OBITUARY: Lovell Friedman — Cape mosaic artist who built public memory from broken pieces

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> Lovell Friedman’s footprints remain across Cape Town, the city she loved. They are set in glass and ceramic, in murals that give voice to the forgotten, in benches that offer sanctuary and in art that brings solace to the vulnerable.

The ceramic sculptor, mosaic artist, activist and humanitarian Lovell Friedman died unexpectedly in Cape Town on 11 October 2026 at the age of 63. She was born in Cape Town on 17 February 1963 and grew up in Oranjezicht. Friedman still lived in the same house where her family had been for four generations.

The house is adorned with her many mosaics, sculptures and plates, reminders of the artist whose work was woven into the fabric of her family life, as well as that of Cape Town.

In reflecting on her life, her husband, the psychiatrist Dr David Kibel, says he met her in 1996 through their close friend Lindsay Rabinowitz, a psychotherapist, and they married in 1999. He remembers a woman who gave generously of herself, the kindest, most loving and life-affirming person he had ever known.

She kept friendships and family ties alive across years and distances. Her care extended to the mosaic artists she trained. She worried about their wellbeing, took a deep interest in their lives and encouraged them until many had established creative projects of their own.

Her mind, Kibel says, spun in a million directions. Ideas and solutions arrived constantly, alongside an endless stream of people and possibilities. Her thinking could be kaleidoscopic and somewhat chaotic, but it was imaginative, abundant and directed towards other people’s wellbeing. Kibel believes this combination helps explain the sheer volume of her work.

Art was part of her life from a young age. Her mother, Shirley, kept materials around the house and brought home offcuts of blank paper rolls from the Cape Times. The little girl would spread them across the floor to sit on and draw, mostly in crayon.

Empty boxes that had once contained the metal type used to print the newspaper came next. She filled their compartments with tiny sculptures of colourful birds and animals.

Once, also still as a small child, she watched raindrops on a car window and told her mother excitedly that they resembled her own drawings. Shirley took her to galleries and surrounded her with art books. Later, she studied sculpture at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, the University of Cape Town’s art school, and completed a master’s degree in ceramic sculpture, graduating cum laude.

Teaching shaped her commitment to community work, Kibel says. At the Cape Technikon she discovered how much she valued helping students grow as artists. In the 1980s, she also taught children’s ceramics part-time at the Community Arts Project (CAP), the Cape Town organisation founded in 1977 in the aftermath of the Soweto Uprising.

CAP brought art, drama and dance together with political conviction at a time when apartheid determined who could study, exhibit or occupy cultural space.