Artist Feature - Madikela Dikgale: Bringing It Back Home
As a high school senior in Limpopo, South Africa, Madikela Dikgale knew she wanted to be a graphic designer.
“We had a career day where we were asked to dress up like our ideal job,” she remembers. “Many people showed up as doctors and accountants, but I showed up dressed like a hipster!”
It may have been an apt fashion sense to adopt, but it was also the only way she knew how to represent what she wanted to become. It was 2012, and as she puts it, “there was not a lot of information about graphic design available to high school students.”
Today, Madikela is an accomplished graphic designer, doing her part to help build an international community through art and graphic design - but like so many others from small communities, she had to leave home to get there.
MTV Base TVC Board, 2017
After she honed the skills she needed by studying design, she moved to Johannesburg. There, she expanded her portfolio to include art direction and film, and gradually began building a new community for herself in the city. It didn’t take long before she found herself meeting others from her own small town, people who were thriving in their career fields only after moving to the city.
This phenomenon sometimes referred to as “brain drain”, occurs when talented and educated youth leave the places where they grew up to seek economic opportunities elsewhere.
“Most people I know from home that are flourishing are doing so in Cape Town or internationally,” Madikela notes, adding that “more must be done locally” if smaller communities want to keep their young people from moving away.
Limpopo, where she grew up, is a rural town in Northeast South Africa, a place known for its art, primarily sculpture, painting, and music. Even so, she observes, the art community there was — and remains — “very closed.”
As someone from a small town, Madikela’s story resonated with me. Like her, I am part of this group of young professionals often referred to as “creatives”: everyone from photographers to freelance writers, graphic designers to web interface specialists. We tend to congregate in cities, near tech start-ups and digital communication firms.
National Clean Water Collective Artwork, 2020
With the ever-growing presence of social media, “community” as both a concept and phenomenon has expanded to include like-minded folks from across the globe.
Platforms like Instagram and Facebook allow us to share and participate in each other’s lives from afar, and many brick-and-mortar communities have formed from these ethereal bonds. Aside from being a business tool, social media has allowed users to form new professional sectors, maintain international networks, and, simply put, do things that would have been impossible a generation ago.
In one such circumstance, The National Clean Water Collective, a New York-based nonprofit, contacted Madikela and asked her to create a painting for them to sell at auction. The proceeds will benefit their work helping the people of Flint, Michigan address the crisis with their municipal water supply.
The style of Madikela’s painted portraits, photographic and crisp in their color and tone, evokes familiarity with the subject. The tap's simplicity and the boy's gaze — we are full of questions and answers at once. This approach has become characteristic of Madikela’s work, as her skill as a photographer translates to gorgeous digital paintings. Her latest release, The Faces Series, showcases portraits that capture a simple intimacy and luminous personality reminiscent of 17th century Rembrandts.
AtoSong, Face Series, 2019
When asked about the creation of these portraits, Madikela tells me: “I wanted to have greater creative agency so I would not have to rely on other people to bring an idea to life. My portraits began by accident, as I wanted to try a different technique.”
“I made one for a friend and then it picked up momentum; now I do commissions.”
When asked about the people depicted in the portraits, Madikela explains, “They are ordinary people. I decided to take my skills back home to my community. To embrace all the individual faces out there. At one point I wanted to do an exhibition but COVID has paused a lot of plans.”
Like many artists during this time, Madikela’s career is almost entirely online, since she is currently unable to generate income through in-person gallery and networking events.
Unicorn, Face Series, 2019
While the growth of Internet commerce certainly creates opportunities for people in fields like graphic design, and these opportunities can lead to positive outcomes, we are still left with the problem of trends like “brain drain” and barriers to education in rural areas. As global dividing lines blur amid the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced each day, online communities seem to be taking the place of local ones. Young people with ambitions to join the digital “elite” gravitate to magnet cities like Johannesburg, leaving areas that aren’t attracting “creatives” behind.
One program attempting to bridge the gap between career education in rural and urban areas is Umuzi Academy, a non-profit that provides workplace-centered training for young professionals in South Africa with historically limited access to education. Through this program, Madikela had the opportunity to work with high-profile clients like Afropunk and corporate film agencies to create short films, meeting accomplished producers, animators, and photographers along the way.
So how do we truly balance the beneficial aspects of technological advancement with its ostracizing effect on rural communities?
“The way I see it, it’s all about collaboration,” says Madikela. “Let’s put what we know out into the community.”
Umuzi, 2019
“Community” is a concept Madikela evokes often, both in reference to her hometown — where she is now living and working again — and to the larger network of online connections of which she is now a part. Both are important to her, which is why she is passionate about voicing her concern about the one-way flow of creatives who leave in pursuit of their careers. She believes a big part of the problem is that people in rural areas often do not value fields like graphic design because they simply don’t see a practical need for it. She’s trying to change that perception, spreading the message that design is something that ultimately can increase the effectiveness and profitability of any business, whether it serves a global marketplace or a tiny rural village.
With passion and vigor, young professionals like Madikela are bringing skills like graphic design and art direction to areas where they are still considered unnecessary, but she insists it does not have to continue to be such an arduous path.
“When we don’t nourish talent because of lack of resources, people lose passion. The habit of closed artistic communities isn’t going to work. Knowledge is power and sharing that with the next generation helps them realize that they don’t have to go away from home to be successful. We can break the cycle. We can utilize the power of online communities to generate sufficient momentum for the next generation to find the skills they need, and enable them to follow their passions without leaving for the big city.”
I am reminded of biologist Patrick Geddes’ now-famous sentiment, “Think global, act local.” Madikela leaves us with a similarly wise attitude, the mark of a true artist: “We can all move forward together.”
For more about Madikela, you can follow her on Instagram, Twitter, Behance, or LinkedIn.
Published Mar 18, 2021
Updated Mar 6, 2024
Published in Issue IX: Community
