August was a month of new beginnings at ProyectArte. As Mara Bochardt’s time at ProyectArte drew to a close last month, Ana Slavin joined the organization as our new executive director.

Ana studied at The National Drama School (Escuela Nacional de Arte Dramático) and completed a postgraduate degree in Culture and Communications Management and Policy at the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO Argentina). Her main activity in recent years has been in the field of managing social and cultural programs. Ana has administered neighborhood cultural development programs both for the government and for non-profit organizations. She also ran programs for underprivileged citizens through Buenos Aires’ Cultural Institute Social Office (Gabinete Social del Instituto Cultural de la Provincia).

Ana isn’t the only new face at ProyectArte; our newest group of 18 young artists has just begun its classes as part of the 2011-2012 ProyectArte Scholarship Program.

This year’s instructors include Karina Peisajovich, who will teach classes dealing with conception and execution of artworks, who will lead a class on different expressive media; and Máximo Jacoby, who will teach art history.

ProyectArte gives its students not only a high-quality arts education, but also the tools and opportunities to broaden their professional horizons. In today’s world, a career in the arts can mean many different things, not just painting and drawing. As ProyectArte graduates Florencia Buezas, Mercedes Peñalva, and Matías Presta demonstrate, professional artists don’t necessarily need to confine themselves to the easel.

Florencia Buezas, a 2008 graduate of the Scholarship Program, first embarked on her small-scale jewelry-design venture as a source of extra income. She applied for and received a micro-credit loan from the Municipality of Saladillo that enabled her to purchase the tools and materials she needed to advance her work. Although her product line is still under development, her vision is to give materials like leather and metals a special twist by incorporating elements unique to her personal artistic style, like elaborate branching designs. While she doesn’t plan to leave painting behind, she has found jewelry making to be surprisingly close to her art; it’s a skill she is now hoping to perfect.

Another working artist from the 2007-08 Scholarship Program is Mercedes Peñalva, who attended fashion design school and is currently working to develop her own clothing line, AMAME BARROCA, prendas hechas con amor, (Love Me Baroque: Garments Made with Love). According to Mercedes, her designs for AMAME BARROCA reflect her own unique philosophy of life. Her clothing is made for the “baroque woman” who manages a busy schedule and has many projects on the go, yet who has not abandoned her attention to detail and her concern for beauty. The garments aspire to be both multi-purpose and timeless; one can pair them with wardrobe basics for both day and night and wear them throughout all the seasons of the year. Her brand envisions a world that is more tender and romantic, with an optimistic and playful aesthetic. They are made with loving care, as every piece is unique: hand-dyed, with hand-made embroidery and prints. Mercedes’ clothing line builds on her work as an artist, incorporating prints taken from her drawings and the works of other emerging artists, bold uses of color, and innovative combinations of fabrics and textures. Her artwork has long played on fashion, offering a critique of current fashion industry practices.

Mercedes has found fashion design to be a rewarding field of work that indulges her creativity and independence, provides her with a monthly income, and gives her a the flexible schedule necessary for her to continue her studies. She is currently gathering materials and working on ideas and designs for her spring-summer line. Her brand is sold in a variety of locations, including a monthly design fair that she organizes herself called Bohemiadogue. AMAME BARROCA can be found on Facebook and at www.wix.com/mercedespenalva/amamebarroca.

Matías Presta, a 2010 Scholarship Program graduate, is thankful every day for his job in the Creative Lab at Vostu, a social gaming company that develops online games and other multimedia for social networks like Facebook and Google’s +1. Vostu is based in Sao Pablo and New York, and the company has over 500 employees in Buenos Aires’ Puerto Madero neighborhood and almost 50 million users around the world, particularly in Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., and Asia. Matías works in a select team of art directors alongside one of the company’s three owners. His job is to help define the style and visual elements of upcoming games and projects. More than the final product, what he enjoys the most is the creative process: developing a game’s aesthetic profile, defining its characters, and designing backdrops and buildings. The experience, he explains, is like being backstage at Disney. He is thrilled to have a job that requires him to draw all day, both by hand and digitally, and to try out new styles—some realistic, others more cartoonish—to fit the desired profile. Beyond complimentary snacks and lunch, one of the notable benefits of working at Vostu is the live model classes held twice a week. Despite working full time, Matías is still able to manage many additional activities, including coordinating art therapy programs in psychiatry, teaching drawing to first year students at the University of Buenos Aires, and pursuing his own studies.

On Saturday, June 18, the students and graduates of ProyectArte’s Scholarship Program were invited to tour the exhibition, Texan Art: Fields, Neighborhoods, and Borders, sponsored by Fundación OSDE and the Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington, D.C. The exhibition documents various Texan artists’ visions of the fusion of North American and Mexican culture.

Kathy Vargas and Vincet Valdez, distinguished artists whose work is featured in the exhibition, talked with ProyectArte’s young artists about their explorations of border culture and the broader society around them and shared personal accounts of their own careers. Both shared insights form their artistic processes, which seek to build works based around their own real-life experiences along the border.

The collaborative tone of the event made it feel like relaxed discussion among colleagues with shared concerns. Both Kathy and Vincent stressed the importance of seizing opportunities to learn, understand, and build bonds with other artists and cultures to enrich their own creative processes.

