Photographer Don Sarich and digital painter Michael Gager, both of The Woodlands,
will be among 300 artists participating in the Bayou City Art Festival Memorial
Park
on March 27-29. The fine art festival, ranked the third best festival in the
U.S. by the readers of
AmericanStyle Magazine (Feb. 2009), received 1,100 applications from all over the U.S. and Canada—the most in festival history.
Sarich, who manages The Woodlands Division of the San Jacinto River Authority by
day, describes his photography as his
“hobby gone wild.” At last fall’s Bayou City Art Festival Downtown, the general manager of a local Hilton
Homewood Suites approached him about participating in the hotel
’s national “Home Is Where the Art Is” campaign to purchase and display local artists’ works in their lobbies. “I was fortunate enough to be selected to display at three Hilton Homewood
Suites in The Woodlands, Clear Lake and the Galleria,” said Sarich. The Woodlands property will exhibit a different photograph of his
every month for one year.
In addition to his award-winning landscape photographs, Sarich enjoys creating
digital photographs that are humorous, off-the-wall
“visual puns,” such as Hot Shot (a burning basketball net) and A Fork in the Road (car headlights beaming onto a kitchen fork in the middle of the road.) This will be Sarich’s first appearance at the spring Bayou City Art Festival.
Gager also has a day job, working for the U.S. Bureau of Labor & Statistics Producer Price Index. Self-taught as a digital artist, the
eonomist/artist specializes in creating outer space compositions on computer.
“I substitute pixels for paint on a canvas,” says Gager, who learned this art form by visiting the Web site, www.solarvoyager.com.
What started as a hobby designing pictures on the Web has evolved into a print
art form. This will mark his second appearance at Bayou City Art Festival
Memorial Park.
The award-winning festival begins on March 27 with “First Look Friday”and continues through Sunday, March 29, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The juried fine art
event showcases 19 media formats, transforming Memorial Park
’s tree-lined, 1.1-mile loop into a canopied outdoor art gallery, bursting with
fine art and multi-cultural music and dance. The displayed offerings include
clay, drawing/pastel, fiber/textiles, furniture, glass, jewelry, leather,
metal, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, watercolor
and wood creations.
Admission is $10 for adults and free for children 12 and under.
The Festival’s Emerging Artists program invites area high school students to create and
exhibit their 3-D installation and 2-D art in the park. Younger children will
enjoy the Capital One Bank Creative Zone, an interactive area designed for
children and families to explore the fun of art. All proceeds of donations made
in the Capital One Bank Creative Zone are divided equally among the Festival
’s participating nonprofit partners.
Ongoing multi-cultural musical and dance entertainment, selected by the Houston
Arts Alliance, will grace the performing arts stage. With the park grounds as
its stage, CORE Performance Company will conduct a world-premiere program. A
wide range of international foods and beer and wine cafes will be available
throughout the weekend.
Festival sponsors are the City of Houston, Budweiser Select, Houston Parks & Recreation Department, CapitalOne Bank and KTRK-TV. The festival is funded in
part by grants from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
Over the past 37 years, the Art Colony Association, producer of the Bayou City
Art Festival Memorial Park and Bayou City Art Festival Downtown, has raised
more than $2.5 million for local nonprofit organizations.
There is no public parking in Memorial Park. The festival provides free shuttle
service from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. to and from the park. On Friday, the shuttle
departs only from Northwest Mall on Hwy. 290. On Saturday and Sunday, shuttles
depart from Northwest Mall and
from three downtown locations—Memorial Drive at Rusk, Rusk at Smith and Smith at Capitol.
