At the Keiskamma Art Project, we guide, train and support community members in an organisation that creates meaningful, often monumental, embroidered artworks. We currently employ 60 people, the majority being rural women who support around 6 dependents. The project’s aim is to provide employment, to support the development of creative skills in order that predominantly women and young members of the community are empowered with entry into the economy. Keiskamma Art Project engages collaboratively with artists from around the world. It supplies training in design and craft skills and nurtures skills in production, financial administration, and computing useful for the running of the Art studio and its shop. Increasingly, the artworks we create enable advocacy. In the making of, and their exhibition, our artworks both educate and provide platforms for the growth of our beneficiaries. This helps beneficiaries develop their voices and exposes them to cosmopolitan opportunities in culture and the arts especially. The Keiskamma Art Project is famous for large scale monumental artworks, from the Keiskamma Tapestry on permanent exhibition at the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town to the Keiskamma Altarpiece which has toured North America and England for two years in the most prestigious cathedrals, such as Washington and Southwark. The work of the project aims to engage local knowledge of both youth and the elders in our communities, integrating many kinds of research in the archiving and interpretation of the Eastern Cape rural collective memory and oral history.
