A Studio in Mexico - Puebla and Cholula
This drawing and mixed media studio course will bring students to south central Mexico. Students will visit many remarkable sites, including colonial palaces and homes, cathedrals and basilicas, museums and art galleries, artisan ateliers and markets to name a few. They will have opportunities to meet and work with local artists and artisans. Puebla and Cholula have long inspired artists. Talavera ceramics, native to Puebla and covered with polychrome drawings and intricate patterns, introduces our journey. Pre-Hispanic tombs and pyramids with intricate stone carved drawings, dozens of religious cathedrals and basilicas built by the Spaniards and unique interior as well as exterior paintings and patterned adornments, artisan markets with indigenous groups identified by traditionally patterned garments all provide a lush environment for art students and an opportunity for immersion in a culture very different than our own and very close.Built as a drawing and mixed media course this program would have great appeal to students interested in design as well as fine arts and across disciplines in these areas. This would include at least students interested in photography, architecture, pattern, surface design, ceramics, drawing and illustration, painting, sketchbooks, art history, cultural studies.
Course considers the breadth of drawing rather than an academic drawing focus. We will work with drawing as a thinking device, a means of observing and visual note-taking, of exploring multiple media.
Participants will develop extensive, eclectic sketchbook(s) during travel segment. Each will be required to develop a 7 part series begun during the travel segment and finished after return. Completed series will be presented in final critique late April at MassArt.
Faculty
- Nancy Aleo
- Nancy Aleo is an Associate Professor in the Studio Foundation Department at the Massachusetts College of Art and is President of the Board of Trustees of the Attleboro Arts Museum. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and maintains a studio in the Boston area. Ms. Aleo earned her MFA and BFA degrees in ceramics and has focused on mixed media drawing and painting for over 20 years. Most recently her mixed media drawing was included in the Massachusetts Artists 2007 exhibition at The Brush Art Gallery, Lowell, MA. Ms. Aleo is a past recipient of Painting Fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Program (1988) and the New England Foundation/National Endowment for the Arts (1994). She was a grant recipient of the Berkshire Taconic Artist Resource Trust in 2000 and received a Faculty Development Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2006. She has been traveling and studying in Mexico for almost two decades including co-leading a student group to Oaxaca, Mexico.
- Nancy Cusack
- Nancy Cusack, Professor and Drawing Coordinator, Studio Foundation Department, has taught and designed studio and conceptual courses for graduate and undergraduate students at MassArt for many years. Her education includes Boston College A.B; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Rhode Island School of Design; Middeloo Institute, The Netherlands and Lesley College/University, where she received a masters degree in expressive therapies from the Institute for Art and Human Development. She continues work begun in 1993 at the cochineal indigenous color research laboratory, Tlaponochestli, in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is past President and current member, Board Directors, South Shore Art Center, She has curated, organized and/or written for exhibitions in the U.S. and Mexico. Nancy is returning from a sabbatical which included a 2 month residency award from the White colony in Costa Rica. Recent juried or invitational exhibitions include: National Gallery of Costa Rica, solo show, February 2008; "Selections" MassArt, February 2008; "Women Who Travel", South Shore Art Center, fall 2007; "ANA 35", Holter Museum, Helena Montana, summer 2007; Corteza Amarilla, drawing installation, May 2007 – current, San Jose, Costa Rica; "New Works", Art at Avanti, Avanti Salon, Boston, fall,2006; 8 Visions, Attleboro Museum, August 2006. Previous exhibitions have included the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Los Gatos Museum, CA; Fuller Museum, Brockton, MA. Nancy has organized and led cultural travel groups to western Europe, Mexico, Central America, Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean for over two decades.