Rolex’s Mentor and Protégé Arts program promotes learning and culture.
Rolex, the world’s most famous watchmaker, is a global luxury brand with a marketing reach that includes ubiquitous airport clocks, premier sporting events, numerous television spots and a lengthy list of ambassadors with household names. Estimates peg the crown’s annual production of fine timepieces at around one million per year and its annual turnover at close to $8 billion. Rolex is, in short, a commercial force to be reckoned with, which goes a long way toward explaining popular ignorance of its official—and indeed unusual—status as a charitable family foundation.
That’s right. Upon founder Hans Wilsdorf’s death in 1960, Rolex transitioned to a foundation, ensuring the company’s impact would reach far beyond the wrists of those fortunate enough to own its watches.
Several of Rolex’s philanthropic endeavors center around the importance of education and mentorship in the arts, ensuring that craftsmanship and ingenuity continue to thrive through a flow of skills and information from one generation to the next.
Mentor and Protégé Arts
Launched in 2002, the biennial Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative pairs mentors and protégés for a year, allowing emerging talents an unusual level of access to experts in their fields. In each of the seven disciplines—architecture, dance, film, literature, music, theater, and visual arts—the mentor and the protégé meet and determine how to spend their year. Save the 30 days they are required to spend working side-by-side, there are few rules to the program.
The process for choosing the protégés is highly selective. A panel appointed by Rolex invited 159 artists from 53 countries to apply for the mentorship program in 2016. From that group, three or four prospective protégés from each field emerged. Next, the mentors, themselves selected by a group of distinguished peers, chose the artist they want to mentor.
For their participation in the program, each mentor is awarded 75,000 Swiss francs and each protégé receives 25,000 Swiss francs. At the end of their year, a further 25,000 Swiss francs are made available to each protégé for the creation of a new piece of work, production, performance, or public event.
The pairs have the freedom to work together in any way they choose, though they typically remain in close contact for the duration of the program. At the end of their partnership, each protégé makes a presentation to demonstrate what they’ve learned from their mentor.
