Julia Barbosa Landois, Praise Music Sonogram, 2025. Photography: Tati Vice.
Julia Barbosa Landois’s Praise Music Sonogram is a live performance that combines spoken word, video, and experimental sound to tell a story of motherhood, miscarriage, and abortion access across national and state borders. Contrasting an unexpected experience in a European haven for healthcare seekers with the medical scarcity and the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S., Barbosa Landois delivers a narrative that is both deeply personal and unexpectedly comedic. Collaborating with Julia Barbosa Landois on this production are Candice D’Meza (Director), Andrew Martinez (Musician and Live Performer), and Edgar Guajardo (Technical Director). The performance is accompanied by a storytelling and knowledge-sharing zine, Tía Sabiduría, that is informed by the DIY aesthetic of Barbosa Landois’ youth. Special thanks to zine co-designer Tina Hernandez and to the following local organizations that helped shape and/or were part of outreach actions for this project: Deeds not Words, Fund Texas Choice, Houston Women’s Reproductive Services, MECA, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, and ZineFest Houston. Praise Music Sonogram exists where storytelling, community medicine, and transnational healthcare persist as resistance to geographic borders and limits on bodily autonomy. In development as part of a 2023 NPN Creation Fund grant from August 2023-December 2024, the work premieres at DiverseWorks before traveling to the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of El Paso and Links Hall, Chicago.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Julia Barbosa Landois is a Houston-based multidisciplinary artist whose work teases profundity and absurdity from the everyday and examines the relationship between the intimate and the public. Her unsettling and sometimes funny performances often use commonplace technologies like a cell phone or stationary bike in unexpected ways. Her work is included in the current exhibition Xican-a.o.x. Body (Pérez Art Museum, Miami, June 13, 2024 – February 16, 2025), curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Gilbert Vicario, & Marissa Del Toro. Landois’s live performances have been presented at Fusebox Festival (Austin), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Blaffer Art Museum (University of Houston), Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), among others. Awards include grants from the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures (NALAC), Puffin Foundation, and Houston Arts Alliance, and residencies at Lawndale Art Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany).
PRESS
Read In the Waiting Room: “Praise Music Sonogram” at DiverseWorks, Glasstire (Feb 2025).
SUPPORT
Praise Music Sonogram is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks, The Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, and NPN. For more information: www.npnweb.org. Praise Music Sonogram is supported in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation. Additional program and general operating support is from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Texas Commission on the Arts, The Brown Foundation, Inc., Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, Houston Endowment, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Teiger Foundation.