Local Artists Launch Businesses

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Artists in any country and every epoch have tended to struggle and perhaps at no time is it tougher than the Internet age. In Costa Rica artists are creating their own businesses, not by choice but to survive.

In this country, a university degree in the arts is an invitation to work in precarious circumstances for low wages. That has moved fashion designer Manuel Veranes, 36, and Marilyn Castellon, 29, a furniture and interior designer to create Casa Tripartito***.

When writer Juliana Rincon of the blog Global Press Institute happened on the two artists, they were in a disordered space on a second floor in downtown San Jose above a trendy new bar. The bar owners lent them the space while they look for a new home for the fledgling new collective.

Wherever Casa Tripartito*** lands next, it will have a showroom designed by Castellon on her laptop. In recent years, writes Rincon, independent design stores have sprouted in Costa Rica where customers can buy locally designed clothing.

The trend is a natural outgrowth of theTico society, where women are almost legendary for beauty enhanced by always being clean and well turned out, with lipstick on even when they are merely on their way to the local pulperia, the neighborhood convenience store.

La buena presentación, being well turned out and pressed, is all but a mania  and you'd never catch one at the mall in sweats or jeans. And the young men are not far behind, shoes glistening wetly with polish.

Last year, the Museum of Modern Art & Design, the Ministry of Culture and Youth, the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Commerce caught up with the rush of creativity, combining to sponsor the first exposition called Diseño 10, along with a conference and a place to allow artists and designers to sell their wares.

Casa Tripartito*** has kept moving with monthly events that show their work, contracts earned individually and together and an interview and half-page story the Spanish-language paper La Nacion.

The design company began oddly. Veranes was a bioenergy therapist studying fashion in his spare time when he got an opportunity of appear in a fashion show in 2005. Hastily he whipped out some designs and he never looked back, self promoting to the hilt.

With two other designers, he formed the collective Casa Tripartito*** and he was off.

Will San Jose become the next New York or Paris of fashion? Don't bet against it! The decline of maquilla, the international clothing business where Costa Rican women provided labor, has left many a seamstress without a job. Willing hands to help local designers fulfill contracts are not lacking here.