• Providence: Pretoria, South Africa
• Who is Lethabo Huma?
• The NFT artwork craze.
• TimePieces: Times’ new NFT community initiative
• A “Safe haven”

While relatively new to professional Digital Art, Pretoria-born artist Lethabo Huma is bringing classical, analogue painting techniques to the New Media space. With an already impressive catalogue, she uses her vibrant, expressive digital paintings as a portal to express her emotions & life experiences and the world around her.

Huma is also one of the artists at the forefront of the booming NFT artwork craze, According to Exchange Data, NFTs have an almost US$28BN market cap to date and, between January and April 2021, the NFT art market grew by more than more than 800%.

Early this year Huma’s work sold on two of the world’s largest auction houses: Natively Digital and Sotheby’s & Christies Proof of Sovereignty.

Importantly, Lethabo was selected to feature in Time’s Magazine’s “Build A Better Future” project, having been nominated to participate in the project by Michah Johnson, an esteemed American visual artist. The project forms part of TimePieces, Times’ new NFT community initiative in which only 40 creatives globally were selected to participate.

Humas’ emotive piece, “Safe Haven”, examines the protection of black girls by creating safe spaces for them to express themselves in.

“I feel that the world can be so cruel and dismissive to young girls growing up. I feel it is so important to nurture that emotional, mental, spiritual well-being of a child, because I believe your childhood defines how you see the world and the kind of person you become,” said Huma.

In the fusion of technology and art, Lethabo Humas’ oeuvre works with blackness and her identity, a candor for which her work is described as irresistibly fresh and African, but not cliched.