Artist's taxi hand signs on show at MoMA
- By Deborah Minors
Artist-anthropologist Susan Woolf, who has had her taxi hand sign artworks immortalised in the Taxi Hand Signs guidebook (2007), on stamps (2010) and in symbols to accompany Braille labels for the blind, has expanded her reach to the Talk to Me exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Thirty thousand people daily visit MoMA, where Woolf represents South Africa in an exhibition category called Double Entendre, which explores issues of communication. Fourteen of her artworks appear in the exhibition, which runs until 7 November 2011.
A concurrent local exhibition, Dialogue in the Dark, runs until 31 October 2011 at the Sci Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown, Johannesburg.
Woolf began the academic component of her art/anthropology cross-disciplinary doctorate, “Taxi Hand Signs in Social Spaces” at Wits in 2009. She is the first person in South Africa to compile an art collection demonstrating hand signs used by commuters to indicate their destinations to taxi drivers.
The South African Post Office brought out a stamp collection with some of the artworks Woolf had made to illustrate the hand movements involved in the language. Declared the fifth most important stamps in the world for 2010 by StampNews.com, taxi hand-sign stamps are now collectors’ items.
All the hand-sign artworks are available in a Braille version to assist the visually impaired, who are among the 12-million commuters who use South Africa’s informal transport network daily.