By Art Correspondent
Over the years Tony Monda attended many contemporary art fairs, festivals and biennales, including:
“Arts in Marrakech” (A.I.M. Festival) at Musée de Marrakech, Morocco; the “7 th Guang Ju Biennale” in South Korea; the “Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla”, in Spain; “Art Basel” Miami Beach Convention Centre, Miami, Florida; “The Art of Now Fair” at Kylie Kaufman Gallery, New York City, USA; the “2012 Triennale d’Art Contemporaine of Paris” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; KIAF- Art Seoul, in South Korea. He served as a docent for African corporate and business leaders at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg on the collection, preservation and valuation of indigenous African art. At an Intellectual Property Forum in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 2012 Monda delivered a paper entitled “Introduction to National Intellectual Property “.
Monda served as an independent advisor, assayer and evaluator for numerous Zimbabwean art collectors, among them members of the Diplomatic Spouses Association of Zimbabwe (DSA), with whom he gave several talks on Art.
In 1987, Monda joined SSCB Lintas Advertising as a visualiser and copywriter and worked in advertising and commercial design.
His life-long search and commitment to improve his knowledge of the visual arts, archaeology and heritage of his country, led him to study at influential institutions and universities in Europe and America.
According to Monda: “Today in post–Independence Zimbabwe, it is important that we preserve, protect, rehabilitate and reconstruct many of our sites of historical and cultural importance, which are facing collapse and degradation due public abuse and natural weathering. It is disheartening to see the sorry state of neglect of some of the natural monuments and cultural sites that we as a nation, have inherited from our rich ancestry”.
Monda undertook study tours on photography at the University of Arizona, and the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography, in Rochester. He was later an advisor to the Zimbabwe Censorship Board on art, film and literature.
Monda is also an accomplished and recognised sculptor, painter, ceramicist, graphic artist, photographer, musician, analyst, historian, adjudicator and lecturer in the arts. Consistently ahead of his time, Tony Michel Monda represents the bridge between races, generations and audience of old and new visual art media. In 1988, at 23 he was internationally recognized African contemporary artist, particularly in England and America and he established Ziso Art Atelier – the first indigenous owned/run gallery in Zimbabwe which received international attention.
In 1991, Monda was head hunted by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe as the deputy head of exhibitions. In 1992, Monda was selected as the first indigenous Zimbabwean to be awarded the USIA Young African Leaders Initiative (YAL), travelling scholarship to study in the USA. He attended some of the most prestigious art institutions in the world to study Art and Art Criticism, Archaeology, Architecture in American Society, Law and Intellectual Property, Government and State Art and Culture Policy Formulation; Critical History of American Art and Abstract Expressionism; Music Appreciation; Contemporary Art History and Curatorship Monda studied legal aspects of art with the Washington Area Lawyers Association (WALA),
covering Visual Arts Copyright Law, Inheritance Law, and Visual Art as Intellectual Property.
In addition he studied United States Arts Policy, Government Arts Advocacy, and Educational Programmes in the Arts at the US Congress in Washington, DC. In Washington DC., Monda undertook training as a state art docent, attending guided tours of the Whitehouse Art collection to study the history of acquisitions, conservation and security protocol of prestigious art collections housed in the Whitehouse and other eminent state institutions in the USA.
Academic study tours included: the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the World Bank, New York; the Frick Collection and Art Reference Library, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans, Louisiana. The Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, Canada; Musée d’Art Contemporaine de Montréal, Canada; Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; Musée d’Art Contemporaine de Québec, Canada; and the Munch Museum Oslo University, Norway.
Monda is an alumnus of New York Institute of Art and Design, New York; UCLA, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Arts Institute (SFAI); Corcoran School of Art, Washington, DC; Cornell University;
University of San Francisco; Georgetown University, Washington DC; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; San Francisco State University, Department of Art Education; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York; University of Washington, Seattle, (Doctorate in Business Administration).
