The Tibetan Children's Education Foundation (TCEF), in collaboration with the Montana Artists Refuge (MAR), another non-profit based in Basin, MT, with the support and assistance of the Feathered Pipe Foundation, Helena, MT, hopes to bring three Tibetan thangka artists from the Tibetan exiled community in India for a three-month residency at Basin, MT. The artists will spend March to May 2005 at MAR center at Basin, for an uninterrupted working period and will also have the opportunity to collaborate and discuss their work with other artists. Here they will have the space, material and a tranquil atmosphere in which to create their art, luxuries for most of them in India, where as refugees, they are cramped for working space, inundated with the sound of thousands of people living all around them and struggling to make ends meet.
The second phase of the project, will organize a series of exhibitions on Tibetan thangka paintings, beginning with one at MAR. Exhibitions will be held at various schools and museums in the Northwest. The artists will present their work and talk to interested audiences, discussing and sharing not only their art but other aspects of Tibetan culture that may interest the audience.
Apart from working for the education of Tibetan children in exile, TCEF works for the preservation and regeneration of Tibetan culture by trying to raise awareness of it here in the West. We hope that the Tibetan Thangka Artists Project will go a long way in that effort. If this project is successful, it will motivate us to undertake similar projects on other aspects of Tibetan art and culture.
This project will give the Tibetan thangka artists opportunities to create excellent Tibetan thangkas. The exhibitions will provide them great forums to present their art to a large audience of Americans in the Northwest. At the same time, it will provide interested Americans a great opportunity to not only view top quality contemporary Tibetan thangka paintings, but also to talk to the thangka painters about their art and to learn about the process of thangka painting. This project will also introduce Tibetan art and culture to school children in this region.
Budget for the Project:
The estimated cost of this project was around $40,000. TCEF raised all of the necessary funds and, as pictures attest, the project was a great success.
For more information on this project, please contact us at tcef@mt.net.
TCEF is a nonprofit 501C3 organization dedicated to Tibetan children, helping preserve their culture and function in the modern world.