To deepen the education of its graduates, ProyectArte invited curator and coordinator Máximo Jacoby of the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center to share his conception of art in a seminar titled “Circulation of the Artwork: The Relationship Between Text and Context.” Each Tuesday in May, twenty young artists met with Jacoby to discuss their own artistic vision and their interest in visual arts as a medium.

Jacoby found that describing the local artistic landscape and its function could be an excellent starting point for understanding the value of self-critical discussion among contemporary artists. Different perspectives on the definition of art and its role in society made this sort of conversation highly rewarding.

For instance, the preconception of a viewer who looks at a work of art and thinks, “my little nephew could make this,” reflects an established paradigm that considers only the complexity of the final product in order to evaluate its legitimacy. This modern perception implies that professional artists must have formal academic training and promotes a practice of art based around classical academic knowledge. According to this perspective, the artist considers her artwork as something separate from herself, something that doesn’t need to be personal. This line of thinking plays on the romantic notion of the artist as a hermit who has no relationship to the social forces around him. The creative expression embodied by her perfected technique, it suggests, enables the piece of art to speak for itself.

Yet in 2011, Jacoby explains, our nearly limitless access to information allows us endless opportunities to connect with the world, sparking the contemplation of new methods of artistic training. Understanding contemporary art as a language fed by many streams underscores its power as an engine of social communication. Much contemporary art, Jacoby contends, is in fact relational art, incorporating diverse techniques and interacting with other disciplines in order to shape a broader language. The contemporary artist can thus be a creator with a broader social influence, one centered on the artistic process itself. Consequently, contemporary art aims for heterogeneous practices, making visual art more evocative and diverse ways to express human thought.

In order for an artist to grow, Jacoby maintains, he must remain open, unbounded by narrow aesthetics or by the demands of the commercial art market. Art can thus be a tool that stimulates the thought among artists and the public.

Such an approach invites artists to include their own words and thoughts in the viewer’s contemplative process. That the viewer understands where and how a piece was made, and at whom it is directed, should not to be taken for granted. Jacoby deems it fundamental that the artist be actively involved in shaping the thought processes surrounding her work in order to establish a dialogue that connects the finished product to the world of action. If one thinks of the contemporary artist as a researcher—as someone who digs through mountains of information to distill a unique perspective—then clearly explaining the artist’s creative process becomes central to the impact of her finished work. In addition, the historical context that shapes an artist’s focus must similarly be considered in order for the viewer to understand how that artist has responded to the world around him.

Explaining these important procedural elements through accompanying texts breaks the classical convention of a homogeneous process, because it includes the context of the artwork and the artist’s own thought process in the display of the work. It also poses a challenging question to artists and viewers, asking if the piece has meaning when isolated from these social and personal dynamics. In this way,  Jacoby concludes, conceiving of the visual artist as a thinker who ponders the purpose of art-making and who offers a written opinion of their own praxis transforms the work by tying it to the artist’s—and the viewer’s—social reality.

This past June, two exciting events helped to get the recent graduates of ProyectArte’s 2010-11 Scholarship Program thinking about the next stage of their artistic careers.

The first of these two events, the opening of “Discontinuous” at ProyectArte’s Galería PRIMA, represents one of the future exhibition opportunities available to these promising young artists. An intervention in the gallery space proposed by acclaimed artist and ProyectArte faculty member Ernesto Ballesteros, the show took the concept of a clothing bazaar as its starting point, and the emerging artists who participated built their contributions around forms and images imspired by play and the senses.

Soon after this opening in Galería PRIMA, ProyectArte visited artist Marcos López’s exhibition “Tierra en Trance” at the YPF Foundation. During the visit, we spoke with the curator of the space, Fernando Fariña, and the students were able to gain not just a deeper perspective on the symbolic and visual aspects of the show itself but also a window into the curatorial process, including Fariña’s approach to choosing artwork in light of installation constraints and the nature of the exhibition space.

Having completed their year and a half of classes, the 18 young artists of the 2010-11 class are heading out into the world as emerging artists. As they enter this new phase of their artistic lives, ProyectArte will continue to provide them with the tools, work and exhibition spaces, and learning opportunities to succeed.

ProyectArte is launching another artistic intervention to engage the community on an important social issue. Partnering with the Foundation for Studies and Research on Women (FEIM), ProyectArte is excited to announce the project, Art in Action: Preventing and Eradicating Violence Against Women, a large public mural on Dorrego Avenue in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Colegiales.

The design and implementation of the project will be spearheaded by more than a dozen young artists currently enrolled at ProyectArte, who will work under the guidance of renowned contemporary artists. The mural will be composed of four images on four 100-meter walls which visually highlight the need to prevent, eradicate, and punish gender-based violence. Professionals from FEIM will be joined by activists from the National Network of Youth and Adolescents for Sexual and Reproductive Health (REDNAC) in order to lead a series of workshops with the participating artists. FEIM will also collaborate with the artists to ensure that the project’s message remains clear and visually distinct.

Art in Action will help to raise awareness and mobilizing the citizens of Buenos Aires to fight this violation of human rights through artistic expression and innovative interventions in the public space. In this way, the project will also testify to the value of art as a means of community-based aesthetic expression and as a tool for action and social transformation.

This project is not the first of its kind for ProyectArte; in 2009, PA artists painted various murals in the Palermo neighborhood, and in 2010 they created a mural in the Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires exploring the issue of access to water. This latest mural will be introduced to the public on November 25, 2011—the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.