Curating Teen Voices: Coming of Age
Opening Reception Thursday, March 2nd, 2017 6-9 PM
Bruno David Gallery 7513 Forsyth Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63105 brunodavidgallery.com
Curating Teen Voices: Coming of Age is a time capsule of teenage voices combined with adult artists living in St. Louis in 2015, all reacting to a critical and unique time in the history of race relations, gun violence, police roles and community relationships in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. The project has been led by Mariana Parisca, Story Stitchers Artist in Residence. Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective is a nonprofit organization where artists and urban youth collect stories, reframe and retell them through art to promote understanding, civic pride, and literacy. The project eloquently puts a megaphone to unheard voices, generating new respect for minority youth and brushing implicit biases away.
Special thanks to the contributing artists include Heather Bennett, Michael Byron, Carmon Colangelo, Addoley Dzegede, Ann Hamilton, Kahlil Irving, Buzz Spector, and selected youth.
The project contains an edition of 10 portfolios, each containing 30 archival digital prints. Each portfolio is housed in a handcrafted archival box created by Saint Louis Story Stitchers artist-in-residence Mariana Parisca. A limited number of sheets of six images will be available. Proceeds benefit the ongoing work of the Saint Louis Story Stitchers.
Mariana Parisca, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art with a double major in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. Parisca joined the Saint Louis Story Stitchers after graduation in 2015 as an artist in residence. Mariana spent the first eight years of her life in Caracas, Venezuela, her family’s home. In 2000 Parisca and her nuclear family immigrated to suburban Ohio. Parisca’s immigration experience as well as the diaspora of her family landscape incite an interest in sense of self and place that she explores through her work. She is currently the Admission counselor at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Financial assistance for this project has been provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Curating Teen Voices: Coming of Age is based on the Youth Art and Writing Contest, 2015 and Curating Teen Voices Workshop Series which were supported in part by the Kranzberg Arts Center, Yvette and John Dubinsky Family Foundation, Susan Sanders Block and The Designing Block, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Regional Arts Commission.
