Artists

John Koenakeefe Motlhakangna (known professionally as John Mohl) was born in 1903, the son of a carpenter/sculptor, in the small town of Dinokana near Zeerust in the Northwest Province of South Africa.

As a child all Mohl wanted to do was draw, and would draw on rocks and use clay to fashion animals. When his father threatened to take him out of school to tend goats, the Reverend Alfred John Haile, then principal of the London Mission Society’s Tiger Kloof Educational Institution (known as Moeding in Setswana) intervened and implored his father to allow him to continue to study and draw. Mohl graduated from Moeding as a teacher and went on to study art in Namibia (then German South West Africa) at the Windhoek School of Art. With support from the London Mission Society and the Lutheran Church, he spent five years in Düsseldorf, Germany, studying at the Kunstakadamie. At this time he Germanised and shortened his surname to Mohl.

Mohl returned to South Africa and settled in Sophiatown in 1944 where he started teaching art from his home, making him the first black art teacher to establish an independent art school. It was known as The White Studio. He also established the Apollo Gallery in Johannesburg using a pseudonym, Frank van Melten, since under the apartheid laws pertaining at the time, as a black man, he was not allowed to open a gallery in an area designated as ‘white’.

Mohl was a founding member in 1960 of the popular group Artists under the Sun, which held open-air art exhibitions in Johannesburg at the Zoo Lake and Joubert Park.

He died in Soweto in 1985 and was posthumously awarded the “Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for his excellent contribution to the field of art. His works remain an inspiration to many budding and established artists”.