Press Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Michael Hoerman
(work) 713.524.7821
(e) michael@vbbarts.org
(url) www.vbbarts.org

Voices Breaking Boundaries presents
East End Live Art :: Artists/Mothers
Performances and Presentations by:
Marcela Descalzi – Sharon Englestein – Christa Forster – Tish Stringer – Kayte Young + Sehba Sarwar

5:00 pm, Sunday, May 10, 2009
Café Flores, 6606 Lawndale Street Houston, TX 77023
Admission: Free

(HOUSTON, April 27, 2009) —In honor of celebrating an alternative mother’s day, Voices Breaking Boundaries features dynamic artists, whose readings, visual art, and performances inspire audiences to consider the excitement and conflict attending artists who are also mothers. After the performances, the artists will discuss how these two roles intersect, inform one another, inspire, and create conflict and creative work in their lives. An interactive graffiti wall will be set up to invite audience members to post their own stories, poems, visual art, ideas, lessons, and photographs responding to the topic: Artists/Mothers. And as always, there will be an open mic. Audience members are invited to bring their voices, images and writings.

VBB’s monthly East End Live Art series are driven by the artistic vision of VBB’s Founding Director, Sehba Sarwar. The shows are supported by the VBB Board and the community, and aim to tackle current issues in the community. Café Flores provides an intimate setting for these goals to be reached, and also allows for VBB to make art accessible to a culturally diverse area of Houston. The event is free and open to the general public.

“Exploring the challenges connected with being an artist and a mother is a conversation that’s long overdue,” says Sarwar, who will be hosting the May 10th event. “We’re already received a wave of interest and support from the community.”

Cosponsored by Café Flores, Houston Institute for Culture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and KPFT 90.1 FM.

About the Artists:

Marcela Descalzi is an Argentine born in New Delhi who has traveled to many continents. With more than 20 years as an educator under her belt, she tries to combine the wisdom of artists and colleagues to forge her own path. She has served as the director of the School Writing Project at Rice University’s Center for Education and has led many student and teacher writing workshops for Voices Breaking Boundaries and other organizations. She is a VBB Co-Founder and has been
involved with the organization at many levels including Board Member, staff and artist.

Writer, performer, mother and educator, Christa Forster earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston. She helped found the theater company Infernal Bridegroom Productions and, also, Spacetaker a non-profit artist resource center. She is currently at work on two writing projects, a novel Comadres and a memoir, Divide and Burn. Her teaching experience includes Inprint, Inc. Writers in the Schools, St. John's Upper School, Jesse Jones High School, Johns Hopkins University, University of Houston and Rice University. She lives in Houston with her husband David A. Brown and their young children, Clara and Diego.

Sharon Engelstein was born in Montreal Canada and has lived many places. She graduated with an MFA in sculpture from the Claremont Graduate School in California, and came directly to Houston when offered a fellowship with Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She has since been included in countless exhibitions in Houston and around the country. In 1995 Engelstein received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. She has had numerous solo exhibitions around the
country in spaces including Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Elias Fine Art, Boston; and The Suburban, Chicago). In 2008 she curated a show at Peel Gallery in Houston and had a solo show at Sunday Gallery in New York. She has received awards from the Canada Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Cultural Arts Council of Houston Harris County.

Sehba Sarwar’s first novel, Black Wings, was published in 2004 (Alhamra), and her fiction, poetry and essays explore issues of gender, identity and displacement, fueled by her own movement between Pakistan, her first home, and the US. Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies in the US, India and Pakistan in publications including Chowrangi, New York Times’ Sunday Magazine and Callaloo. Currently exploring new media in the form of video, sound and digital art, Sarwar is also working on a collection of essays and a second novel. She is currently based in Houston’s East End with her husband and daughter. Sehba serves as VBB’s Founding Director and Artist-in-Residence.

Tish Stringer is an anthropologist, media maker and culture-jammer. She is the proud mother of a sassy daughter on whom she’s pinned her hopes for a better world. She believes conviviality is the glue that holds communities together and enjoys hosting potlucks and piefights. Turn-ons include: good art, thoughtful commentary, a revolution you can dance to and thunderstorms. Turn-offs include: talking loud and saying nothin’, conspiracy theories involving fluoride, vapid mass media and cake.

Kayte Young is an architect by training, a maker of things, a devoted mother to cosmo, adoring partner to carl, and an amateur (yet passionate) gardener. she currently lives in bloomington, indiana, where she does various sorts of design work, including costumes for an elizabethan music group, graphics for a children's science museum, and vermiculture systems for a battered women's shelter. you can check out her blog(s) at whistlingleafblower.com.

For more information:
at 713 524 7821
michael@vbbarts.org / www.vbbarts.org.

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