Bulumko Mbete is a South African artist and writer with a multicultural heritage, currently working between Johannesburg and the United States. Her practice engages with materiality, transmission, and memory, drawing on artisanal and domestic practices historically carried by women in Southern Africa.
Working with textiles, beadwork, weaving, and natural dyeing, Mbete approaches materials as systems of knowledge. Through craft-based methodologies, she creates frameworks for communicating generational traditions and gestures of love. Textile objects in her work function as living archives, holding familial, social, and cultural histories.
Her research extends to the archive as a site for creative storytelling. Using photographs, textiles, and clothing, she explores family geographies in relation to South African history and their impact on migration, labour, farming, and love. Her work positions craft knowledge as an indigenous epistemology while engaging with domestic, ritual, and colonial histories.
Mbete completed her BFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art (University of Cape Town) and is currently an MFA candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2023, she received the Cassirer Welz Award and the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award.
Recent solo exhibitions include Like the sky, I’ve been too quiet at Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg (2023), and I’ve known rivers at the Bag Factory, Johannesburg (2023). Selected group exhibitions include autopseis at blank projects, Cape Town (2025); Between Words and Worlds at The Bridge Gallery, Paris (2024); and Gather II at SMAC Gallery, Cape Town (2024).