History of The Pozos Art Project

Mouse over the images below to see their captions.

The Pozos Art Project, Inc, was named for the Mexican town of Mineral de Pozos, where the project was started by photographer Geoff Winningham and artist Janice Freeman.  The project was founded with a dual mission:  to bring arts instruction of the highest possible quality to children, especially to the local children of Pozos; and to develop better relations and understanding between the United States of America and Mexico, by involving students from the USA, working both as teaching assistants and as participants, alongside the Mexican students. 

Pozos is located in the state of Guanajuato, in the high plains of central Mexico.  The landscape of the region has been called a “ Mexican Tuscany” for its rugged natural beauty and its many historic ruins.  Rocky hills rise all around the town, inviting hikers, artists, and photographers to explore the ruins of elaborate old mining structures.  At an altitude of over 8,000 feet, the light is crystalline. The eastern range of the Sierra Madre Mountains lies along the horizon to the north. Founded almost five hundred years ago as a center for the mining of gold, silver, and mercury, Pozos eventually grew into an opulent city of over 80,000 inhabitants. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution took most the men of the city off to war and few returned.  The great mines filled with water and were abandoned.  For over half a century Pozos sat as a pueblo fantasma, a near ghost town, with fewer than 100 hardy souls still living there.  But in the 1970’s, the place began to take on a new life.  Mexican families from the surrounding area moved in, and even a few foreigners took up residence in as well, mostly artists, like Winningham and Freeman, who built a home and studio just a block from the old town plaza.

​The roots of the project go back to 2002, when Freeman brought a few Pozos children into her studio and taught them printmaking.  Several years later, Winningham, with funding raised in Houston, purchased 20 cameras and brought eight undergraduate art students from Rice University to help him teach photography to 34 Pozos children.  Freeman continued to teach printmaking to the same kids, and the results were inspiring.  The art from that combined effort was published as a catalog (Mi Pueblo: The Pozos Children’s Project) and then exhibited in museums in Mexico and the United States.  In 2008, in an effort to continue making art with children, Winningham and Freeman put together a board of directors and formed the Pozos Art Project, Inc, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit corporation.

By 2009, the extraordinary quality of the art done by children working with the Pozos Art Project in Mexico had come to the attention of Sandra Bernhard, director of HGOco, the community projects arm of the Houston Grand Opera.  Bernhart invited Winningham and Freeman to work in ongoing collaborations with HGOco, teaching art and photography to children in selected Houston schools, opening the first chapter of the Pozos Art Project’s work in Houston.  Rice University’s Department of Visual Arts joined the collaboration, Rice undergraduate students began to volunteer to help in the project, and in 2010 the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented the exhibition “Home + Place,” displaying 44 photographs by Houston children alongside an equal number of photographs by children working through a parallel project in Azerbaijan.

The “Home+Place” project proved to be an inspiration for ongoing work in the public schools of Houston.  In the fall of 2012, the Pozos Art Project announced an ambitious new effort: a collective visual portrait of the city of Houston, done by HISD schoolchildren from diverse cultural backgrounds.  The ongoing project, In the Eyes of Our Children: Houston, An American City, is planned as both a celebration of Houston’s extraordinary cultural diversity and the vitality of children’s art.

We invite elementary and middle school students to join our summer workshop in Houston, June 6-18, 2016.

As we move toward completion of our project, In the Eyes of Our Children: Houston, An American City, we will offer a 2-week workshop for Houston children of elementary and middle school age. For details about the workshop, please contact Geoff Winningham via email: geoffwin@rice.edu or phone: (832) 721-6958.