The Royal College of Art, London; University of London; the School of Oriental and African Studies – SOAS, UK; RAU University, Johannesburg, South Africa.
In Europe he attended study tours, workshops and lectures at influential art institutions in France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and England. These included the Louvre and the Centre de Pompidou (Musée Rodin; Académie Royale in Toulouse; Montparnasse, the Musée Picasso; the Dali Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum London; The Tate Gallery; Stedjelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Stieglitz in Antwerp, Holland; Musée Royoux des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Schinkel Museum Stuttgart; the Bauhaus Museum; the Rijks Museum and Academy
He studied Modern European Art; British Old Masters; Curatorship and Conservation; Dutch abstract painting and studied the Renaissance art and ideals in Venice, Florence and Rome, in Italy. Monda undertook Mentorship Training from CIDA, the Creative Industries Development Agency, with the British Council.
Late in 1993, Monda returned to Zimbabwe and re-joined the National Art Gallery as Deputy Head and Head of Exhibitions. He was the first indigenous art curator at the institution to hold these positions. American and British trained, Monda was the youngest ever Deputy Head and Head of Exhibitions at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe with administrative and public relations responsibilities for major exhibitions; including sponsorship, curatorship, composing and editing exhibition catalogues, as well as press, government, corporate and international media relations. As such, he was instrumental in securing the dual corporate sponsorship of Anglo American and Mobil Oil for the Zimbabwe Annual Heritage Exhibitions. He also served as a national adjudicator for the Annual Zimbabwean Heritage Exhibitions, until they ceased to be held in the mid-1990s.
For the ensuing years Monda attended and participated at international conferences, exhibitions and workshops including: the San Francisco Sculpture Biennale in California, covering issues on contemporary sculpture; the 8th Annual International Stone Sculpture Symposium in Washington, Seattle; workshops on Zimbabwean Sculpture at the Kronan Group of Sculptors and designers in Kronan, a workshop in Millesgarden, both in Sweden; the Toronto Arts Council’s 34th Annual
Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, in Canada; the 34th Toyamura International Sculpture Biennale in Hokkaido, Japan; a sculpture symposium, at the Bagni di Lucca Art Festival in Italy; and participated at various painting symposia, including a symposium at Freda Kahlo Museum in, Mexico; and understudied the art of Georgia O’Keefe and Allan Houser in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Monda participated in a Russian study tour and workshops at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krimski Val near Gorky Park, Moscow. These included lectures from Russian artists, architects, critics and curators, a survey of contemporary Russian art. Monda further participated in a joint collaboration with the Moscow Studio and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC, covering intensive etching and print making workshops with American and Russian students, under the supervision of Dennis O’Neill.
In his quest to invigorate African identity and diplomacy, Monda attended the Museum of Black African Art run by the Institute Foundation Des L’art Africain (IFAN), in Paris and participated with other post-colonial African artists to create works with visual statements that articulated their intangible culture and re-invigorate their African identity.
As part of his cultural diplomacy initiative, Monda was a guest speaker at the Center for Study of Black Literature and Culture, at the University of Pennsylvania, and spoke on Zimbabwean Art and Literature Inspired by the Liberation War of Independence and at the University of Washington, Seattle, Center for Innovation, USA, he spoke on the perceptions of African art in African and Euro-American print media.
Currently, Monda holds several Post-Graduate degrees in his field of intellectual discourse, and is the first indigenous Zimbabwean artists to attain a university post-graduate art education and contemporary arts practice, and he is the only Zimbabwean artist to hold three international post-graduate degrees.
As the first Southern African understudy research fellow at Sotheby’s, Christies and Bonham’s Auctions in London and New York, Monda is a noted arts estates evaluator, art advisor and docent corporate art consultant.
