Artist Proof Studio: Twenty years of responding to South African transformation imperatives

Abstract

Artist Proof Studio (APS), a community printmaking studio in Johannesburg, was founded twenty years ago as a response to the challenge of building democracy in postapartheid South Africa. APS has used multiple strategies to shape the ways in which artists can discover their own capacities as creative voices for change, and the roles artists can assume as agents of change and active participants in the South African democracy.This article considers the challenge of continual transformation necessary for dynamic function. The resilience and longevity of a cultural non-government organisation like APS can be ascribed to its ability to harness the imagination and the vision to create meaningful and transformational change. APS finds innovative approaches to economic survival, and so it is able to meet its social function by providing bursaries to under-resourced and talented youth, and by promoting community engagement and advocacy around issues of HIV, gender equality and xenophobia. APS addresses its transformational approach in two ways: the role of the artist as an agent of change, and the ability of the organisation to constantly transform itself. Creative processes are integral to deepening the journey of self- creation for the individual artist as well as for the organisation as a hybrid and complex structure.