Loeries travel to Grahamstown
This year, for the first time, The Loerie Awards Travelling Exhibition will participate in the National Arts Festival in a bid to highlight - and pay tribute to - the role actors, musicians and artists play in the country's advertising, communication and design industries. The Festival, which takes place in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape 29 June - 8 July 2006, is historically a palette of music, drama, comedy and satirical shows put on as part of the main programme, or as fringe and special events.
The Loerie Awards Travelling Exhibition is an interactive collage of all the winning work from the 2005 competition. Explaining the decision to take 2005's winners around the country, Wingwing Mdlulwa, chairman of the organising committee, said that the organisation had several objectives. While the most important of these was to co-ordinate the annual competition and its awards ceremony, paying tribute to those disciplines that contributed to the marketing industry's success was vital.
"The marketing industry relies on the skills of many different people. There's the thinkers - the strategists, the planners, the blue printers; there's the conceptualisers - those who decide how to translate the strategies into a piece of communication that means something to consumers; and then there's the deliverers - the men and women whose talent it is to bring strategies and concepts to life. These are visual, graphic, audio and performing artists.
Appreciation of the magic
"The Loerie Awards Organising Committee wanted to show the industry's appreciation for the magic these people weave and we thought an ideal place to do so would be at the mega of arts and culture in our country, the National Arts Festival.
"I hope those who attend the Festival will visit the exhibition and view the winning work in a new light - that is, consider all the hard work and creative talent that brought the advertising or design to life," he said.
Co-hosted by the SABC, one of the 2006 Loerie Awards' major partners, the exhibition was launched earlier this year at the 2006 Design Indaba Expo held in Cape Town. Over 15 500 people attended the Expo and had the opportunity to see the travelling exhibition, the first of its kind from The Loerie Awards. Since then, it has visited the Vega Brand Communications School campuses in Durban and Johannesburg and The Imagination Lab in Alexandra, as well as the Rand Show.
Grahamstown details
The Travelling Exhibition can be found at the 'St Patrick's Catholic Church Hall', which is in Hill Street in the centre of the town. It will be open from 10am in the morning until late at night. For further information, visit www.nafest.co.za and look for the SABC Stage link under the heading 'festival Programme'.
From the National Arts Festival, the exhibition moves to the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography 3 - 17 August. It will also show at the Margate Art Gallery in September.
Anyone interested in hosting the exhibition, or arranging field trips to view the exhibition - principals and art teachers at secondary schools and tertiary institutions such as technikons as well as youth group co-ordinators, and so on - should visit The Loerie Awards website for more information (www.theloerieawards.co.za/education/exhibition/).
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