Rolex matches rising artists with dynamic mentors from across the globe. They'll spend a minimum of six weeks in artistic collaboration with rising stars of their respective fields.
Tomas Bertelsen; ©Rolex/Audoin Desforges; Bart Michiels
When it debuted 20 years in the past, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was billed as the corporate’s intention to fill a void in arts philanthropy — to make sure that the world’s inventive heritage is handed on personally, within the irreplaceable, time-honored custom of grasp and protégé.
The debut of the primary class of mentors — which included novelist and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison in addition to director and playwright Robert Wilson — made it clear that this was not a superficial pursuit.
Within the 20 years since, the initiative has developed right into a prestigious program the place 63 gifted protégés from everywhere in the world have been paired with world-renowned artists of their self-discipline.
The biennial announcement of its subsequent cycle of mentors and protégés has, in sure circles, develop into a extremely anticipated occasion, à la award-show nominations; the newest had been revealed final month at a ceremony on the Brooklyn Academy of Music and, as one would possibly anticipate, it's a very numerous, worldwide and ridiculously achieved group.
El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist who at the moment lives in Nigeria and has received Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, was paired with Bronwyn Katz, a South African artist working primarily with discovered supplies.
Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Anne Lacaton will mentor Lebanese-American architect Arine Aprahamian, a Fulbright Award winner who earned her Grasp of Structure diploma from the College of California, Berkeley.
Bernardine Evaristo, who was the primary black lady and first black British lady to win the Booker Prize (for her 2019 novel “Woman, Lady, Different,” which was a nationwide greatest vendor and has garnered a slew of different literary prizes) is paired with Ayesha Harruna Attah, an award-winning Senegal-based Ghanaian creator of 5 novels of historic fiction that problem current preconceptions of African mores.
One of the crucial daring Chinese language filmmakers working at the moment, Jia Zhangke, will workforce up with Rafael Manuel, a Filipino filmmaker who splits his time between Manila, London and Amsterdam, and whose brief movie “Filipiñana” received the Silver Bear Jury Prize on the 2020 Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition.
Now engaged on a feature-length model of that movie, Manuel says he hopes to be “formed and challenged on a holistic stage, shaken to the core” by his mentorship.
Dianne Reeves, a five-time Grammy Award winner who discovered herself trending final month after actor Sheryl Lee Ralph belted out a number of traces of her 1994 music “Endangered Species” as a part of her Emmy Award acceptance speech for Greatest Supporting Actress in a Comedy Collection (“Abbott Elementary”), will mentor South Korean fashionable jazz singer and composer Track Yi Jeon, who says Reeves is “my largest affect, who has guided me as a jazz singer and who I like probably the most.”
These duos decide to a minimal of six weeks of artistic collaboration over the course of two years in a one-to-one mentoring relationship that always leads to lifelong friendships.
It has additionally organically created a world group of creatives, alumni of this prescient program who might not have in any other case crossed paths.
This, Rolex says, is “certainly one of its best achievements.”
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