Emerging From Exile.(South African collections returned in Homecoming Exhibition)(Pretoria Art Museum)

At the height of apartheid, in 1972, there weren't many places in South Africa where black artists could freely show their work. When Ike Nkoana hung his paintings in a Pretoria gallery, they were smeared with excrement overnight. So he and other artists found refuges for their pieces in foreign embassies and diplomats' homes, which remained off-limits to police and unwanted visitors. When Jim Baker, a black U.S. diplomat, first held an exhibition of 150 works in his residence, diplomats from all over the globe snatched up most of the pictures in a few hours. "It wasn't only about selling the artwork," says Nkoana. "The main idea was to use art to try and get closer to each other." But as the diplomats left, they took their art collections with them, removing the country's best work from the 1970s, says Michael Maapola, one of the artists. "An empty space now exists in South Africa's heritage."

That space is about to be filled. In October, dozens of the works will return for the "Homecoming Exhibition" at the Pretoria Art Museum. The idea for the show grew out of a decision by Australian diplomat Diane Johnston to return her 17 works to South Africa last year. Inspired by the gesture, journalist Tom Nevin set up the Homecoming Foundation to track down diplomats who might be willing to return their art--none of which has ever been seen publicly before. So far, 250 works have been returned or pledged for the show. "The response to date has been so encouraging that we're now assured one of the most culturally significant exhibitions of black fine art in South Africa's history," says Dirkie Offringa, one of the few South African curators who knew the artists in the 1970s. After a month in the capital, the "Homecoming Exhibition" will tour the country before traveling to South Africa's embassies abroad.

For the surviving artists, the "Homecoming Exhibition" is like a reunion, a chance to greet long-lost friends and see their work again for the first time in 30 years. "It brings all those memories back," says Maapola, who lives outside Pretoria and still makes his living as an artist. "The good and the bad." At the home of fellow artist Johnny Ribeiro outside Pretoria, where diplomats used to gather, Nkoana, now 56, holds back tears as he looks at a yellowed clipping of himself with one of his sculptures: a railway sleeper split in half to represent his fractured country. He doesn't know where the sculpture is now or if it will return for the exhibit. But 10 years after apartheid ended, its racial symbolism still resonates: if brought together, the two sides of split wood would make a whole.

The artists were accustomed to working with meager materials. They cut scenes into leftover kitchen linoleum and sketched on ...