BIOGRAPHY: Kim Berman
Kim is the Executive Director of the Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, JHB, and a Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Johannesburg. She received her BFA degree from Wits University in 1981 and her MFA in printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Mass., USA, in 1989. In 1991, together with Nhlanhla Xaba, she founded the Artist Proof Studio, a community printmaking centre which provides training and studio facilities to emerging artists. In 2000, Kim initiated Phumani Paper, a national poverty relief project which includes a significant research and training component based at the University of Johannesburg. She has lectured widely in South Africa, Europe and the United States, and is represented in South Africa by the Goodman Gallery, where she has held a number of successful solo exhibitions. Kim was a finalist in the Sasol Wax Art Award competition in 2007.
Kim is a hugely energetic person who is deeply committed to political and social transformation in South Africa. She uses printmaking as a vehicle to reflect on the social and political processes that surround her. She has an uncanny ability to take a neglected, peripheral landscape and to transform it into an image that not only comments on society but is also transformed into something beautiful and poignant. She has long been concerned with fire and its ability to destroy and create. Kim says “Art provides us with a tool for participation in life. The challenges we face as South Africans today make us acutely aware of the broader role artists have as catalysts for change”.
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