Judy Seidman

Judy Ann Seidman (born 1951) is an American-born visual artist and cultural activist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Judy's early exposure to art and politics was through her family, her grandmother was an artist, a life-long political activist, feminist and pacifist. So, she was brought up with artmaking, particularly artmaking as an act of political activism. When Judy was five or six, she announced that she wanted to be a painter or a pirate

Career Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Seidman lived in southern Africa as an artist and teacher in exile. She and her husband (historian Neil Parsons) moved to Swaziland (Eswatini) in 1975, where she taught art at Thokoza School in Mbabane and gave birth to her first daughter. In 1980, Seidman and the family moved to Botswana, where she joined the Medu Art Ensemble an Anti-Apartheid resistance art movement. 1984 she held a solo exhibition (“Graphic Work by Judy Seidman”) at the National Museum and Art Gallery in Gaborone

After the unbanning of political organizations in 1990, Seidman moved to Johannesburg, where she continues to live and work.

In the post-apartheid period, she focused on HIV/AIDS activism, gender equality, and public health campaigns.

Artistic style A Mail & Guardian critic noted that Seidman’s art was largely figurative and narrative, often featuring women, workers, and activists in scenes of struggle and empowerment. Her compositions often place Black liberation fighters and women at the center, deliberately countering colonial-era depictions that erased such figures.