The Artist Proof story takes us to Johannesburg, where a print studio becomes a living laboratory for a new society. We also hear about:
• A court built as art, where law and lived experience meet in the same space
• A collective studio where artists divided by apartheid learn to work, argue, and make meaning together
• A fire, a death, and a return to the ashes—where broken pieces become the raw material for rebuilding
What emerges isn’t a heroic artist story. It’s something quieter and more durable: a way of working where creativity becomes infrastructure—where access, collaboration, and persistence slowly reshape how people see themselves and each other. Not a moment. A practice. Not a symbol. A system.
Stay with this. There’s something here about how change really happens—how culture does the long work that politics alone can’t finish.
A Johannesburg-based printmaking and training center founded in 1991, focused on access, collaboration, and professional development for emerging artists across South Africa and the continent.
Historic site of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, built on a former prison complex and integrating art into its architecture as part of democratic nation-building.
Anti-apartheid leader and South Africa’s first democratically elected president, whose release in 1990 marked a turning point in the country’s transition.
South Africa’s public broadcaster, covering national cultural and economic developments including the arts sector.
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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.
Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.
Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.
Transcripts
Bill Cleveland:
Hey there. What can we learn from 35 years of social change art making in Johannesburg, South Africa?
From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activists, artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. I'm Bill Cleveland. So today, something a little different. I want to tell a story I first shared in my book Art and Upheaval.
It's a story from South Africa in the years after the end of apartheid, when the country was trying to figure out what democracy would actually mean in everyday life. It's story about artists, but not in the way that we usually tell those stories. Not about one genius, not about one leader, not about one heroic act.
,:
A cooling breeze flutters the South African flag above the new Constitutional Court building on Constitution Hill.
It's been nearly 10 years since Mandela's election, but many in the crowd gathering for the court's opening are still not used to the sight of the new flag. Six colors joined and apart, rippling in the wind. For South Africa, this is a time of changing history and changing symbols.
And here on this hill, the new Constitutional Court stands where a prison once stood. Nearly 100 years earlier, the British built the Johannesburg fort to hold prisoners awaiting trial.
During apartheid, its cells held some of the state's most dangerous enemies. Albert Lutuli, Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, even Mahatma Gandhi.
It's likely that the prison had served more meals to Nobel Peace Prize winners than any hotel in the world. Yeah, and it also served up a lot more pain. The justices who designed the new court made an unusual decision.
They insisted that the building itself would have to be a work of art. They understood that the new constitution had grown out of a history where culture, politics, and identity were inseparable.
And that if the law was going to survive the rough road ahead, it had to become something people could feel, not just something they were told to obey. So artists were invited to leave their mark on every inch of the building. Paintings, prints, sculpture, glass, stone stories embedded in the walls.
how township uprisings in the:
Smoke, rubble, armored police vehicles, young people running, women carrying the injured, fists raised in defiance, nothing static, nothing decorative. Every inch of paper burns with fear and rebellion. But the real story doesn't live on the wall. It lives in a print studio a few miles away.
In the early:
She later said she felt incredibly squeezed living as a white, anti apartheid, Jewish, lesbian artist in a society where difference itself could make you a target. In Boston, she found freedom. But she never felt separate from what was happening at home during the state of emergency.
Even drawings showing unrest could get an artist arrested. So she began making prints and artist books from photographs smuggled out of South Africa, trying to give those images a personal voice.
the truth was banned. Then in:
South African News Announcer:
There's Mr. Mandela. Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa. This is Winnie Mandela next to him, waving to the crowds,.
Bill Cleveland:
Hand in hand. Kim saw it on television in Boston and thought, what the hell am I doing here?
Within weeks, she sold her car, packed her belongings, bought a printing press, and went home to help build the new South Africa. Back in Johannesburg, she and her dear friend and artist Klan Kla Saba found an empty space on Djepe street and started a cooperative print studio.
They called it Artist Proof Studio. White artists said it would never survive. Black artists had no money to join, so they built it anyway.
