Thank You

To all those who made Women Beyond Borders possible, we are forever grateful. Appreciation goes to all the participants including: artists, curators, coordinators, sponsors and directors of institutions, who have spent countless hours…

THE INSPIRATION

Women Beyond Borders began in a conversation at an art opening in Santa Barbara in 1991. Founder and artist, Lorraine Serena, contemplated the ease of shipping small works of art…

PREMIER EXHIBITION

The Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (now the Museum of Contemporary Art) was the site of the premiere exhibition on November 4th, 1995. In the exhibition were 185 boxes from…

TEN YEAR RETROSPECTIVES

Celebrating women worldwide for their creative expression, these powerful exhibitions explored the nearly ten-year history and social impact of this unique international women’s art project…

WBB’s Relevance to Academia

WBB has been a catalyst for creativity and collaboration in many areas and has been interpreted by a variety of adjunct projects. Presented here are a few examples of how WBB has crossed over to academic disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, art education, art history, and public practice…

Formosa Tales Exhibition

Women Beyond Borders are proud to announce that we have opened a new exhibition in Taiwan in conjunction with Red Room, a community-driven creative arts platform fostering inter-generational, cross-cultural expression…

Pieces of Dialogue

Sometimes it seems so complicated, this being human. Especially now, in the 90s. Maybe it always seems difficult for those whose age it is, but certainly it is…

Goodbye Saigon

April 1975, Vietnam: Everyone knows the communists will overrun Saigon, but no one expected it to happen so fast. Over the last month the sound of gunfire and explosions have slowly increased…

A Selection of Press

Many journals and articles have covered portions of the WBB journey, below are articles from newspapers, magazines and other sources. Please note that these are a few highlights…

SWITZERLAND

Anne-Kathi Wildberger, Educational Curator and Heide Bilderbrand, WBB Austrian participant had the inspiration of including a segment of WBB along with Pandora, Women in Classical Greece, an exhibition of vessels…

Elena Mary Siff

Elena Mary Siff and her husband Sam Erenberg were responsible for several of WBB’s International Exhibitions…

Lan Huong Thi Nguyen

Oh, how “underground” we were. I went through all kinds of paperwork to get an “exit visa” from the communist government…

A Brief Scope of Women Beyond Borders

The endeavor that was founded in 1991 by Lorraine Serena and a few artist friends has expanded well beyond it’s humble beginnings as a simple art project with the objective of…

ISRAEL: OUR FIRST INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION

For the dozens of artists who took up the challenge, the boxes serve as an impetus for a journey into their own inner enchanted worlds to distant temples, longings for a different reality, or expressions of secret hopes…

Making Art as if the World Mattered

“The imperatives of a rapidly changing world are overwhelming. Art as a positive and compassionate response is becoming urgent. Much of modern art seeks to maximize profit rather than to serve social ends,” according to Lacy…

FIRST BOXES ARRIVE

The first boxes arrived, filling Lorraine’s studio with the spirit and imagination of their creators. No one had any idea what to expect…

Rib-in Man. An Imaginative Journey of a Box

This exhibition further marks spaces for art made by women in Singapore. It is not on accounts that they are women that alone made such work invaluable…

Box Network

Just to set things straight, Pandora was the Athenian name for the Earth Goddess Rhea. The nasty little tale in which Hesiod, the Greek poet, blamed all the world’s follies and ills on a woman who…

Something Out of Nothing?

The title of my essay is taken from Lucy R. Lippard’s article of a similar title where she discusses the definition of women’s “hobby art.” She questions the boundaries…

WBB on Stage

For the Rubicon premiere, company members created a play in which the journey of the WBB project is interwoven with excerpts from many of the artist’s statements…

Mongolian Exhibition

We never know that our color of life is so rich and various.
You should feel it and live with them.
If you don’t feel it you would be lost.

Growth of A Movement

From 1991 to the present, Women Beyond Borders has grown from a small group of passionate artists with an idea into a globe-spanning movement dedicated to sharing women’s experiences with the world. Through their efforts, tens of thousands of people all across the planet have been moved by the unique visions and stories of each artist through their creations…

21 Leaders of the 21st Century

Women’s Enews is a globe-spanning nonprofit news service covering issues of particular concern to women and providing women’s perspectives on public policy. Every year the organization honors…

Algebra Textbook Box Feature

“What does an Algebra book have to do with Women Beyond Borders?” Lorraine asked that question when she received a call from the Authors of “Discovering Advanced Algebra”. Images of Women Beyond Borders were sent…

Slovenia

In a time when it’s business as usual that one curator or one institution conceives, selects, and curates an exhibition, the founders of Women Beyond Borders challenge this common model by experimenting with, and re-introducing a collective approach…

Museum of Ventura County Workshop

The exterior of the Museum of Ventura County   Museum of Ventura County Ventura, California July 10, 2019 Denise Sindlar, Deputy Director of Museum of Ventura County Karyl Lynn Burns, Event Coordinator   A COMMUNITY EVENT   Collabora...

