The Collection

Mary Sibande is a South African multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. Through her work, she interrogates the legacies of race, gender, labor, and servitude in post-apartheid South Africa while reimagining the place of Black women in history and contemporary society.

At the center of Sibande’s practice is her alter ego Sophie, a life-size figure modeled on her own face and body. Sophie is dressed in elaborate uniforms that evolve across the artist’s “phases,” each marked by color and symbolism. In her Blue Phase, Sophie appears in the blue-and-white domestic uniforms historically worn by South African maids, embodying the labor that defined generations of Sibande’s female ancestors. In the Purple Phase—inspired by the 1989 “Purple Rain Protest”—Sophie dons Victorian-inspired garments suggestive of political awakening, power, and transformation. In the ongoing Red Phase, Sophie takes on a warrior-like presence, expressing righteous anger and resistance against continued inequality.

Through Sophie, Sibande critiques and destabilizes stereotypical depictions of Black women, recasting them as central protagonists in narratives of empowerment, imagination, and futurity. By using adornment and performance of the body, she creates counter-histories that both honor and transcend the limitations of servitude imposed by colonialism and apartheid.

Sibande has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Met Breuer (New York), the British Museum (London), Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town), the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town), and Somerset House (London). She represented South Africa at the 2011 Venice Biennale and has participated in the Dakar, Havana, and Lyon Biennales. In 2021, she received the prestigious Helgaard Steyn Prize for her monumental sculpture In the Midst of Chaos, There Is Opportunity.

Her work is included in major collections worldwide, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington, DC), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), Norton Museum of Art (Palm Beach), University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor), Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town), and Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (France).