Johannesburg’s art world gathered in high spirits last month to toast a milestone: 15 years of the Cassirer Welz Award, that glittering platform where tomorrow’s brightest talents are given the room and the residency to become.
Founded in 2011 by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer in memory of her husband, Reinhold Cassirer, the award has evolved into a cornerstone of SA’s cultural calendar. Later renamed to also honour Stephan Welz, the revered founder of Strauss & Co, it is as much a love letter to the arts as it is a promise to the future.
Fifteen years on, the promise holds strong. Sponsored by Strauss & Co, in partnership with Bag Factory Artists’ Studios and with the added support this year of the French Institute of SA, the award continues to offer something more valuable than a glittering cheque: time, mentorship, and space to create. A three-month residency at the Bag Factory, ending in a solo exhibition, is an opportunity that has shaped careers, defined voices, and encouraged SA and its neighbours to see the world through fresh eyes.
From a sea of applications, five finalists emerged this year: Fiona Davhana, Ditiro Mashigo, Swaline Mkhonto, Chidimma Nwafor, and Smiso Cele. And it was Cele, the Johannesburg-born artist whose practice knits together ecology, geopolitics, and the intimate weight of personal history, who walked away with the accolade for 2025. His work, deeply rooted in place and the politics of belonging, takes on the big questions of how we live with the past while moving into a freer future.
“It feels like a purpose fulfilled,” the artist said after the winner’s announcement. “I’ll get to show my work and get the message out there. But I don’t work from an intellectual standpoint, I work from what I encounter in my daily life and the work I used in my application for this award, it’s rooted in how I grew up in Auckland Park,” he said, referencing the multimedia collage and steel and wood sculpture on display.
“I grew up in a very small house and my room was used as a storage space. It had a lot of random objects that occupied the space between being in a shed and being thrown away so I started working from that room and moving into other broader scenes like engaging with the histories of places I find myself in.”
But this year was not only about the coronation of a new winner. To mark the award’s fifteenth anniversary, Bag Factory will host “Trajectories”, a group exhibition opening on August 30, celebrating the constellation of artists who have shaped, and been shaped by, this award over the past decade and a half. It’s a rare chance to trace the threads of emerging voices as they grow into leading figures, to witness the ripple effect of support and belief made manifest in canvas, sculpture, and installation.
“Supporting the 15th edition of the Cassirer Welz Award reflects our wider mission to nurture cultural exchange and creative talent,” remarked Dorine Lebreton of the French Institute of SA. It’s a sentiment that rings true for anyone present at the event: the sense that investing in artists is, in fact, investing in society itself.
And so, the Cassirer Welz Award turns fifteen. Not with nostalgia, but with champagne fizzing, conversations buzzing, and the art world’s gaze firmly set on the future. In the work of Cele, and in the long line of winners who have come before him, one glimpses what Gordimer and Cassirer intended: an enduring faith in creativity’s power to illuminate, challenge and transform.