Museum of Ventura County Exhibition

While the Women Beyond Borders Play was still in it’s planning stages, Karyl Lynn Burns, the Producing Artistic Director of the Rubicon Theatre Company raised the idea of a new exhibition that would coincide with the premiere of the play. The idea involved using a small selection of…

Boxes Around the World

Thinking and acting globally has many faces. Ideally, it includes creating an intercultural dialogue that fosters our shared responsibilities as citizens of this world…

A Selection of Correspondences

When WBB was still in its earlier years, much of the correspondence between the artists, curators and coordinators was done through faxes. Coordination between people spread across several continents was a challenge with the technology available, messages had to be sent at odd hours and sometime…

BON VOYAGE BENEFIT

The Bon Voyage Benefit was hosted at St. Marks in the Valley for a box viewing and discussion…

BEHIND THE SCENES

Not many have seen the tremendous collaboration and commitment going on behind the Women Beyond Borders scenes for over two decades, both internationally and in the USA. Since we were a grassroots project…

VIDEO: Women’s Voices – Reflections

Reflections on WBB by participants around the world. Women’s Voices is a collection of interviews of Women Beyond Borders’ participants discussing their lives as artists in…

Women Beyond Borders – The Art of Community Building

Freedom. Love. Searching. Sex. Courage. Violence. Hope. Such are the imaginations of women around the world captured in small, almost ordinary prototype boxes, transformed into…

Beyond Boxes: WBB Project and its Implications for Feminism Today

n. paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal

Over the past decade, Women Beyond Borders has developed into one of the most intriguing and inspiring cultural phenomena at the turn of the twenty-first century, successfully reaching out to…

Treasury of the Heart – Barbara Bowman

Treasury of the Heart
Remembrance of Precious Passage
A Wordless Diary
The Crushed Corsage
A Newborn Ankle ID
First Tooth Lost

Mother and Daughter

Until a strong line of love, confirmation and example stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to woman across the generations, we will still be…

Reflection – Zoe Beaton

I choose a very simple, but meaningful theme for my box “Reflections”. As I age, I find myself reflecting not only on the path before me, but also on the path behind me. So many memories…

VIDEO: Interview with WBB Founder Lorraine Serena

Lorraine Serena discusses the origin of Women Beyond Borders with Jack Nadel on his show “Out of the Box with Jack Nadel”…

NEPAL

A selection of WBB boxes was in an exhibition in Kathmandu and also on on a trek, which traveled through native villages in Nepal. The boxes acted as a catalyst to open discussion on…

Women Beyond Borders – an Essay

Women in communication, sharing ideas, insights, dreams, joys, sorrows and collective memories, an age-old concept…

VIDEO: WBB World Tour 1995-2005

The official World Tour Video representing all the hard work of everyone involved with WBB from 1995 to 2005…

VIETNAM WORKSHOP

Building Blocks: Life Skills, Art, and Healing, was a project spearheaded by Pacific Links Foundation and funded in part by the Consular Club of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to support the reintegration process of survivors of human trafficking…

VIDEO: WBB Goes to Nepal

A short documentary about the Women Beyond Borders Nepalese exhibition…

MONTANA

Over 1,200 fifth graders from Missoula County came to the museum every school day for three months throughout the exhibition to view the boxes and to discuss women’s issues…

Tajima Collaboration

Women Beyond Borders, with support from Tajima Creative, presented dynamic exhibitions, highlighting the personal stories of prominent national and regional women in Seattle and Palo Alto. To express these stories in art, the project paired women…

RWANDA

This group of boxes is part of 55 boxes that were taken to Kigali, Rwanda by Betsy Kain in collaboration with Solace Ministries in 2006. They were given to widows of the genocide in an effort to help them work through their losses and grief…

TENNESSEE

More than 65 metro teachers were given the boxes to hold workshops for their students as well as the Nashville’s Rites of Passage, Hermanitas and Girls Scout programs…

CULTURAL OLYMPIAD

WBB was invited to participate in the 2002 Cultural Olympiad. The exhibition was rated as one of the top five events along with the Pilobolus Dance Theatre and Dale Chihuly. Children Beyond Borders, an adjunct project of the Olympiad, included a selection of boxes from over 6,000 children…

RIDGECREST

Exhibition at the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, California…

VIDEO: 10 Year Retrospective

Women Beyond Borders 10 year retrospective at UCSB University Art Museum in 2002. At the opening in Santa Barbara…

Girls Inc.

