South Africa artist William Kentridge creates works that evolve formal fusion of his early work in theater and his innovative use of drawing. He makes animated films that are diametrically opposed to cartoons. Using primarily charcoal and black and white only, Kentridge makes drawings that function independently and also are used and re-used, placed and manipulated, in making his films. He draws, photographs, erases, and photographs, to build the narrative sequence. The process is visible in the finished film, one that suggests the provisional quality of progress and history. Kentridge's work in drawing, film, and prints tells stories on multiple levels. They are personal dramas or melodramas, about lost love, infidelity, and the corrosive impact of greed. But they are also allegories of self-destructive social and economic systems that exploit at the expense of the vulnerable and of the land itself. His work tells of the scars of apartheid in explicit terms, and of a post-industrial society that is in disrepair. The commentary is both specific to the current state of South Africa and applicable to many places in the world. Kentridge was brought to international attention in 1997 when his work was shown in Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. Since that time, his work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and included in The Short Century: Independence and Liberation \Movements in Africa 1945-94. He was the recipient of the Carnegie Medal in 1999 and received an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2002. Kentridge lives and works in his native Johannesburg. In 2001 the ASU Art Museum presented an exhibition of films and drawings by the artist. (See Past Exhibitions). William Baltimore.

Marilyn A. Zeitlin