By Gabriel Packard

New York, Dec 28 (IPS) - The photograph shows the bright primary colours of a southern African Ndebele mural done in the traditional earth-based paints that must be renewed after the rains.

In front of the mural sit two women artists. Their necks are ringed in metal from their shoulders to their chins. Yet more metal rings stretch from their knees to their ankles. The patterns and the colours on their shawls, beaded hats, ankle bands, and headbands, harmonise with the mural on the wall behind them. Between the two women is a two-year-old girl.

The girl is now 22, and works as an administrator at the Ndebele Cultural Centre in Mabhoko near Pretoria, South Africa. The two women - her mother, Angelina Ndimande and grandmother, Francina Ndimande - are the two teachers there. "To paint is to express joy," says Francina. "Painting is in my soul."

The Centre was started in September 2001 by photojournalist Margaret Courtney-Clarke, whose photographs of African women's art are currently on display at New York's Schomburg Centre.

At the Ndebele Centre, young women and girls learn beadwork, drawing and painting in the traditional Ndebele patterns. They also learn to decorate ostrich eggs, tins, bottles and greeting cards. But the Centre is more than an art school. The 50 students, ages four to 17 can also learn about traditional farming methods, nutrition, and social issues such as AIDS.

Francina, Angelina and two teenaged students from the Ndebele Centre came to New York to paint a wall mural in the glass-fronted Edison Gallery during the Schomburg's current Art of African Women exhibition. Passers by could watch them at work.

This is very much in the spirit of the exhibition, in which art is a process, not just a finished product.

The title of the exhibition - The Art of African Women: Empowering Traditions - contains a double meaning that hints at the nature of the photographs on display. The show is not just about the art of African women (as in the art that African women produce); it is equally concerned with African women (as in African women as art).

Many of the photographs are of the women artists in the process of creating. And many of the women in the photographs are inseparable from the art they produce.

The Berber women from northern Africa, for example, have tattoos and henna markings on their chins, foreheads, hands and feet. The markings indicate family membership and marital status. The women weave symbolic patterns into shawls: different colours and sizes of stripes show which ethnic clan they belong to.

Courtney-Clarke has had a lifetime of respect for Africa. She grew up on a ranch on the edge of the Namib Desert in Namibia, and as a child she would play with African children. This nurtured a cultural flexibility that helped her to know the women artists and the art, leading her to spend 20 years hitch-hiking around African taking photographs.

"I saw the art disappearing in front of my eyes," she says. "I returned to Ghana after nine years, and there was hardly anything left. In South Africa, there are very few homes painted in the traditional style."

Most of the art forms featured in Courtney-Clarke's photographs are disappearing. This made her want to record the art, the first person to do so, she says. "Most people know African art as masks and wood carving, bronzes and terra cotta work, gold weights and jewellery. All of these things were made by men," she says.

"They were things that could be carried away in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by colonialists and kept in museums."

"For many reasons, no one focused on mural art," she adds. "Mural art is rural and remote, it can't be carried away, and it changes with the seasons - then washes away in the rain. It is ephemeral. No one even documented it."

This is also partly because of a fundamental difference between the traditional African and Western concepts of art, she says.

The Western world often asks, ''does life reflect art, or does art reflect life?'' Neither of these options applies to the tattoos on the faces of the Berber women. For them life is art, and art is life. As one Berber proverb says, ''Life is a loom on which God holds the threads."

Similarly, in Burkina Faso, the decoration of homes with murals is an extension of the practical act of plastering homes - a job done by women. The art is practical; it is integrated into daily life. It is not produced to be sold or to hang on the wall of a museum.

Unfortunately this is a main reason why these arts are being lost. As the way of life changes, the art forms are discarded.

"Art is always relevant, especially when it is created against all odds," Courtney-Clarke says. "But mural art is dying largely because of migration to the cities. The cities aren't prepared for this mass-migration, and many women end up in a cycle of child rape and prostitution."

"This is one of the reasons why I created the Ndebele Foundation," she says. "It helps women avoid this cycle."

The director of The Art of African Women exhibition, Roberta Yancy, stresses the importance of allowing women to use traditional art in such a productive way. "This exhibition is about survival, both spiritual and economic," she says.

"I didn't want people to go away from this exhibition thinking that it was just about the past," says Yancy. "The Art of African Women is also about the future. It is contemporary."

The Art of African Women: Empowering Traditions runs through 30 March 2003 at the Schomburg Centre. For further details, go to http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html (END/IPS/NA/AE/CR/GP/ML/02)