An agent of change through art

Over more than three decades Kim Berman – the 2026 Investec Jewish Achiever Art, Sport, Science, and Culture Award winner – has midwifed hundreds of other artists. This through Artist Proof Studio, the community printmaking centre she co-founded, and as a visual arts educator at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). 

Her commitment to empowering others has helped produce some of the most well-known contemporary South African artists, including Philemon Hlungwani, Nelson Makamo, Mary Sibande, Nicholas Hlobo, and Sizwe Khoza. 

Berman spearheaded a paper-making project in 21 rural areas around the country that provided skills and jobs, facilitated HIV awareness campaigns, and has secured vital government, institutional, and corporate funding for artists and arts education. 

Her own art hangs in prestigious collections such as at the Constitutional Court and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

The thread through it all is Berman’s social conscience. And she attributes that in large part to being Jewish. 

“My parents brought us up with Jewish awareness and a sense of social justice,” she says. “Being Jewish was part of a social conscience. We knew about the Holocaust and therefore recognised apartheid as prejudice.” 

Social involvement runs in the family. Her maternal grandfather, Yiddish writer Richard Feldman, was a South African Labour Party member of Parliament in his time. Her grandmother Freda was a co-founder and leader of ORT SA. Her three sisters are active in areas ranging from family and women’s labour issues to art therapy. 

“My Jewish upbringing has very much influenced who I am and my choices as an activist and as a person who believes in social justice. I happen to be an artist so I use my art in that area,” she says. 

Berman co-founded Artist Proof Studio with the late Nhlanhla Xaba in Newtown, Johannesburg in 1991. She’d spent seven years in Boston, acquiring a Master’s degree at Tufts University and most of the printmaking skills she would use to make a difference back home. 

“Printmaking is a democratic medium,” says Berman. “You can use recycled materials and it’s affordable. You don’t have to be rich to make a print.” 

But at that time in South Africa, printmaking happened only in universities or art centres, limiting access. 

“So I bought a beautiful French Tool etching press. I sold my car and my furniture to afford it, and shipped it to Johannesburg . The studio formed around the press. 

“We explored alternative ways to create prints, approaching newspaper and magazine presses for leftover inks. We made our own plates from found and repurposed materials. We also began making paper because handmade paper suitable for printmaking is unaffordable for many artists.” 

Berman says the main idea was, and still is, for Artist Proof Studio to be a “safety net” for youngsters who didn’t have access to tertiary education. “We accept students based on their portfolio, their talents, and their ambitions to be artists,” she says. “We don’t exclude them because they don’t have a matric or money” 

More than 600 artists have graduated from Artist Proof Studio over 35 years. 

All the while, Berman was making a difference too at UJ. It’s predecessor, the Wits Technikon, hired her as a lecturer in 1994, on condition that she helped in its transformation. 

“At that time, technikons were very white. I helped appoint the first two black lecturers in the Faculty of Arts, one of whom was a colleague from Artist Proof Studio. Some of the students also came through the studio, where I was able to secure funding to support their studies. It took a good 10 years to transform the faculty racially.” 

Berman feels one of her biggest contributions at UJ was introducing a socially engaged curriculum. 

“I’ve always seen my role as making students aware of their society. Community engagement has always been my strongest pull. As a senior lecturer I managed the post-graduate students and designed an honours programme in which all students have to do workplace learning or community engagement. I took volunteers to engage with community projects all over the country,” she says. 

For a long time, she didn’t have the buy-in of her academic colleagues. Many saw the community work as taking students away from their fine art practice. Completing her PhD gave her more autonomy. The faculty’s first black Master’s student was able to complete his research because she could get funding for him to do so. 

Berman says being in both spaces was always interesting for her. “I don’t think I would have survived so long in academia if I hadn’t been involved with Artist Proof Studio. It’s a free space, where artists can make their own opportunities, whereas academia has a much tighter curriculum. At Artist Proof Studio, some students don’t have maths or writing literacy so we find different ways to teach. We can accommodate deaf and neurodivergent students by having the flexibility to accommodate one-on-one learning.” 

Berman says the success rate of Artist Proof Studio students supporting themselves as artists is much higher than university students. “In academic courses, you teach critical and conceptual thinking, and the learning has nothing to do with commercial viability. At Artist Proof Studio, we teach life skills, business skills, and how to market yourself as an artist.” 

This doesn’t mean she prefers one environment to the other. She did, after all, spend 31 years in academia, becoming a full professor. One of the things she is proud of about her UJ career is the Master’s in Art Therapy she helped “midwife” and lead for five years, with specialists from around the world lecturing online. The programme, the first Art Therapy qualification in Africa, was initiated by her sister Hayley, an art therapist. 

“The programme is ground-breaking,” says Berman, explaining that it is adapting art therapy, which originates in America, for an African context. 

Before Berman retired from UJ last year, the university staged a comprehensive exhibition of her artwork titled Remembering and Forgetting: Landscapes in Dialogue. “My retrospective was a big deal for me,” she says. “I was nervous. I hadn’t shown my art in 15 years. My students didn’t really know me as an artist or my artwork.” 

Ultimately, the retrospective was very gratifying. “It was a way to rediscover myself as an artist.” 

However, it hasn’t yet led her back into her studio. She’s been too busy compiling a book on the legacy of printmaking, which profiles 100 Artist Proof Studio alumni and features essays. The book is due to be launched early next year. 

Maybe then Berman will get her hands dirty with ink again.