Talk: Cossío: Founding SMA’s Art Schools by Alberto Aveleyra

Friday, March 22 12:30pm
Mercado Sano, second floor
$350, RSVP by sending an Inquiry

Felipe Cossío del Pomar founded the Bellas Artes and the Instituto Allende art schools here in San Miguel.

Cossío was a Peruvian painter, writer, historian of art and political activist who lived in Paris, Madrid, Brazil, United States, Cusco and San Miguel de Allende. He was the personal friend of Picasso, Modigliani, Diego Rivera and many other artists and intellectuals of the Paris of the 1910’s and 20’s. He did his PhD on the Cuzco school of painting and published multiple books, including art criticism, histories of art, biographies and his chronicle about the schools in San Miguel published in Spain in 1974.

The founding of (the Escuela Universitaria de) Bellas Artes in 1937, forever changed the history, economics and cultural development of San Miguel.

This talk reveals the life and works of the man that transformed San Miguel in a cultural experiment, showing that the educational project of the art school cannot be understood without understanding the personal and professional trajectory of its founder

Alberto Aveleyra is a Mexican anthropologist and historian, curator of the new permanent archaeological exhibition of the Historical Museum of San Miguel. He is president of the Friends of the Historical Museum. He founded the cultural project Artisans of Time in 2004. Through tours, talks and seminars Alberto funds his research project on Mexico and San Miguel de Allende.

In 2014 and 2017 he went to Piura in Perú to digitize the personal archives of Felipe Cossío del Pomar, the Peruvian founder of the two art schools of San Miguel. In 2019 Aveleyra was the curator of the temporary exhibition “La historia poco contada de Felipe Cossío del Pomar” in the Aurora Estrada hall of the Centro Cultural El Nigromante.