Women Beyond Borders collaborated with Girls Inc. at the Ten-Year Retrospective in 2002. Girls Inc. held workshops where young students created boxes that were exhibited at the WBB exhibition…

CHILDREN BEYOND BORDERS

VSA arts first displayed the original 52-box exhibit during the 2002 Olympic games and Cultural Olympiad held in Salt Lake City. VSA Arts invited students with disabilities…

SINGAPORE

The women participants in Singapore created boxes in relation to a community, i.e. a collaboration with family, friends, a group of people, etc. The objective was to discover who women are and what women want in our particular society and…

What’s a Box Got to Do with it? Reflections on the Body…

The group of boxes selected for this exhibition focuses on issues of subjectivity and the body from a variety of perspectives. The box, providing an inner space as well as an interface to the world, becomes a metaphor for the body…

VIDEO: CSUCI Exhibition

Video of the exhibition held at California State University, Channel Islands…

AUSTRALIA

The opportunities this exhibition has offered throughout its five year existence, whilst acting as an agent for the ideas and feelings of women, has encouraged and inspired creativity and above all communication…

JAPAN

“I am sure that this project is the hope of all women everywhere. Let us also hope that this Exhibition will lead to additional opportunities throughout Japan, and all the countries of all the world, to communicate and express our humanity.”

– Yoshihiro Ikka, Curator

MEXICO

The Women Beyond Borders exhibition in Mexico brought together artists from different socio-economic classes for the first time. Women from small villages in Mexico who work in crafts…

CANADA

Traveling from a temple in Nepal to a gallery at the Dufferin Mall in Toronto, WBB fully lived up to its vision. Such unique exhibition sites reached out to develop a new relationship between the artist…

CUBA

Summer brought with it to Havana a breathless cultural activity. Opening August 7, 1998, at the Centro Wilfredo Lam was the Women Beyond Borders Exhibition, of special relevance in our aesthetic…

Women’s Voices: Elsa Mora, Cuba

Women’s Voices is a collection of interviews of Women Beyond Borders’ participants discussing their lives as artists in their respective countries and comments on WBB and their own box creations…

CROATIA

An indoor and outdoor installation of boxes from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia was arranged by Nada Beros, curator of the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art…

YUGOSLAVIA

In 1997 WBB gathered several of the most prominent Yugoslav sculptors and painters, as well as a few emerging artists. The opening exhibition of their…

UNITED KINGDOM, IRELAND & AIRPORTS

I was hooked from the moment I heard about Women Beyond Borders. With a fine arts degree from the University of London and twenty-five years of professional work in gender equality in the United States, this project somehow…

ITALY

Gallery Extra Moenia – Arte Moderna, located in a 15th C villa overlooking the hills of Umbria, was the site of the WBB exhibition in Italy. The exhibition brought together WBB participants…

KENYA

In February 1995 Yony Waite, a WBB Kenyan Artist and Curator, hand-delivered the first completed boxes for the Women Beyond Borders exhibition to California. She arrived via Greyhound bus just down the street from Lorraine Serena’s studio to personally deliver…

RUSSIA

Because of the inspiration of Lynn Scarlet in California, the WBB exhibition was introduced to Katya Galitzine, an artist and writer. Katya was visiting Santa Barbara to promote…

BOXES ON THE TRAIN

Our WBB exhibition crossing eight borders was quite an experience! In addition to openings in train stations, we went through the entire train from time to time, inviting people to come…

Truthful and Authentic Communication

Twelve Greek women artists of different generations are participating in this unique exhibition of Women Beyond Borders, a symbolic journey enclosing and dispersing at the same time the transcultural memory of a polysemic past-present. The boxes reveal a multitude of transformations…

A Commentary on Women Beyond Borders

The prestigious Belgian anthropologist Levi-Strauss said that, looked at over the millennium, passions have not changed substantially and to omit at random ten centuries wouldn’t effect significantly our knowledge of human nature…