Hair Matters brings together 41 works from Georgina Jaffee’s collection, currently on view at Strauss & Co’s Woodstock gallery in Cape Town ahead of its sale on 21 February 2026.
Over many years, Cape Town art collector Georgina Jaffee has built a focused collection of contemporary art centred on one idea: hair. Across painting, photography, sculpture, textile works and installation, the collection looks at hair as a subject, a material and a marker of identity. With a strong focus on African and Afro-diasporic perspectives, the works connect personal experience to wider histories and cultural meaning.
That collection is now publicly visible in Hair Matters: A Selection of Works from the Georgina Jaffee Collection, an exhibition currently on view at Strauss & Co’s Woodstock gallery in Cape Town. The exhibition precedes the sale of Jaffee’s extraordinary collection, which will take place on 21 February 2026 at 4pm and forms part of Strauss & Co’s February programme around the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
The exhibition brings together 41 works by artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, textile and installation. While diverse in form, the works are united by a shared engagement with hair as something deeply personal and socially charged, particularly within African and Afro-diasporic contexts.
‘Hair has always mattered to me. Having my own frizzy hair and keeping it long, it was always a self-identifier, with people often commenting on and recognising me through it. My father would tell me to brush it, tie it up and control it. Walking the streets of Woodstock in Cape Town, with my frizz blowing in the wind, a young man with wild hair also being battered uncontrollably in the gale, called out to me in recognition of something shared’ – Georgina Jaffee
Artists featured include Ifeoma U. Anyaeji, Sethembile Msezane, Sabelo Mlangeni, Richard Mudariki, Tracey Rose, Hank Willis Thomas and Dominique Zinkpè, among others. Together, the selection spans multiple generations and geographies, with artists represented from across Africa, the United States, China, Europe and Latin America.
Rather than treating hair as a decorative or symbolic shorthand, the works in Hair Matters approach it as something lived and contested. In many cases, hair becomes a way of thinking through race, gender, colonial histories, spirituality and bodily autonomy. Some works engage hair directly as a physical material, while others use it as an entry point into broader social and political narratives.
Highlights include Anyaeji’s installation A No M’eba, Ma Na Anoho Mu Eba (I Am Here, But I Am Not Here – Presence, Absence), constructed from braided plastic bags, and Zinkpè’s Petite Princesse, an assemblage of sculpted Ìbejì figures forming a larger body crowned with matted hair. These sit alongside historically significant photographs by Drum magazine photographer Bob Gosani and works by Fikile Magadlela, a key figure in Black Consciousness-era art.
To accompany the exhibition and sale, Strauss & Co has invited four curators to contribute short written responses to selected works. The essays form part of the auction house’s annual Curatorial Voices initiative and reflect a range of generational and disciplinary perspectives. Contributors include Natasha Becker, curator of African Art at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, alongside emerging South African curators Jared Leite, Vida Madighi-Oghu and Sihle Motsa.
“The collection demonstrates how an intimate subject can open onto wider questions of power, race, gender and resistance. While the works engage contemporary practice, they are also rooted in history.” – Kirstie Pietersen, Head of Sale, Strauss & Co
Across these texts and the works themselves, hair emerges not as a fixed theme but as an evolving point of debate, shaped by history and continually reinterpreted in the present. In a South African context in particular, hair has long been a site of cultural and political tension, and the exhibition acknowledges that legacy while placing it in conversation with global diasporic experiences.
Hair Matters: A Selection of Works from the Georgina Jaffee Collection is currently on view at Strauss & Co’s Woodstock gallery in Cape Town. The auction takes place on 21 February 2026 at 4pm.
