AMANDA PASCALI | IN RESIDENCE: APRIL - MAY 2022
The Other Side: Bringing to Light the Stories of Immigrants in Houston
The Other Side was a continuation of the Immigrant American Folk Project created by bilingual singer/songwriter Amanda Pascali in 2020. This project used visual art to create a space where musical, literary, film, and lecture events were carried out by Pascali herself as well as other artists from Houston’s immigrant community. The walls of the Other Side were adorned with art by first-gen and immigrant artists as well as old recipes, poems, and letters donated by project participants who wished to share their family’s stories. Stacked suitcases in the space represented both the tangible and intangible things that Houston’s immigrants carried with them to America such as food, music, and ideas that became part of American culture through cultural diffusion. See some photos from the Opening Reception or the Closing Concert.
Featured artists include The Pascali Family, Nico Diaz, Alessandro Carrera, Gerald Cedillo, Elina Petrova, Saint Melanin, Charly Siaba, Lucas Magnus Andrade, Joel Valdes, Rey Francis, Khawaja Azimuddin, Tiffany Yao, Adriana Meza, Lupe Hernandez, Lina Habazi, Kat Ambrose, Jeremy Kabala, and Addison Freeman.
ABOUT THE LEAD ARTIST:
Internationally acclaimed, bilingual singer/songwriter and 2021 Houston Chronicle “Musician of the Year,” Amanda Pascali was born in Queens, New York, and is based in Houston, Texas. Often referred to as a “young, female, and Italian Bob Dylan,” Amanda has released music and performed internationally, from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to packed houses in Italy, Romania, and across the Eastern hemisphere.
With a father who was thrown out of his home country for rebelling against the government, Amanda was driven from a young age to be a messenger of her family’s stories and diaspora. As the rising voice of America’s most ethnically diverse generation of young people, 23-year-old Pascali writes songs that speak to the experience of growing up as a first-generation American. Amanda’s music, now coined, Immigrant American Folk delivers a powerful narrative on being- “too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both”.
