Rice professor, students make artistic outreach trip to the heart of Mexico

CONTACT: Jessica Stark
PHONE: 713-348-6777
E-MAIL: stark@rice.edu

 Rice professor, students make artistic outreach trip to the heart of Mexico
Team offers workshops, art for small town

Tomorrow a group of Rice University students will leave Houston to embark upon a month-long artistic and educational outreach trip to a small ghost town in the heart of Mexico. Led by Rice Professor Geoff Winningham and artist Janice Freeman, the Rice students will offer visual art classes, workshops and exhibitions to the people of Mineral de Pozos, focusing on providing opportunities for the community’s children and young adults.

Beginning next week, the team will teach workshops on photography, painting and drawing. A small group of Houston high school students will also attend the workshops to further create opportunities for cultural exchange. 

The trip is part of a larger endeavor: the Pozos Art Project Inc., a Texas nonprofit corporation founded last year. The organization grew from a previous project Winningham and Freeman conducted with Rice students.

In the fall of 2007, Winningham and his students visited his home in Pozos and worked with the local children there to photograph the town and its people. The children, ages 7 to 16, were given cameras and other materials to discover, explore and capture their town through artwork.

Winningham got the idea from Freeman, his wife, when he was trying to decide what exhibition to make for FotoFest 2008, an international showcase of photography and photo-related art. A few years earlier she had taught printmaking in her Pozos studio to some children from a nearby orphanage.

“The prints they made were quite beautiful,” Winningham said. “So I began to wonder if I could do something similar for the kids in Pozos — teach them basic photography, help them photograph their town, process and print their work and still assemble a show in time for FotoFest.”

Winningham had been commissioned by the Jung Center of Houston to have an exhibition for the festival, and he had only six months to get funding, buy cameras and materials, find and teach the Pozos children who wanted to participate, help them produce the pictures, then frame the show and hang it. Others might have panicked or scrapped the idea all together, but Winningham decided to expand the project, inviting Rice students to participate. With the Jung Center’s full support, the Pozos Children’s Project was off the ground, and Winningham, Freeman and the Rice students were bound for Mexico in the fall of 2007.

The result was “Mi Pueblo,” an exhibition of photography and monotypes that has toured Texas and Mexico. The next stops for the exhibition include art galleries at Notre Dame University, Duke University and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.

“We’ve had so much success with the project, we feel that we must keep it going and growing,” Winningham said. “It’s not just about making extraordinary art. We hope that through our projects, we can foster understanding, good relations and shared cultural experiences between young people of the U.S. and Mexico.”

Winningham invites photographers and reporters to see Pozos, which he calls “a picture story that will make itself.” To arrange such a visit or to interview Winningham or any of the students making the trip to Mexico, contact Jessica Stark at stark@rice.edu or 713-348-6777.

For more information on the Pozos Art Project, visit http://pozosartproject.com/.