Artist Meet & Greet, Storytelling, & Poetry: At the “Too Much To Carry” Art Exhibit
Artists: Mana Mehrabian & Mary Coss
Storytelling: Siamak Vossoughi
Poetry: Merna Hecht
Please join us for a meet and greet Mana Mehrabian &Mary Coss and to enjoy storytelling by Siamak Vossoughi, a local fiction writer, and a poetry reading by poet and activist, Merna Hecht at the Vestibule Gallery.
Mana Mehrabian
Mana Mehrabian is an interdisciplinary artist, born in Tehran, Iran, and currently living and working in eastern Washington state. Her work centers around themes of perception, identity, memory, migration, and the body. She works in photography, video, and installation, incorporating everyday materials and objects. Her work often refers to the medium of photography and its theories by engaging with its artifice, tools, and characteristics. In addition to her work as an artist, she is also an educator and artist-curator.
Mary Coss
Mary Coss is a multidisciplinary artist known for her monumental sculpture and haunting installations that explore the human condition. Born in Detroit to a family of makers, Coss traveled and lived throughout the country and settled in Seattle. Coss is a cultural worker evidenced by years of mentoring, teaching and curating projects that infuse the arts with social justice. She has taken on leadership roles in diverse settings, including her role as cofounder for a variety of institutions including: METHOD Gallery, a youth public art program at SEEDarts , Reach (formerly CASA) a rape crisis center that flourishes after 30 years, and Borealis Festival of Light in Seattle, WA.
Siamak Vossoughi
Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran and grew up in London, Orange County, and Seattle, eventually moving to San Francisco in part because of the way William Saroyan described the city in his stories. He has been back ‘home’ to Seattle since 2019. His stories have been published in many journals, and his first short story collection, Better Than War, was published September, 2015. It received a 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Siamak’s second collection, A Sense of the Whole, received the 2019 Orison Fiction Prize and came out in November 2020. Siamak says “As an Iranian-American writer, I figure it is my job to write with love for Iranians and Americans. It’s a lonely business but I wouldn’t trade it.”
Merna Hecht
Merna is a passionate social justice educator and poet who brings her lifelong love of the written and spoken word to her teaching. She is a nationally known storyteller, a teaching artist and a published poet and essayist. As a 2008 recipient of a National Storytelling Network Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling, Merna brought storytelling and poetry to a pilot project at BRIDGES: A Center for Grieving Children in Tacoma, WA. The BRIDGES project with young people experiencing life altering trauma and loss was a stepping stone toward Merna’s work with refugees and immigrants who had lost loved ones and a known way of life. In 2009, she founded the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project at Foster High School in Tukwila, WA which has received national recognition for bringing refugee and immigrant stories of loss and hope into wide public awareness.
