ProyectArte is preparing to launch the search for its sixth class! As in previous years, the full scholarships will give a talented and diverse group of 15 to 18 year-olds the opportunity to participate in an intensive arts education program taught by some of Argentina’s leading artists.  The 18-month scholarships will run from March 2010 to August 2011 and will be taught by distinguished Argentine artists Horacio D´Alessandro, Karina Peisajovich, Ernesto Ballesteros, and Mónica Van Asperen.

Requirements

- Be between the ages of 15 and 18 as of March 1, 2010.

- Submit for consideration between five and ten works, in any format, size, or medium, afixing to these works the applicants full name and contact information

- We note that although the selection process for ProyectArte Scholarships is competitive, no prior formal arts education is necessary to apply.

You may download the application form here and obtain more information by visiting www.proyectarte.org or contacting ProyectArte at info@proyectarte.org or (011) 4899-0444.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.

“Tres Versiones sobre Juan”, July 25th 15:00 a 17:30 hs. at Prima Gallery

“Reciclaje de Obsesiones”, August 4tho 19 hs. at Prima Gallery

“Los Argentinos” of Mariano Sapia, July 26th at Centro Cultural Recoleta

ProyectArte Launches Search for Sixth Class of Scholarship Recipients

Seeing Beyond “Dangerous” Youth, August 03, 10 and 24 at ProyectArte

In addition to its permanent staff, ProyectArte relies on short and long term volunteers and interns to help the organization carry out its programs.
During the month of July several volunteers and interns who have been with us for the last several months are finishing up their time with ProyectArte, and the school is welcoming their replacements. We say goodbye to Victoire Dewageneire from France and to Anne Phllips-Krug from Germany and we thank them for their collaboration with the organization. Noah Gordon, who has been instrumental in the redesign of ProyectArte’s newsletter and blog, is also leaving Buenos Aires, but will continue to stay involved with the organization in New York, where he will be attending Teacher’s College of Columbia University.
ProyectArte is pleased to welcome three new volunteer members to our team in Buenos Aires. This month we are joined by Sophia Tragash, who is coordinating our growing library, Patrick Loher, who will provide general administrative assistance and Monica Mariño, who was previously working in the education department of the Brooklyn Museum and will work alongside our Programs Coordinator Luciana Marino (no relationship to our new intern) helping to run our scholarship program.
Whatever your specialty or skills may be, the staff of ProyectArte would like to offer you a unique opportunity to work as a volunteer in a dynamic workplace with people who are committed to the mission of the school: to offer each talented young person the opportunity to develop their artistic potential. If you are interested in volunteering, please contact us at volunteer@proyectarte.org.

“Red X Der” is an organization that for six years has been producing publications made by youth about the topic of children and adolescent rights, to inform and educate other young people.
With the phrase “We are not dangerous, we are in danger”, they have a new objective: to change the perception that the middle class has about youth living in poverty. As part of this new initiative at Red X Der, adolescents between the ages of 15 and 22 create brief comic-book style storybooks about their lives and incorporating information about laws that govern children and adolescents’ rights.
As part of this initiative, ProyectArte and Red X Der have come together to organize a seminar, led by artist Javier Barilaro, in which ProyectArte’s students and graduates will work together with Red X Der’s youth to create artworks expanding on the themes of this program.
This seminar will also be open to other young people not affiliated with ProyectArte or Red X Der; anyone interested in participating should contact ProyectArte’s Programs Coordinator Luciana Marino at luciana@proyectarte.org or click here

Saturday June 13th, as part of ProyectArte’s visiting artists program, we had a meeting and conversation with Martín La Rosa.
We began the meeting with slides of the artist’s artwork and after some of our questions the talk began. It transformed itself amongst other things into a brief review of Martín’s biography; he told us a little about how he began as an artist; starting as a drawer without comprehending art as a profession, but as a pleasure. Later he discovered airbrushing as a way to study art and way of working professionally in the arts. Although his first experience with art was drawing, at 17 he began to paint. With Dali as a reference, he adopted a surrealist style. After seeing and getting to know different artists he found “his own truth”. His art took a turn towards hyperrealism, influenced by Antonio López García.
We noted that in his artwork we can also observe the use of a small number of recurring objects. To this observation Martin responds that “the object is an excuse to paint the air”, and that the selection of these objects responds to an interest in textures and the impact of the light on the material. He also told us that his works take him longer and longer to produce, and says that “all the time counts, because what is important is the result”.
Martín also told us about his first experiences with the art market. The opportunity to sell his work came about thanks to an encounter with the Argentine artist Guillermo Roux; who after seeing his work presented it to “Praxis” gallery. Martín also shared with us the evolution of his ties with the gallery during the span of a twelve year of relationship. As the evening progressed and the meeting wound down, he left us with the parting advice that, above all, we be good spectators.

