The first thing that strikes you about Gliding Through The Gallery is not the art. It is the people. On any given glide, a group of between 30 and 40 strangers gathers on a Saturday morning outside a gallery somewhere in Johannesburg. Some have never set foot inside an art gallery before.
Others have spent years admiring artworks from afar, convinced that the spaces were not built for them.
There are young professionals, creatives, first-time collectors and the simply curious.
By the end of the day, many leave not only with a deeper appreciation for art but with new friendships and a sense that they, too, belong in the spaces.
For founder Mpumi Mayisa, the feeling of belonging is precisely the point.
On 4 July, Gliding Through The Gallery will celebrate its first anniversary. In just 12 months, the initiative has grown from a social media experiment into one of the most exciting grassroots art education projects in South Africa, creating pathways into a world that has often appeared intimidating, exclusive and inaccessible.
“I had been working in the art world for about eight years,” says the 34-year-old Mayisa. “Last year, when I left my gallery job and went independent, I started making videos online, of me going to galleries and just enjoying them, because that’s something that I really like to do.”
What began as casual content for the curator and art adviser quickly revealed a much larger problem.
People, particularly on TikTok, repeatedly told her that while they were curious about contemporary art, they did not feel welcome in galleries.
“They would say: ‘I’m interested in art but I don’t feel welcome in those spaces,’” Mayisa recalls. “I started making vlogs showing people how easy it is to access galleries, that they’re free, sharing the addresses and everything else.
“But people said: ‘Yes, now I know where to go, but I still don’t know what I’m looking at and I don’t have anyone to guide me.’”
That gap between curiosity and confidence became the foundation of Gliding Through The Gallery.
Part gallery tour, part art education programme and part community-building exercise, the initiative
positions Mayisa as both facilitator and bridge between art institutions and audiences.
“I asked myself: ‘What does it mean for me to become a facilitator between these spaces and people who are interested in art?’” she says. “A lot of people are curious about art but they don’t necessarily know what it has to do with them.”
In many ways, Mayisa is addressing a long-standing problem in South Africa’s art ecosystem. While galleries have become more diverse over the years, they can feel intimidating to those unfamiliar with the language, etiquette and codes that govern the art world.
There is often an unspoken assumption that gallery visitors should possess a certain level of knowledge: that they should understand conceptual frameworks, know artists by name or confidently discuss mediums and historical references. For many, particularly black audiences who have historically been excluded from the institutions, walking into a gallery can feel like entering a foreign country without a map.
Gliding Through The Gallery offers that map. The experience is carefully curated. No two glides are the same.
Mayisa spends days independently visiting exhibitions across the city before deciding which galleries and artists will form part of a particular itinerary. Once the route has been selected, tickets are released online.
Social media has been central to the initiative’s growth.
“We’ve really been able to leverage the power of social media,” she says. “Once you build a beautiful visual library of the experience, people feel like they want to be part of it.”
The visual storytelling has proved compelling. Videos documenting previous glides show groups moving through exhibitions, listening attentively during artist walkabouts, laughing over lunch and engaging in conversations that continue long after leaving gallery walls.
Attendance is deliberately capped at between 30 and 40 participants.
“We keep it intimate,” Mayisa says.
What initially started as a few hours spent moving through galleries has since evolved into something much richer.
Participants wanted more time. They wanted to unpack what they had seen, ask questions and continue conversations with artists and fellow attendees. In response, Mayisa introduced the Breaking Bread series.
After visiting exhibitions, the group gathers at a restaurant or café to share a meal.
It is here, Mayisa says, that the real magic often happens.
“What I didn’t anticipate before starting the Glide was just how community-centred it would become,” she says. “When we break bread, that’s when the community really comes together. People connect and art is the thing that brought us together.”
The initiative’s evolution has also revealed an untapped audience of potential collectors.
Many participants arrive as what Mayisa affectionately calls “art curious”. Yet over time, some begin expressing an interest in purchasing artworks, collecting and supporting artists.
Recognising this, Gliding Through The Gallery has expanded beyond tours to include collector engagements, dinners and other activations designed to nurture new collectors.
“There was this untapped market of people who are interested in investing in art,” she says.
“People wanted to collect but didn’t feel educated enough or welcomed enough to do so.”
The significance of the work extends beyond audience development or increasing sales.
For Mayisa, it is political.
“Africans are the custodians of the work that is created on this continent,” she says. “The works created by artists hold our stories, our lineage and a lot of knowledge.”
Her concern is rooted in history. African cultural objects were once violently removed from the continent through colonial theft and extraction.
Today, although the circumstances are different, significant amounts of African contemporary art continue to leave the continent through international sales and acquisitions.
“It is important for people to access the knowledge that has been created for them and for the custodians of this work to claim it,” Mayisa says.
“For a long time African work was stolen from the continent and now it is being purchased from the continent at a very fast rate. It is important for us to keep some of the work here, to understand it and to be in relationship with it.”
As Gliding Through The Gallery celebrates its first year, Mayisa’s ambitions are growing.
The initiative is preparing to take its first international glide to the Venice Biennale in August, with plans for additional global excursions under way.
Closer to home, new projects are in development, including an online platform that will allow audiences to purchase artworks directly.
“We’re moving from helping people become art curious to helping them become invested in African art,” she says.
In a country where access to cultural spaces remains uneven, Gliding Through The Gallery has done something deceptively simple yet profoundly important: it has made galleries feel human.
And perhaps that is why, just a year in, so many people keep coming back.