This dissertation investigates acquisition and exhibition histories of parts of the Permanent African Art collection of the Iziko South African National Gallery. The ISANG, which is South Africa’s oldest state art museum, began growing its African art collection in 1967 at the height of the apartheid era. With an institutional life that spans from 1872 to the present, the ISANG has been shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, but also by the imperatives of the post-1994 cultural project of nation building. The dissertation traces continuities and discontinuities with colonial legacies in the epistemic frameworks that shape the African art collection. It makes use of sociological approaches to art through the concepts of value, ‘taste’, and power. Evident in the knowledge archive produced by the African art collection at ISANG, is a reliance on unstable and perhaps unsettled notions of tradition (and by implication of ethnicity). Given South Africa’s history of settler colonialism, there are political stakes in defining tradition(s) in the context of art and aesthetic histories. With a focus on epistemology, this project investigates the construction and potential deconstruction of traditional African art as an historical category, and the consequences this may have for opening-up foreclosed temporalities and mobilities in South African art history. The particularity of the South African art institutional context, entangled as it is (and has been) in multiple epistemic paradigms, offers a critical vantage point through which to view the category of traditional African art. By analysing an institutional framing of this contested category within the South African context over many decades, the project aims to contribute to wider debates around African art and its attendant epistemic politics.