FROM: Jeremy Sinsimer
ÀNI Art Academies President
It has already been an incredible privilege to join ÀNI Art Academies and to be a part of this truly international community. Visiting each of the academies over the past few months has opened my eyes and really shown me how little I knew about all the hard work, dedication, knowledge, and skills that is required of everyone to pursue this program successfully. And this is not only for the instructors and the apprentices, but for all of our staff whose dedication to ÀNI Art Academies has allowed it to flourish in different and diverse communities around the world. From the admin, deans, instructors, translators and social media teams, to the chefs, gardeners, cleaners, maintenance teams, and drivers, ÀNI Art Academies could not function without all of your hard work and commitment to the success of our apprentices. ÀNI Art Academies is so much more than I could have imagined, and it is the communities you have formed that, I believe, lies very much at the heart of its, and your, success.
One thing that struck me as I visited each academy is that there are two distinct communities at each location. The first community I noticed was the local community; the apprentices, the staff, and the relationships with the local towns or villages. Whether on a hill high above Río San Juan, on a main, shoplined street in Red Bank, surrounded by rice fields and peacocks outside Dickwella, tucked away in the woods outside Wilkes-Barre, beside a desert path down to Little Bay, or surrounded by yet more rice paddies and water buffalo in Koh Yao Noi, the location, the people, and the connection with the local community is a huge part of what makes each ÀNI Art Academy so unique.
The second community is the international ÀNI community; bound together by a common curriculum, a near obsessive focus on practice and mastery, and a level of dedication that I have never seen before in my career. As different as each location may be on the outside, the studios themselves would be familiar to any apprentice or instructor who visits them. There might be someone powering through pressure scales, someone stuck on spheres, someone doing their first form box, or someone realizing that their huge drawing is going to take a bit more time than they had anticipated. It is amazing to see how connected everyone is through their common pursuit of excellence along this shared path forward.
Whether you are an apprentice or an instructor from the Dominican Republic, Anguilla, the US, Sri Lanka or Thailand, you all share a common experience; an experience as unique as it is profound, so that when you meet each other, or even see each other’s work, you know that they made those sacrifices, put in those long hours, and fought through those struggles, just as you have. And although our ÀNI Art community continues to grow, the experiences you’ve had, and the dedication and passion you’ve shown, are still only shared by a precious few around the globe. I am therefore all the more grateful that you all have so warmly welcomed me, an outsider to this world, into the ÀNI Art Academy community. It is a privilege and an honor to serve this organization and I want to thank you all for your warm welcome as we navigate this path forward together.
Jeremy Sinsimer