Georgie Papageorge grew from the soul of South Africa. Born there, raised there, rooted there, she consciously chose to stay—through the rich years of plenty for white South Africans, through the terror and fear that escorted out years of apartheid and swept the country into endless change.

She makes art from the violence, the warring, the death, and then the atonement. Revolution, colonialism, the Catholic Church, the nightly news on television, the Ndebele, the landscape of the great Kalahari Desert, her own family compound: from such as these she draws both her themes and her symbols. Her themes are huge; her reach is gigantic; the resulting work is monumental. Her sculpture, Suspension, held its own when photographed from a helicopter on an African gold mine dump. That same work was moved to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City to serve as a contemporary altarpiece. Against the architecture of a gigantic Gothic cathedral, it still held its own.