Six decades In, Goodman Gallery reflects on its role in art and society

On a weekday afternoon in Johannesburg, the doors of Goodman Gallery are open in the way they have been for decades. Inside, a new exhibition byHank Willis Thomasfills the space. For Liza Essers, it is a familiar kind of milestone.

“He’s actually the first artist that I took on when I took over the gallery,” she tells me. “We’ve been working together for about 17 years.” There’s something fitting about that continuity. As Goodman Gallery approaches its 60th anniversary, the story is not only about longevity but about the accumulation of relationships, decisions and positions taken over time.

These relationships have shaped what the gallery has become six decades into its existence. Founded in 1966, amid apartheid, Goodman Gallery opened at a time when South Africa’s cultural institutions were largely segregated. From the beginning, it refused that logic, exhibiting artists of all races and creating a space that challenged the exclusions of the moment.

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Over time, it became associated with artists who would come to define 20th-century South African art. The history anchors the gallery today, even as its footprint has expanded far beyond Johannesburg. For Essers, who took over the gallery in 2008, the legacy was something she encountered first as an outsider.

“It was this amazing space to imagine, a space to dream, a space to learn, a space to grow,” she says, recalling her early visits. “Every time I walked into the gallery and had the privilege of seeing a show, it transformed me in that moment in a way that I had never experienced from anything else.” What followed was less a gradual extension of that experience outward. If the gallery had once been primarily focused on South African artists, Essers’ tenure has been marked by a deliberate broadening of its scope geographically, intellectually and commercially.

Today, Goodman Gallery operates across Johannesburg, Cape Town, London and New York. Its programme includes artists from across Africa and the wider Global South, alongside established international figures. The shift, however, was not simply about scale.

“It was about opening the conversations,” Essers says. “Allowing the space to open for broader conversations.” The conversations have been structured, in part, through three long-running curatorial initiatives that shape the gallery’s programming. The first, Working Title, functions as an incubator for emerging artists, offering a platform without necessarily folding them into the gallery’s commercial roster. It is, in many ways, an attempt to preserve something of the gallery’s earlier identity as a cultural institution rather than a purely market-driven entity.

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