Friends of Johannesburg Art Gallery
Client: Friends of the Johannesburg Art Gallery
Period: 2014-2026
Multi-stakeholder partnerships
Arts, culture & heritage
01 — The sneak-peek
The friends a great gallery needed
The Johannesburg Art Gallery has anchored the city's art life since 1915. When inner-city decline thinned its support, BBA Liminal helped revive the Friends of JAG — and has stewarded the organisation for more than eight years, rebuilding the partnerships, programmes and public that keep the gallery alive.
02 — The liminal moment
Designed by Edwin Lutyens, the Johannesburg Art Gallery opened in Joubert Park in 1915, a permanent home for the city's first public art collection, and has stood at the epicentre of Johannesburg's art establishment ever since. Its support body, the Friends of JAG, had always helped it reach new audiences. Then the flight of capital from the inner city in the 1990s saw support for both the gallery and the Friends fall away.
03 — The transformation
Reviving the Friends, building the partnerships. We helped bring the Friends of JAG back and have been its lead creative agency for more than eight years — arranging mutually beneficial corporate partnerships, running fundraising and educational outreach, and managing the community and public awareness that keep the gallery in view among the public, local government and corporates.
A centenary, marked in silver. For JAG's 2015 centenary — a hundred years of the Lutyens building — we facilitated a collaboration between the South African Mint and the Friends, conceptualising three limited-edition sterling silver commemorative medallions, their proceeds going to the Friends' everyday support of the gallery.
Preserving a movement's archive. We helped the Friends win a US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation grant to protect the legacy of the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA), founded in 1978 to make art study possible for black artists in Johannesburg. With JAG's curators, we are digitising the archive — 17,894 artworks, artefacts and documents — to make it accessible to all South Africans and scholars worldwide.
The FUBA Archive
Museum Week
04 — The craft
Unlocking the past, opening the doors
More than eight years stewarding the Friends of JAG: corporate partnerships and fundraising, the centenary silver medallions with the SA Mint, the FUBA archive digitisation, branding for the Art of Comics exhibition, and JAG's #MuseumWeek presence — all keeping a 1915 gallery close to its city.
Centenary programme
FOJ digital
05 — The validation of purpose
“Being one of the #FRIENDSOFJAG has its perks, including lectures and tours, studio visits, invitations to openings, a regular newsletter, discount on catalogues published by JAG, discount on venue hire and much more.”
14+ years as lead creative agency
17,894 FUBA works & documents digitised
110+ years since JAG opened in 1915
Partnership origination
Brand & communications strategy
Facilitation & convening
Capacity building
Print production
Signage & wayfinding
Campaign design
Digital strategy
Brand identity design
Heritage communications
Public value framing
Long-term stewardship
Multi-stakeholder alignment
Brand platform development
