Management Team

Hans Guggenheim ( with white jacket in the center), at the

opening of the Jamyangling Castle Academy of Arts and Crafts

Hans Guggenheim - Founder

Hans Guggenheim was Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT and visiting scholar at The Center for International Affairs at Harvard, where he worked on an evaluation of the contributions of UNESCO to the art and culture of traditional societies. He served as president of the World Crafts Foundation, of the Wunderman Foundation-Project Guggenheim in Mali. As vice-chairman of the Board of the Boston Center for the Arts he arranged for exhibitions of artists from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1991. He is an advisor to the Craft Center in Washington, DC and to the Shelley and Donald Rubin Museum in New York. In 1956 Guggenheim traveled around the world for LIFE magazine as an artist-reporter. He founded Projectguggenheim based on contacts with artists in remote areas of the world, responding to their expressed desire to become more knowledgeable about the traditions of their own culture. Guggenheim notes that :" Discontinuities in art traditions are common in history and especially threatening to the crafts in small cultures when the traditional means of transmitting skills from one generation falls into disuse. It is at this point when schools have to provide the means for continuity. At the same time such schools must make it possible for young artists to be able to participate in the global aesthetic driven by technological innovations in the arts." The goal of Projectguggenheim is to build art academies and art schools based on the belief that awareness of today's art as well as in the past is the right of any artist, and especially of young artists who live behind geographic and cultural barriers. Projectguggenheim policy is to provide computers both as creative tools and means of communication with the art world to schools within its network where there are no museums or art publications. However, its heuristic strategy for stimulating innovation is based on creative artists who see new opportunities and who can evolve new responses to new challenges. Thus Projectguggenheim aims to facilitate the travel of artist teachers to its global network of schools.