Information about Mano y Mente
Mano y Mente is a small, private artist-in-residence program located in the historic, beautiful town of Tularosa. “Mano y Mente” means “Hand and Mind” in Spanish. The name reflects the program’s creative and pensive nature and is in Spanish to pay tribute to the region’s cultural influences.
Mano y Mente is not a school, the director is not a professor, the "artists in residence" are not students. Mano y Mente is an artist program designed for professional artists to focus, create, and exchange ideas. Mano y Mente participants are selected from a national and international pool of applicants and are invited to spend 10 weeks living in Tularosa while painting throughout southwestern NM. Artists are chosen based credentials including talent, diversity of art experience, productivity, individuality, and compatibility.
During each session, Mano y Mente participants spend every other week at a different landscape painting region (White Sands, Three Rivers, Lincoln National Forest, etc.). The alternating weeks are spent in-studio working on individually inspired works of art.The work exhibited at each final show is inevitably influenced by the stunning local landscapes alongside the artists’ own experiences, techniques, and interests. Styles of present and past Mano y Mente artists have ranged from pin-point realism, expressionism, to surrealism and abstraction.
The use of the studio and housing space, and the transportation to local landscape-painting regions is free to the Mano y Mente artists. Both the patron and the director/founder are art and local history enthusiasts and hope that each session’s participants leave New Mexico with the same zeal and curiosity!