Osage Art Foundation
The Osage Art Foundation was established in 2005 with three main goals – Creative Communities, Cultural Cooperation and Creative Capacity and has since played an active role in developing education and training of young people, broadening cultural awareness and participation in artistic endeavours, nurturing creativity and critical thinking and fostering international cultural exchange. The Osage Art Foundation is now widely recognised by the local community and internationally as having initiated many pioneering projects of international calibre.
The arts help us to understand who we are, where we come from, where we are going and what we want to be. They are an essential part of describing new information, new ideas and new values. The Osage Art Foundation aims to bring to the art world new voices, new vision, new ideas and new styles; to present art that spurs the imagination; to present work that addresses local issues, national concerns, and universal themes and work that celebrates diversity and difference. The Osage Art Foundation aims to celebrate the achievements of humanity together with its limitations and failures.
The Osage Art Foundation promotes and develops innovative best practice in curatorship and research, knowledge building and in teaching and learning.
The Osage Art Foundation raises funds and supports a range of programs that help young people come to a better understanding and appreciation of art and help improve relations between people of different cultures.
We believe that the arts play an important part in the life of every member of the community. We aim to help increase community participation in the arts through education and better access and understanding in order to help shape a future in which the arts play a vital role in everyday life.
The Osage Art Foundation believes that every society should strive to become a creative community. We believe that the aesthetic appreciation of art is vital to the well being of any society and should be accessible to all.
The Osage Art Foundation is committed to improving the links between education and the arts. Our projects help broaden people’s perspectives on different ways and means of expression. We have a particular interest in early childhood art education as it provides the building blocks of all art education and the foundation of skills necessary for contemporary life. Certain basic skills are implicit in all art education. Through observation, perception, expression, communication, technical skills and creativity children learn the life-long skills of open-mindedness, innovative thinking, technical skill and cultural awareness. We actively support children’s art education through seminars and workshops that stimulate children’s interest and participation in art, raising their self-awareness and nurturing their creativity and critical thinking.
The Osage Art Foundation is also committed to fostering cultural cooperation, improving understanding between people of different cultures and to developing creative capacity in every country that we work. International cultural exchange programs facilitate deeper and better understanding between people of different cultures. We aim to help break down barriers between cultures while maintaining and preserving the things that make them distinctively different.
Resources are vital if artists and communities are to engage with the arts and enjoy a rich cultural life. We aim to help improve the vitality and viability of the arts. The most important ingredients for cultivating creativity in a community are human capital and investment. Where possible, the Osage Art Foundation provides strategic funding or in-kind support to key arts organisations and third-party project based activities in order to help those activities to prosper.
The current focus of the Osage Art Foundation is on developing deeper discourse in and around the arts and in the wider community. We believe that research, analysis, examination and promulgation of issues pertaining to society, contemporary culture and value by artists, writers, critic, curators and commentators will build better understanding of regional perspectives throughout Asia and to the wider world beyond.
In order to better contextualize the work of the current generation of Asian contemporary artists, the Osage Art Foundation has helped to introduce a number of seminal contemporary Asian masters to the wider international artworld. For example, Roberto Chabet (1937 – 2013) made an unparalleled contribution to Philippine contemporary art as an educator, mentor, visionary, conceptualist, innovator, alchemist, poet and tireless promoter of younger talents, but until recently was not as well known internationally.
To date in 2013 the Osage Art Foundation has presented the Andy Warhol exhibition “Hello It’s Me, Goodbye: Andy Warhol’s Cinema”, jointly-presented by The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh the second in its series of non-profit “Market Forces” exhibitions, “The Friction of Opposites” that opened in Hong Kong in May 2013 at the same time as the commercial art fair Art Basel Hong Kong in order to focus attention on the non-commercial intrinsic values of art.
In May 2013 The Osage Art Foundation was honoured at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards with an Award for Arts Sponsorship.