KIM BERMAN (b. 1960)
Bearing Witness
2002
aquatint hand-coloured etching
54 x 43.5 cm
The Madibogo Prayer
1995
drypoint/collograph
edition 65/65
45 x 37 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Kim Berman is an NRF-Rated scholar and Full Professor in Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Executive Director of Artist Proof Studio (APS), a community-based printmaking centre in Newtown, Johannesburg which she co-founded with the late Nhlanhla Xaba in 1991.
She received her BFA from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in the United States in 1989. She completed her PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009. She has lectured and exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally.
A 1999 suite of prints by Berman in mezzotint, dry point and engraving paper, titled Playing Cards of the Truth Commission, an Incomplete Deck is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art in Washington DC in the United States, as is the 1997 artist’s book Emandulo Re-Creation, to which she contributed as a member of the Artist Proof Studio. A 2001 print Break the Silence is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Berman is committed to engaging arts for social change through her activism and teaching. Her book Finding Voice: A visual approach to engaging change was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2017.