WRITING EDGE
The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihoods BY BRENDA SCHMAHMANN
A woman dressed in the quiet blue fabrics of rural domestic life, a man at her side, facing the future together confidently, though the background teems with lost children. This is just one arresting detail among the illustrations of The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihoods (Print Matters, 2016). Creativity, history, community health, nature and spirituality come together in this beautiful, informative and moving book by Brenda Schmahmann (BA FA 1982, BA Hons 1983, MA 1987, PhD 1997). It records the history of the Keiskamma Art Project, a community needlework group in the Eastern Cape village of Hamburg, and discusses the themes of its most important work. The group was founded in 2000 by Carol Hofmeyr, an artist and medical doctor, in an effort to create a source of income for the villagers. Schmahmann taught art history at Wits in the 1990s and now holds the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. Much of the Keiskamma needlework takes pieces of Western art – the Bayeux Tapestry, the Isenheim Altarpiece, Picasso’s Guernica – as the impetus for expressing local themes, using local imagery. Schmahmann considers known sources, references and intentions as well as other possible influences and significance, and helpfully compares and contrasts the old and the new. The book’s illustrations show not only the finished pieces but the place where they were made, people making them, and the ways they were exhibited. While often quoting viewpoints of members of the Keiskamma Art Project, Schmahmann also allows her own understandings of these powerful images to suggest ways of interpreting them.
MAY 2017
55