Authors: Luisina, Sacha and Florentina

For more information on this artist you may visit the following sites: http://www.artnet.com/artist/725097/martin-la-rosa.html
http://www.coleccionpraxis.com/LaRosa-32.html.

After three intense months at ProyectArte teaching the Introduction to Artwork Development (I) course, artist and ProyectArte faculty member Karina Peisajovich discusses her views on art, her students, and ProyectArte in general in a conversation with current student Nehuen Wolf.

NW: What is you relationship with art?
KP: My connection with art began when I was young. In 1984 I attended the National Arts University, although it was a couple of years after I finished school that I began to make objects with more concentration and independence. This impacted my artwork and my attitude towards it became more personal and professional at the same time; probably that is what differentiates artmaking from another activity.

NW: What is your opinion on the opportunity that the scholarship offers us (students) and yourself?
KP: The scholarships for artists are always valuable. They generate an exchange and open the mind. In some cases this happens during the course of the scholarship and in others some time after having finished it. Every student has a different timeframe to process new ideas and learning. As a teacher I try to detect how everyone is doing and to help him or her organize ideas that they propose to turn them into images.

NW: What is your opinion on the possibility to make a living off of art present day?
KP: Sometimes it happens that the work that one made (with its visual and ideological message) coincides with the demand of the market, but sometimes this does not happen so easily. The artist can direct his or her piece towards the trends of the market, but it is useless to force it until it looses meaning. Faced with this difficulty, it is always better to resolve the economic issue outside the artwork. I recommend defending ideas, insisting and expanding and exploring them more deeply.

NW: How is your relationship within the institution with the staff and us, the students?
KP: A good and intense group has formed. I suppose that this has to do with, on one hand, the energy from every one of you and on the other, with the exchange between the faculty and the institution. We all work together to adjust and improve the program on the go.

NW: OK, finally, do you have a general conclusion or any advice?
KP: It’s important to squeeze the juice out the scholarship and work a lot. Go to exhibitions, read and think. Explore in a constant state of observation. Ideas often appear during moments that are not working hours in the studio.

Of course when finishing the interview, Nehuen also tells us his idea of Karina as a student-artist: “Karina is a very good teacher. She pays attention to each one of our individual ideas and she tries to push them to the maximum by helping us build on the ideas to create new things. She also has a lot of knowledge about art in general, at both a technical and cultural level. The relationship between the group and Karina is very good and the best part is that we never feel any limits when developing a work.”

http://karinapeisajovich.com/

As a part of ProyectArte’s broad offering of professional development courses for its graduates, in May we began a series of seminars on finding, managing, and financing exhibitions organized in collaboration with Gestión Sustantiva, a respected leader in arts management.
Having completed the first two units – “How to Manage an Exhibition” and “Financing Opportunities for Fine Arts” – the graduate participants in the seminar have acquired important tools in the field of cultural management. From its conception, one of the key ideas of the courses was to focus on the practical application of these tools, and thus a core component is that each student is using their learnings to work on an actual exhibition, be it individually or as part of a group show. The students’ exhibitions range from traditional shows with paintings on gallery walls to the less orthodox, such as exhibitions on subway trains and stations. Some of the shows are in the early planning stages, while others are well underway and already have innauguration dates. Using the tools they’ve learned in the seminars, the graduates are immersing themselves in the work of seeking financing, finding exhibtion space, all the way to details of artwork installation in specific exhibition spaces. This way, every student’s project, from the most conventional exhibition in a gallery to the most risky, works through the different stages learned in their seminar, addressing all the aspects that must be kept in mind when planning to show artwork to the public.
The seminars, which begin from the premise that an exhibition is an interaction and act of communication with an “other” (the public) and that one of the goals is to bring them to the exhibit, engage them, and persuade them to return, was very well received by many of ProyectArte’s graduates. Following are comments from some of them.
Gonzalo Maciel said “Personally the diagrams on how to set up and plan a show were very helpful for me. It is good because it simplifies things by breaking down into maneable chucks the issues that one may think are complicated. They’ve also allowed me to better organize myself when planning exhibits.. It is good that beyond the course we take these materials and will be able to use them in future exhibits. And since it is a group seminar you can listen to how others manage their things and what they say to them and learn from their experience. Oh! I was forgetting, it is great that the teachers visited the places where we are planning our exhibits, which gives them a much more concrete vision of what we want to achieve, and demonstrates their commitment to our show beyond the effort that they put into the classroom sessions.”
Another graduate, Mercedes Peñalba, writes “The cultural management seminar opens our heads a little bit. Personally, it made me rethink the work that a show requires and all the details that must be addressed, and made me realize that the more attention to detail the better it will come out, not only with exhibitions at gallery level, but also smaller or informal projects. The tools and the procedures that we are learning with Paula and Mariana serve us well, they are applicable and easy to practice.”
Lucrecia Raimondi says “I am putting together a group show in the gallery Perro Verde located in Chacarita and the seminar helped me to clarify several important areas including: concept of the show, opportunities for activities related to the exhibition, thinking of the public like an artist, and installation of the show and publicity for the exhibit. On the other hand, the teachers’ visions about the spaces to do cultural showings are interesting, they make us see all the things that we have to consider, from the formalities to the preservation of the artwork.”

