Fundació Joan Miró

About the individual or institution nominating:

1) Name and Surname of the individual submitting the nomination:

Ana Ara

1.2) Institution submitting the nomination:

Fundació Joan Miró

About the practice, project or institution nominated:

2) Name of the institution nominated:

Fundació Joan Miró

2.1) Name of the director of the institution nominated:

Marko Daniel

2.3) Name of the institution, practice or project nominated:

Premi Joan Miró

3) Argue in one sentence why you think the project you nominate is outstanding and could serve as an example for the entire community of modern and contemporary art museums.

This project demonstrates the transformative power of art by fostering social cohesion and empowering students to understand and respect difference.

3) Description of the practice or project. (max. 500 words)

The Joan Miró Prize is an international award for an artist at a breakthrough stage in their career regardless of age, gender or cultural identity. The prize is awarded in recognition of recent work by artists demonstrating the same spirit of exploration, innovation, commitment and freedom that characterised Joan Miró's life and work. In 2023, the Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen was the winner of the eighth Joan Miró Prize, awarded by the Fundació Joan Miró with the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. To increase the impact of the Joan Miró Prize and for the first time ever, an educational project has been developed with both a primary school (Escola Octavio Paz) and a university (BAU College of Arts and Design of Barcelona) to bring the students closer to contemporary art through the work of the five shortlisted artists aimed for the prize in 2023: Tala Madani, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Frida Orupabo, Mika Rottenberg and Haegue Yang.

The most successful part of the project was the learning process with Escola Octavio Paz in Barcelona, which involved a total of 75 students (between 10 and 12 years old) and 4 teachers who, guided by two of the Public and Social Programming Team membres of the Fundació Joan Miró for a month, did some research around these artists’ proposals while getting to discover the transformative power of art. The students were able to comprehend, through the selected artists, social issues that challenge them: capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, patriarchy, racism, belonging and memory. They also showed a better understanding of how they affect them, how they get to understand them, and what repercussions they have in their daily life, especially within their families and with their schoolmates. Moreover, the students developed means to explain through an artistic process these topics that they want to explain or report by having to go through the entire creation process (not just a simple task) while finding in art a place from where they could share their thoughts, feelings, and aspects of their lives by exhibiting their works around the school. This process was translated into an audiovisual piece that has served as context and inspiration for the jury members in their deliberation process. All of them highlighted the excellence of the mediation and the results obtained, where the students demonstrate having established a significant link with the work of the finalist artists.

The commitment of the Fundació Joan Miró to the participating schools will continue to be present, to keep on sharing knowledge in the educational community. It will also be scaled to other ongoing educational and accessibility projects, in which the winning artist will get involved. Through this project, we are commited to consolidating our institution as a place of encounter between local communities and the arts by developing tools for critical thinking through the arts, fostering values of coexistence and diversity by integrating educational innovation practices, promoting artistic processes in any area of learning and balancing social inequality through the combination of culture and education while seeking greater permeability between schools and families.

4) Images:

5) Provide links to the institution website as relevant support material:

https://www.fmirobcn.org/en/foundation/premi-joan-miro/prize/