Obituary: Lesley Perkes, Champion of public art in South Africa

1961-2015: Lesley Perkes, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 53, was the most enthusiastic and energetic champion of public art in South Africa.

"Public space belongs to the people" was her rallying cry.

Her dream - which, in the face of daily setbacks, financial constraints and bureaucratic obfuscation and even hostility, she never relinquished for a second - was to use art to regenerate "neglected impossible spaces".

She believed that art in public places was the best antidote to grime and crime and desperate lives. She liked to quote mutual fund builder John Templeton. "He said to look for the points of maximum pessimism and invest there. Well, I am, and me and my friends are. Ain't no dustbin too scary for us."

She initiated a project to transform township homes around South Africa into art galleries using township artists. Typically, she also arranged transport so that paying tourists could visit these township galleries. She saw the potential of art to lift people out of poverty.

She started a company called artatwork in the '90s to identify opportunities and local artists, match them and arrange commissions and financing. No project or idea was too far out for her to give it a bash.

"The best works I have ever been involved in making were experiments that could have been catastrophes," she said.

One small example was her Troyeville Bedtime Story project, born out of a few weed-infested concrete slabs she noticed one day after driving past them for a year. She invited an artist friend to "reinvent" this eyesore into a piece of art. Working together, they transformed it into a double bed, which became a popular tourist attraction.

Her greatest coup was local artist Mary Sibande's sell-out exhibition Long Live the Dead Queen on 19 giant building wraps that transformed Johannesburg into the largest outdoor art gallery in the world for seven months, from June 2010.

"For the first time, artworks took the place usually reserved for alcohol, cigarette, insurance and beauty advertising," said Perkes. "To have the funding to compete with the commercial world is a triumph of the imagination."

It had taken her eight years of arguing and cajoling - and the 2010 World Cup - to pull it off.

Less successful was her 20-year battle to get permission to transform the neglected 268m Hillbrow Tower into a "canvas for imagination". She was endlessly thwarted by city officials, whose stock response was to shove more forms at her to fill in. When she thought she'd jumped through all the hoops, some functionary would remind her that there was a "recession" and money was scarce.

She didn't take this kind of thing lying down and project partners would sometimes plead with her to be less combative for fear of alienating prospective funders. This made her want to slap them.

"I like making myself useful," she said. "I am no longer interested in how hard that is."

Or in what people thought of her. She lost count of the number of sceptics she proved wrong.

"I think all of our successes and some of our catastrophes (of which we are fond) are primarily due to behaving like an idiot who does not know when to give up."

Even if it didn't open as many city and corporate wallets as she'd have liked, her enthusiasm was unstoppable and infectious. She was invited to give a TED talk about her work in Long Beach, California, in 2013 and her audience was galvanised.

Perkes was born in Johannesburg on June 17 1961. After school at Woodmead she did a BA at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Last year her health began to fail and on January 8 she was belatedly diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. She had just begun chemotherapy when she was admitted to hospital with a fungal lung infection. She died three days later.

She is survived by her son, Chili, who completed his matric last year. Her partner, Michael Kier, died in 2007. -