People shared tools, shared space, and shared skills.
The studio became a place where artists from communities that had been separated for generations worked side by side, learning, arguing, teaching, making work together. Kim later said that the studio had become a kind of microcosm of the new South Africa. Messy, fragile, but full of possibility.
disaster struck. One night in:
And Klenkla, who had been staying in the building, died in the fire. Kim said later, devastation is an understatement. Artist Proof was a home, a security, a livelihood.
And the loss brought up every other trauma in people's lives. They had a choice, stop or start again.
A few weeks after the funeral, the artists gathered in a basement space across the street from the burned out building. They began digging through the ashes, pulling out fragments of prints, pieces of paper, charred images. Dust filled the air. People coughed.
Someone started singing. They laid the burned pieces on the floor and began Making new work out of what had survived. Kim wrote later, the act of collaging is reconstructive.
It's sticking bits, pieces of fragments to make a whole. It is finding beauty in damage and loss. It is a metaphor for reconciliation. And that could be the end of this story.
But Kim has always been very clear that it isn't. Because the story of artist Proustudio is not about her.
It's about the thousands of vital, imaginative souls living in that country, people with enormous creative capacity, people with stories to tell, people who needed a place where those stories could be made visible.
Artist Proof was founded in:
The studio focused on artists who might otherwise never have had the chance to study people facing social or economic barriers, and built a training program based on the belief that. That printmaking, because it can be shared and multiplied, is a democratic art form. Over the years, hundreds of artists passed through that space.
Then thousands. Workshops, community projects, exhibitions, collaborations, mentorship. Not one story, many stories. And the work kept going.
In:
And that may be the real lesson in this story. Democracy didn't come to South Africa because artists made prints. Artists made prints because democracy was being fought for.
And when the fighting was over, the work wasn't finished. Because changing laws is one thing.
Changing how people see themselves and how they see each other and what they believe is possible, well, that takes longer. Sometimes it takes generations. Sometimes it takes a studio. Sometimes it takes a handful of burned pieces of paper being turned into something new.
And sometimes it takes thousands of people working quietly, stubbornly, imaginatively telling their stories until the country they live in begins to recognize itself in them.
I like to close with voices of students and teachers reflecting on their Artist Proof experience on the occasion of the organization's 35th anniversary. First you'll hear a short news report on APS and the global art market.
Then Artist Proof Studio representative Nathe Semelone, followed by some Artist Proof students.
SABC New Announcer:
As the global online art market surges forward.
billion by:
Nathe Semelone:
Able to focus on arts training, print collaborations, as well as the sales and distribution of prints. With our focus in education, we train talented students from South Africa as well as other parts of Africa.
Our students are prominently showcased, making sure that all of the graduates that graduate from Otters Proof Studio are better positioned to become successful.
APS Artist:
My Favorite Mediums right Now hi everyone, my name is. I'm from the south of Johannesburg from a town called Enadel Techniques.
My favorite mediums right now are screen printing and dry print, preferably screen printing. It's one of those type of techniques where it's like all inclusive where you can use color, you can use black and white.
The different styles of textures you can put into it are very expensive. It's just a very good medium.
Tony APS Artist:
My name is Tony. More self introspective, participating in it, learning enough from it. So that you can try to be a better version of oneself.
APS Artist:
Originally I am from Free State Township. I'm a cool maker, painter, facilitator.
I'll be having an exhibition on 21 March so it's connected to human rights and then my main inspiration for the show it's reflection, self imposed and please don't miss it.
My name is, I'm a creative director. My work is premised on digitizing indigenous knowledge systems.
You know the idea that like a picture's worth a thousand words and then technology enabled us to create more than a thousand words, to create 10,000 words, then a hundred thousand words and then a million.
Bill Cleveland:
Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.
If you're interested in learning more about Artist Proof, please go to the link in our show notes which also includes links to the many people, places, events and publications mentioned in this episode.
Last but certainly not least thanks to the Art Is Change team, our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOP235.
So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word.
