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Join Us For The Pozos Art Project 2015 Summer Workshops

The Pozos Art Project, Inc, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to enhancing relations between the United States of America and Mexico through arts-related projects, announces workshops for the summer of 2015 in photography and the studio arts.  The workshops will be held in the Mexican town of Mineral de Pozos, Guanajuato and will combine young students from both countries, working under the direction of photographer Geoff Winningham and artist Janice Freeman, assisted by college students working in the arts.

Dates for this year’s workshops are June 29-July 12 and July 13-26, 2015. Fee for either two-week workshop is $3,000.  This fee includes tuition, lodging with a Mexican family, all meals, all photography and art supplies, and transportation to and from the nearby airport in Querétaro, Mexico.  For additional information please contact Geoff Winningham via email: geoffwin@rice.edu or phone: 832 721-6958.
We invite you to see images of the art and activities from our previous seven years’ workshops on this website by viewing our published catalogs from 2008 through 2014.

The Nature of Children and Art

In 2008, the noted poet and Jungian analyst Pittman McGehee, wrote this preface for the catalog to the first exhibition of children’s art from The Pozos Art Project. The exhibition opened at The Jung Center of Houston for FotoFest of 2008 then, over the next three years, traveled to museums in the United States and Mexico. 

The archetypal idea that connects childhood with nearness to deity is expressed in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality:”

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

C. G. Jung writes: “The artist seizes on [an] image, and raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted
by the minds of his contemporaries according to their power.” And so, too, the Rabbi Jesus admonishes that we must become like a child in order to enter the Kingdom of God.

The assumption, then, is that children are developmentally closer to the unconscious than adults, which would lead us to believe that their art comes with an honesty and authenticity because there is less ego to be involved. The enemy of art is pretense.

The evidence of this wonderful show gives credence to the theory that children are closer to the source. We can call it divine, transcendent, the force, the source, the Muse, or the Self, but whatever we call it, that is what we sense in these pictures. These photographs and monotypes give us images that carry something of the archetypal innocence, curiosity, and authenticity of the child.
And they encourage us adults to discover that “puer aeternis” (eternal child) in each of us. This project brings us pure art, where the extraordinary is seen in the ordinary.

- Pittman McGehee 

Board of Directors of The Pozos Art Project, Inc.

Travis Broesche - Houston
Susan M. Edwards - Houston
Janice Freeman - Houston/Pozos
Geoff Winningham - Houston/Pozos
David Winslow - Pozos