South Africa was then under the rule of apartheid, which enforced racial segregation, prioritising the needs of the white minority and marginalising the black and coloured majority.
Among other laws enforcing segregation, the Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned people to live in different regions according to their race.
[3] The period following the 1976 Soweto Uprisings saw a huge surge in community arts centers, largely related to "the burning social and political issues of the time.
"[3] CAP's beginnings were also embedded in the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, which encouraged self-reliance and self-determination among non-white communities.
The center was founded on the idea of "each one teach one"[4] – after an artist had been trained, they would take what they had learned back to their community to help empower the broader society.
[12] CAP activist Ishmael Moss explains, "It was not so much pressure on the art to "toe the line", rather we worked to give the people space.
[16] It has been argued that this community itself, by its multiracial nature, served the anti-apartheid struggle just as well as the art intended to challenge segregation.
"[18] CAP aimed to provide a space for self-definition and healing, where "marginalized people could empower and humanize themselves through creativity.
"[19] In 1976, lecturers from the University of Cape Town began two temporary projects, offering workshops to marginalised artists.
[21] The same year, CAP launched the Media Project, which produced silkscreen posters and was most closely associated with political activism.
The South African Police "raided CAP four times in three months under emergency regulations, removing pamphlets, banners, photographs, diaries, and personal letters,".
However, it has been argued that the NQF's emphasis on the "scientific" methods of art didn't allow for as much exploration of theme which the center had previously focused on.
[9] However, in 2012 the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape reopened the archive and assembled an exhibition to be shown at the Iziko South African National Gallery.
[1] The National Gallery website explains the exhibition is an “open-ended and complex narrative of human experience, imagination, and social and personal relations in the world of apartheid and in its aftermath".
[1] The exhibition was also accompanied by a book by the same title, which shows several of the works on display and pairs them with pieces of literature to create a more complex dialogue around the art and writing.
The exhibition's catalogue essay explains: On the one hand, the resistance works on the show are reminders of an era in which artists responded to a crisis of the human condition resulting from apartheid.
In both respects, they invite a re-imagining of political society in the face of unemployment, poverty, disease, unequal education, persistent racial divisions and new class polarizations.