While at the National Gallery, Monda worked closely with the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture to encourage youth participation in the creative industry and cognizant of gender parity, he instigated for the Annual Women Artist Award. With the Ministry of Education he worked on the formulation of a Zimbabwe-orientated syllabus inclusive of music, art and cultural heritage studies, and with the Ministry of Justice and Parliamentary Affairs covering issues pertaining to art and law viz-a-viz copyright, intellectual property and protection of traditional knowledge and material culture.
For over thirty years, Monda endeavoured to engage with a wider international audience in the arts searching for answers and addressing issues of cultural identities, industrial fatigue in Africa and the wider global consumerist concerns and cultural under-currents. He believes – “The artistic and aesthetic identity of our society are cultural conduits that expound on the identities of our society and nation and interrogates our worldview of who we are.
Except for Zimbabwe, most countries in the SADC of southern Africa, following their independence, have progressed and established separate ministries of the arts, in keeping with regional standards of cultural governance and in recognition of the far-reaching role of art in diplomacy and economic development. Monda says
In March 1994, Monda co-founded and was a co-director of Springstone International Art Gallery and Cultural Foundation, an independent art and cultural institution based in Avondale, a suburb in the capital, Harare, which held its resounding inaugural exhibition entitled “Old Masters and New Signatures” in April the same year. He was appointed head of research and documentation and served as creative curator, artist-in-residence, and exhibition designer of the numerous thought-provoking art exhibitions held at the gallery, until its unprecedented closure in 2009.
As a sculptor, Monda stands out from his Zimbabwean contemporaries. Given his world schooled art influences he has developed his own unique language in his sculpture, separate from the collective ideology and format of the well-worn “Shona sculpture” of the 1950s, to the present time.
His works focus on African memory, cultural nuances and tropes of spiritual socio-religious beliefs. For Monda contemporary art has no barriers, he says: “art is a quest to obtain a greater understanding of the human condition through awareness of memory, culture, society and beliefs and of belonging”.
At Springstone International Art Gallery he conducted national art and cultural tours for embassy staff, international business people, corporate, diplomats and expatriates seconded to Zimbabwe, covering several aspects of Zimbabwean life, culture and business and promoted Zimbabwean material culture indigenous cuisine.
In 1997, at the invitation of the Zimbabwean Government and trade mission, Springstone International Art Gallery, represented by Monda who curated and designed the Zimbabwean stand, displaying the best of modern Zimbabwean Sculpture as well as Zimbabwean wines at the G15 Summit, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
A luminary in the arts of Zimbabwe, multi-award holder and NAMA Award-winning artist-critic-curator-musician-designer, has shown that his multi-talented side is inexhaustible and have earned him numerous awards, including: The Black Advancement African- American Renaissance Award from Oakland University, Berkley San Francisco; the Sterling Award of Excellence from the Centre of Research and Innovation in Graduate Education from the University of Washington, Seattle, USA; an international arts award at the International Visual Art Critics Conference – IAWAC held in Montreal Canada, for his research and contributions to Contemporary African Art Discourse in Southern Africa.
In the late-1990s, Monda was the overall visual arts monitor for the 4 th -6 th editions of the National Arts Merit Award (NAMA), and was on the Nomination Committee for honorary degrees recommendations for visual artists. For his efforts in promoting art and culture in Zimbabwe he won the NAMA award of “Best Arts Writer” in 2011, and was a nominee for a NAMA award in 2013.
In 2000, Monda received the “Millennium Visual Arts Award” from First Bank, Zimbabwe, for his art work and won the Springstone Wine Label competition award. In 2002 he received the “Award of Distinction” from the Springstone Art Gallery’s Board of Trustees.
He was further awarded a Certificate for his “Dedication to the Development of the Visual Arts and Culture of Zimbabwe”, for his promotion of Women Artists, and Rural Craftspeople of Zimbabwe. In 2010, Monda was ranked amongst the top 11 best Art Critics in the world and 4 th in Africa, by the World Art Critic Review Ratings.
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