Keiskamma Art Project: Embroidering Hope in a Rural Eastern Cape Village

Founded in 2000 by artist and doctor Carol Hofmeyr, the Keiskamma Art Project began as informal art lessons for a handful of local women in Hamburg, Eastern Cape, and has grown into a network of studios specialising in beading, felt-making, embroidery, ceramics and printmaking. Today around 130 artists, mostly women, work under the guidance of 12 local managers and group leaders, creating monumental collaborative artworks such as the Keiskamma Altarpiece, a life-size version of Picasso's Guernica, and a 120-metre tapestry that hangs in South Africa's Parliament. The Art Project sits alongside the wider Keiskamma Trust's Music Academy, which trains over 160 children across eight rural schools, and its health and education programmes, together building livelihoods, healing and cultural memory in one of the country's most impoverished districts. The Art Project's work is held in the permanent collections of the University of South Africa, the University of the Witwatersrand and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum, and has won South Africa's Business and Arts (BASA) Award.