Rolex taps creative stars for its 2022 mentor program

When it debuted 20 years ago, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was billed as the company’s intention to fill a void in arts philanthropy — to ensure that the world’s artistic heritage is passed on personally, in the irreplaceable, time-honored tradition of master and protégé.

The debut of the first class of mentors — which included novelist and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison as well as director and playwright Robert Wilson — made it clear that this was not a superficial pursuit.

In the two decades since, the initiative has developed into a prestigious program where 63 gifted protégés from all over the world have been paired with world-renowned artists in their discipline.

The biennial announcement of its next cycle of mentors and protégés has, in certain circles, become a highly anticipated event, à la award-show nominations; the latest were revealed last month at a ceremony at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and, as one might expect, it is a very diverse, international and ridiculously accomplished group.

El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist who currently lives in Nigeria and has won Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, was paired with Bronwyn Katz, a South African artist working primarily with found materials.

Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Anne Lacaton will mentor Lebanese-American architect Arine Aprahamian, a Fulbright Award winner who earned her Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Bernardine Evaristo, who was the first black woman and first black British woman to win the Booker Prize (for her 2019 novel “Girl, Woman, Other,” which was a national best seller and has garnered a slew of other literary prizes) is paired with Ayesha Harruna Attah, an award-winning Senegal-based Ghanaian author of five novels of historical fiction that challenge existing preconceptions of African mores.

One of the most daring Chinese filmmakers working today, Jia Zhangke, will team up with Rafael Manuel, a Filipino filmmaker who splits his time between Manila, London and Amsterdam, and whose short film “Filipiñana” won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Now working on a feature-length version of that film, Manuel says he hopes to be “shaped and challenged on a holistic level, shaken to the core” by his mentorship.

Dianne Reeves, a five-time Grammy Award winner who found herself trending last month after actor Sheryl Lee Ralph belted out several lines of her 1994 song “Endangered Species” as part of her Emmy Award acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (“Abbott Elementary”), will mentor South Korean modern jazz singer and composer Song Yi Jeon, who says Reeves is “my biggest influence, who has guided me as a jazz singer and who I admire the most.”

These duos commit to a minimum of six weeks of creative collaboration over the course of two years in a one-to-one mentoring relationship that often results in lifelong friendships.

It has also organically created a global community of creatives, alumni of this prescient program who may not have otherwise crossed paths.

This, Rolex says, is “one of its greatest achievements.”