Piensa en arte/Think Art

Piensa en arte/Think Art is an initiative of the Fundación Cisneros and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros designed to introduce the creative and critical thinking processes that are implicit in artmaking into traditional education systems. Conventional disciplines often use pre-established orders for the acquisition of knowledge, whereas the exploration of multiple possibilities is an integral part of the artistic process.  Piensa en arte/Think Art integrates creative and critical thinking into disciplines traditionally external to art, provoking active questioning, interdisciplinary thinking, unexpected connections, and freedom from pre-established orders.

With this in mind, Piensa en arte/Think Art develops a series of exercises that, although generated from works of art, are not recognized immediately as being directly linked to them.  Once the exercises are solved, learners discuss the artist’s work in relation to their own problem-solving endeavors.  Like the artists whose work they discuss, learners become active participants in the development and questioning of cultural meaning rather than the passive recipients of cultural products, and apprehend education as a process of investigating, questioning and creating.