The development of the "<i>Interacting with Culture"</i> mural in Jewel City

This item documents the design and production of Mural 5, part of a mural series commissioned for the Jewel City precinct in the Johannesburg CBD. The precinct is a mixed-use redevelopment by Divercity and iThemba Property, with sponsors including Plascon. Coordinated by an arts curation and project management team working with Parts & Labour, the initiative commissioned diverse artists in 2019 to create site-specific works across the precinct, intended to uplift residents and serve as narrative destinations in their own right.The record traces the commissioning process (including site identification (a face-brick wall on Block 5, fronting Main Street), technical surveying, quotation and budgeting, and the formal client brief) through to the design development of Mural 5 by illustrator Zhi (Zinhle) Zulu, titled Interacting with Culture. Moving from an initial pattern-based concept to a narrative one, the mural follows a young woman's journey through the Johannesburg cityscape, gathering symbols of Zulu cultural attire (amacici, isongo, umgexo, isigqoko) as she travels by taxi across four walls, her scale shifting to reflect growth and struggle to belonging. The sequence culminates in an "ancestral place," rendered as eleven running iterations of the figure, which evokes both motion for passing vehicles and ancestral multiplicity, reinforcing the concept of Ubuntu ("I am because we are"). This dataset documents the full lifecycle of a commissioned public artwork, from brief to symbolic resolution, capturing the reasoning behind a significant work of graphic heritage in Johannesburg's inner-city regeneration.