Jill Trappler - Board

Jill Trappler was born in Benoni in 1957 in the Gauteng Province. She completed her tertiary training with Bill Ainslie at the Johannesburg Art Foundation and completed three years of a fine arts degree through UNISA.

She experimented with ceramic and craftwork and also discovered her true medium when she went into weaving with Marguerite Weavind, Mooi River textile factory and the Adult Institute, Islington in London.

She is an artist who consistently explores different modes of non-representational art in a variety of media. Her work is rarely literal; she works with poetry, music, metaphor and with associations that emerge years after the visual stimulus is registered.

She initiated the weaving employment project at Philani Nutrition Clinics, Crossroads and Khayelitsha, including design, drawing and colour workshops, story writing and spinning and knitting.  She combined this with lecturing part-time at the University of Cape Town and various studios, including a teaching program at the South African National gallery in Cape Town.

In 2009 Trappler decided to prioritise studio work for the first time in thirty years. Although she has participated in many group and solo shows, her presence and contribution have to some extent been over-shadowed by her far-reaching involvement in teaching, mentoring and project work.  As an active participant in the Thupelo Workshop from its inception, a founder member of the Greatmore Studios in Cape Town, a Board member of the Fordsburg Artists' Studios (the Bag Factory) in Johannesburg, and Chair person for a few years of the Association for Visual Arts, to mention but a few of her activities, Trappler has participated rigorously in art and craft projects in South Africa and further afield.

Jill has exhibited locally and internationally (South Africa, Germany, New York, France, Australia, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Uganda, Korea, United  Kingdom, United State of America and Wales) since 1990, and has won a variety of awards including the Provincial award from Western Cape arts and Culture for contribution to visual arts. Her work is well represented in South African and international collections.

Lionel Davis was born in District Six in 1936, and spent all of his childhood in the neighborhood. District Six was primarily home to colored (mixed race) South Africans, but many black and Indian families lived there as well. The neighborhood tended to break down racial barriers in an otherwise highly color-conscious society.

Davis took his first formal art classes with CAP, and continued his art education with the organization for two full years. He then spent another two years at the Evangelical Arts and Crafts Center at Rorke's Drift in Natal. At Rorke's Drift, Davis was introduced to the medium of screen printing, which is used to produce artwork on t-shirts and posters. Davis realized that this medium had great potential to affect widespread social change, and he pursued it wholeheartedly with the intention of teaching the discipline to others. Davis's two years at Rorke's Drift gave him a degree in Fine Arts, and qualified him to return to the the Community Arts Project in Cape Town as a teacher.

Davis taught at CAP through the tumultuous 1980's, as harsh government crackdowns became more frequent and South Africa became increasingly isolated in the world. As a screen printing instructor, he assisted a variety of individuals and organizations who opposed apartheid. South African law made it dangerous for his students to print posters and t-shirts with overtly revolutionary messages, but their artwork aided the resistance movement in more subtle ways. Davis's students produced everything from posters protesting high rents to t-shirts urging white South Africans to resist army conscription.

Davis is particularly proud of the fact that CAP remained autonomous throughout the decade, resisting the temptation to align itself with any particular political organization. This allowed Davis and his fellow instructors to assist everyone who sought to oppose apartheid, and in so doing, do their part to encourage all South Africans to bind together in a united front against their government.

Davis is also proud of the degree to which his work as an art instructor empowered his students. Education is certainly a subtle form of resistance, but in the long run, it is perhaps the most potent means of bringing about positive societal change. Almost all of Davis's students perceived art as a domain that belonged only to whites, and their education with CAP thus helped to break down barriers in their own minds. Art education also gave Davis's students a rare chance to pursue full self-expression.

Apartheid's official Bantu Education curriculum stressed wrote memorization and strove to dehumanize its black pupils to the greatest possible extent. Generations of black children had creativity and free thought drilled out of them as they passed through South Africa's schools. Through drawing and painting, many of Davis's students were able freely think and create for the first time in years. Often, this opportunity set Davis's students on the road to attaining a much stronger and more profound sense of self.

"Through the medium of art," Davis explains, "you can begin to dignify a person."