The Instagram Page Preserving South African Album Art

Online archives are liminal spaces, often existing long enough to hold the spark of the moment but failing to outlast their half-lives once the inevitable burst happens. The blog era codified culture throughout the 2010s, yet one would be hard-pressed to find a majority of those websites with their information still intact — from images to YouTube embeds and beyond — if they are online at all. Valuable domain names are often redirected to entirely new servers. A 2024 Pew Research Center study estimated that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible, a fact that doesn't bode well for future knowledge bases.

Lwandile Nyakuza sees this porous online ecosystem as a starting point, a temporal window into a greater conversation about how art affects the world. As founder of the Eyewaslistening page on Instagram, and with feet planted in both the design and music worlds — he makes and releases music as ByLwansta — Nyakuza has created the perfect space to merge his passions and share the results with an audience engaged by a fairly niche subject: album art, especially in the streaming era.

The page is valuable internet real estate. South African cover art rests neatly on the grid, wrestling against its own imposition, each frame a gateway to stylistic choices: the art form — photography, illustration, or fine art? — the layout, how the sonic and the visual collaborate, and what that engagement produces. For him, it's a way to dial in on his passion, to establish localized counterparts to an international affair, and, hopefully, to contribute to visual literacy in an age where images are the backbone of how we process daily life.

"I found myself in a situation where I hadn't thought of a cover that I liked in the South African context, and I was like, that's clearly on me. Just to rectify that, I was like, cool, let me actually do some proper research; let me create a platform for myself where I also get to get these conversations in around these covers, and even speak about some of the stuff that I've worked on," he says. The reckoning happened after a friend roasted him for not including South African album art on a list he'd been asked to contribute to.

He adds: "[Eyewaslistening is] a study to find out what creators were thinking, what intentionality looks like, that relationship between music and how it's visually communicated. If there is, by any chance, a South African identity, if that's something that anyone is looking for. Any common threads in the different covers."

The first post went up in March 2025, and this thread in our conversation introduces a new way to appreciate the page. He was intentional in the wireframing, ensuring that the curation lands, resonates, and leaves a lasting impact. 

"Instagram has those three grids, so what I do is theme a grid," he says. 

The first three posts belong to Roho, Bongeziwe Mabandla, and Filah Lah Lah, and all center light in one form or another in addition to utilizing photography as a medium. The next three are a combination of illustration and photography; the South African jazz compilation Indaba Is, Freshlyground's Nomvula, and ByLwansta's SPIJØNGET (Chapter Two) all have to do with the mouth. And so it goes — YoungstaCPT side-by-side with BCUC; Thandi Ntuli, Desire Maria, and Solo Ntsizwa forming a trifecta of monochrome prestige; Tumi and the Volume, Tumi Mogorosi, The Brother Moves On. The visuals and their curation make the page sing. 

Each post is a deep dive with photographers, illustrators, and stylists. PR$DNT HONEY speaks about the open brief for Indaba Is, and how the intention was to "create an artwork that felt familiar, yet not," while Lidudumalingani Mnqombothi shares how his and Bongeziwe Mabandla's process was informed by conversations around the music, not necessarily the music itself. Felipe Mazibuko recalls how Simphiwe Dana's personal transformation informed the choices he made when styling her cover for Kulture Noir. "It was quite clear that it was a Noir/dark and deep journey that also translated into her composition and songwriting of the whole album," Mazibuko says.

Long before the thumbnail, Black South African visual artists treated the record sleeve as both gallery wall and battleground. The late Rashid Vally, of As-Shams record label and Kohinoor record store fame, commissioned daring young Black artists, chief among them Hargreaves Ntukwana, to create cover art for his As-Shams/The Sun jazz releases. Ntukwana's paintings hung throughout the record store, exchanged over the years for records and financial assistance. One of them ended up on Abdullah Ibrahim's (then known as Dollar Brand) Underground in Africa, while others appeared on albums such as Tete Mbambisa's Did You Tell Your Mother (1979).

Dumile Feni lent his figures to Hugh Masekela's exile-era opus Home Is Where the Music Is (1972), an album whose title came from Keorapetse Kgositsile's poem "For Hughie Masekela." Poet, painter, musician, and linguist Lefifi Tladi, of the Malombo Jazz Messengers and Dashiki Poets, ran a contemporary Black art gallery in Pretoria before the apartheid state shut it down and forced him into exile. He went on to create record sleeves that attempted to undo the work of apartheid galleries by placing Black abstraction and portraiture into homes and record bins.

The point, Nyakuza says, is to cover as much ground as he can. At times, a month goes by without a post because he's still trying to track down the creative personnel behind the work. "I'm trying to find the creator, or I'm trying to get a response. Something I learned with the Simphiwe Dana cover for Kulture Noir is that she's the graphic designer behind it. I was struggling to get a response from them. I always wait it out because I think it's important to get the insights. I always try to be patient and follow up as much as I can, and maybe find someone who can introduce me," he says.

The curator traces the page's origins back to 2018. "I was in my final year of my Graphic Design studies, and I was getting a little restless with the assignments and briefs we were getting. It felt very unrelatable."

His final year came with the freedom to choose his own topic, and his mind immediately went to a project that would put his music front and center. His passion was to "bring music into the classroom," he tells us.

"I'd go home with my skills, and I'd package CDs in my room, design stuff. I felt like I had an opportunity now to bring that into the class, into my everyday life."

His final paper, about cover art, was titled The Significance of Visual Communication on the Consumption of Music in the Digital Age — "a mouthful," he jokes. It tracked the evolution of cover art — what he later terms "cover design" from the vinyl era through to the modern day, where thumbnails are the ubiquitous interface between song and listener.

"One would think that because [cover art] is smaller, it'd probably be less significant. Meanwhile, it's probably more significant now because you're competing with not just other music, you're competing with everything on the internet," he says.

The next phase is to migrate all 985 online followers — and counting — into in-real-life counterparts, to open the possibility for dialogue, to export the experience from its three-grid domain into a plane where all the senses can be assaulted. 

He concludes: "We've created the archive, we've kind of gauged what the interest is around cover art. The next stage is having in-person conversations with the creators, but also just letting people come out and possibly bring a cover art that they like, just to discuss it. It's almost like turning the cover art into the music, in a way. Not only are we touching the music, we're making new memories around it."