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Sarah Gish Founder + Creative Champion Connect with |
Sarah GishFounder + Creative Champion
Sarah Gish is the proud mother of two feisty boys, Matthew and Alexander Buchanan, and is married to childhood friend Stuart Buchanan. She has been a marketer and educator for various companies since 1985, including Blaffer Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Landmark’s Greenway and River Oaks movie theatres, where she helped found the Houston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (now QFest). She left that job in 2000 when her younger son Matthew was born to start a business where she could spend more time with her children. This decision led to the birth of her third “child”: Gish Creative (www.gishcreative.com). Gish Creative is a personal, family, and business enrichment company whose goal is igniting lives and creating connections.
Throughout her life, Sarah has been a consistent champion of culture who believes creativity is crucial to our development as healthy individuals. All of her work projects have stemmed from that belief. Sarah also believes in non-stop family fun and encouraging children. In 2003, Sarah started creating projects and proprietary media for parents and kids. She was the Marketing Director for the now-defunct Zap Magazine for Kids and later that year she created and published The Summer Book®: A Guide to Houston Day Camps and Classes for Kids and Teens (www.thesummerbook.com), which comes out annually in March. In 2004, she began blogging and publishing a weekly e-newsletter, GISH PICKS (www.thesummerbook.com/gishpicks_archive.html), in which she recommends cultural outings for families and is sent to over 8,000 households each Wednesday. GISH PICKS hit the Houston Community Newspaper enterprise one year later, expanding its reach to 35 markets and 1 million readers. Since 1998, Sarah has written a monthly column on art films, GISH AT THE MOVIES, for 002+ Magazine, and she is a freelance writer for various publications including Texas Family Magazine, www.glasstire.com, My Table Magazine, Texas Meetings + Events Magazine, CultureMap, Houston Art+Culture, and Houston Family Magazine. She started in radio when she was 16 years old, having stumbled upon Rice University’s radio station after a brief visit to Willy’s Pub. Since then, she got her FCC license and has worked as a radio DJ in Tokyo, Japan (where she was “Sarah Smile”) and at KPFT-FM in Houston. Her current show on KPFT-FM is called “Only Connect: Exploring People and Places that Make Houston Great.” Since 2005, Sarah has presented “I Can Fly!” workshops which guide adults and children in uncovering their passions through art-making and education. Sarah is also a speaker and workshop presenter on a variety of topics, including parenting, activism, historic preservation, fun activities for kids, the city of Houston, and surviving summer with children. Working one-on-one with people, Sarah does private consultations on uncovering one’s purpose in life as well as on marketing. Because of her concern about Houston’s lack of consistent historic preservation, she founded Save Our Landmarks (www.saveourlandmarks.org) in 2007, a group which got the city to designate the River Oaks and Alabama Shopping Centers and Theatres as city landmarks (it’s now defunct because the group’s goal was met). In 2011, she and musician Leah White decided that youth needed to be inspired about Houston’s history and need for preservation so they co-produced a cd of fun family songs about historic Houston landmarks in conjunction with Houston’s 175th birthday called HOUSTON: OUR ROOTS ARE STRONG (www.ourrootsarestrong). Sarah received her B.A. in Art History (UT/Austin, 1985) and in 2003, returned to her educational roots by creating art out of recycled materials. Her art car, the “Artmobile,” rolled in the 2004 Art Car Parade, and she has shown her conceptual assemblages at The Art Car Museum, Bering and James Gallery, Caroline Collective, Houston Central Library Art Gallery, DiverseWorks, Lawndale Art Center, Mind Puddles Gallery, and Super Happy Fun Land. Eleven hubcaps and 1,961 bottle caps adorn her current art car, “Hubba Hubba Art Car,” which rolled in the 2011 Houston Art Car Parade. Always on the hunt for ever-interesting uses for bottle caps, Sarah started a line of jewelry incorporating them called Bottle Cap Mama. In addition to being on the education sub-committee of the Houston Archaeological and Historical Commission (the group that designates city landmarks), Ms. Gish is on the board of the University of Houston Women’s Studies Program and a member of the Magdalene Community. She has been on the boards of the Houston History Association, Brigid's Place at Christ Church Cathedral, and Fresh Arts Coalition. Sarah is the founder of a cyber-community of over 400 women called the “Fourth Friday Divas” and has raised her children using attachment parenting principles that she learned in La Leche League. Sarah was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and raised in Houston by parents who were from California. She has lived and traveled in various parts of the United States, Europe, Japan, and southeast Asia but she loves Houston best. Photo thanks to photographer Danny Clark |