Cause Index

South African Visual Arts Historians

South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) is an organisation of academics and professionals that seek to advance the professional practice of art history and visual culture in South Africa and to forge relations with practitioners from other disciplines and regions.

Our country has a relatively small group of people working in or allied with the discipline of the history of the visual arts. Most of them are members of SAVAH.

Since the late 1980s, and with the subsequent lifting of sanctions, we have been actively trying to adapt to the changing role of our discipline in South Africa, to transform the demographics of the society and to forge links with international art historians in both Africa and the west. To this end we formally allied our organisation with CIHA (Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art).