Authors: Mariana Aparicio and Paula Mascías.

ProyectArte is excited about the this important seminar which we are certain will have an important positive impact on the quality of our graduates’ exhibitions. ProyectArte looks forward to inviting all our supporters to upcoming shows which have benefitted from our student’s learnings during these classes.

Periodically, ProyectArte’s scholarship recipients come to the school outside of their regular class and studio time to help out with additional projects that help the school function, such as organizing our art storage room or cataloging books in the library. On the last such ocassion, several of the current students decided to write a small note for our blog giving their perspectives on their ProyectArte experience since they began their studies in March of this year. Here we share their thoughts on various aspect of their experience, prepared collectively by students Mariano, Eugenia, Luisina and Martina.

Rapport in the Workshop

“From the beginning there has been a strong cohesion and camaraderie among the group that continues to persist. It can be seen in the classes. There is always someone willing to help you by offering constructive comments or suggesting alternative resolutions to a problem. We’ve developed a familiarity within the group; for example, just a few weeks into the program the group started making birthday cakes and cards for each student on their birthdays, with the cards being created by the group to reflect the personality of the person they celebrate. We believe that these surprises and gestures demonstrate the level of attention and awareness we have for each other.”

The Professors

“The professors contribute to the warm and familiar climate in the classes. Although they are all different, their varied teaching styles and specialties complement one another and help up develop our works. While respecting our tastes and preferences, they also show us alternative possibilities and provide us with information to encourage us to seek new opportunities. In broadening our artistic endeavors – including new ideas, materials, and ways to use them – we discover new abilities and capacities within ourselves.”

The Creative Process

“We come to the workshop knowing some things but willing and ready to get to know materials and techniques we have never before seen or used. To encourage us to develop our full potential, the professors challenge us, trying to guide us towards deeper questioning and understanding. This guidance complements our individual perspective, as well as dramatically widening our horizons. Throughout this process, one of the most important elements is what each individual is able to offer to the others. While this tension between our vision and the input from the teachers and the group often leads to contradictions and difficulties, such a variety of input is almost always eventually helpful, as it breaks monotony and allows us to explore a range of possibilities. In fact, some of us have been quite surprised even in the short time we’ve been here by the works we have produced.”

Visiting Artists

“For students who wish to pursue a future in the arts, what could be better than an informal talk with distinguished artists with broad experience and a whole body of work? We are very fortunate to have such an opportunity. At ProyectArte we have the opportunity to share such informal talks with outside artists along with other students, graduates, and staff. Our first two visiting artists this year have been with the group Ojo de Pez and Mariano Sapia, who have told us about their work and shared their insights on different artistic visions as well as paths available. These encounters are an imporante influence, and they inspire us and add to our identity as aspiring young artists as well as our conception of art in general.

Pitching In

This happens on the last Saturday of each month. There, we set up materials, post notes on the blog, organize the library, and prepare canvases for painting, amongst other activities.”

Authors: Mariano, Eugenia, Luisina and Martina.