\n<\/p>\n
Exhibition Essay:
<\/b><\/p>\n
Everybody Around the Table<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n With its mix of narrative and abstraction, textile and sculpture, <\/span>A The artists whose work is included in this exhibition are aligned, Drawing from Our Heritage<\/span><\/b> The Journey<\/span><\/b> Angelica Bergamini<\/b>\u00a0is deeply rooted in Etruscan culture yet very much a citizen Diana Gonz\u00e1lez Gandolfi<\/b>‘s early experiences as a foreigner in many Italian and Italian American References Claudia DeMonte<\/b> taps into Italian folklore with her Corno<\/i> Despite his Scottish surname,\u00a0Timothy McDowell\u00a0<\/b>has The Textile Tradition<\/span> Patricia Miranda<\/b>\u00a0takes conventional lace, dyes it red, and pieces it into In a series of embroideries on linen handkerchiefs, Milisa Chris Costan<\/b>, whose day job for some years was as the color designer for a My own work<\/b>\u00a0is suggestive of fabric. The paintings are first and Sculpture<\/span> Don Porcaro<\/b>\u00a0stacks stone into anthropomorphic sculptures\u2014some quirky and Lisa Zukowski<\/b>\u2019s sculptures are borne of secrets, the legacy of a grandfather D. Dominick Lombardi<\/b>\u00a0learned to use the hammer, saw, and chisel as a boy at the Laura Moriarty<\/b>\u2019s chunky sculptures, constructed from wax, suggest miniature After an earthquake reduced Avellino to rubble in 1980,\u00a0Gianluca Although best known as a wood carver, a career that was almost John Monti<\/b>\u00a0has come to see the connection between his Italian Abstraction and Ethnicity<\/span> The granddaughter of immigrants and the daughter of artists, Karen As a professor of painting, Paul Fabozzi<\/b> had led groups of Carolanna Parlato<\/b>\u2019s poured Applying color to strips of Mylar and hanging them in a formal As an artist who is fully bilingual in Italian and English,\u00a0Anna
\nLegacy of Making:\u00a0<\/i>26 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage <\/span><\/i>might have you wondering, \u201cWhat exactly is the common aesthetic
\nthread here?\u201d If you are Italian, or Italian American\u2014or indeed, a member of
\nany ethnic group that has its roots in another country\u2014you understand that,
\nlike any big gathering with the relatives, it brings an entire famiglia<\/i>
\nto the table, each with different ideas and ways of expressing them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\ngenerally, into two groups: those whose art is manifestly connected to the work
\nor traditions of their immigrant forebears, and those whose art does not appear
\nto have an aesthetic association. While our creative expressions are varied,
\nour Italianit\u00e0<\/i>\u2014our sense of Italianness–informs the work in this exhibition,
\nwhether it is apparent or not.<\/p>\n
<\/b>We start with the artists whose contemporary expression has a
\nconnection to the past\u2014to the generations, the journey over, the language, the traditions.
\nWe see how artists translate these ideas from the original Italian. \u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/b><\/span>Through a long career,\u00a0B.\u00a0Amore<\/b>\u00a0has
\nresearched and documented seven generations of her Italian family, maternal and
\npaternal, a journey that culminated in 2000 in the brilliant installation of
\nphotographs, objects, and papers contained on tables and in vitrines exhibited
\nat the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York City.\u00a0Lifeline, Filo
\nDella Vita: An Italian American Odyssey<\/i>\u00a0then traveled to museums in
\nSan Francisco and Boston, then Rome, and finally to Napoli, where her family\u2019s
\njourney began. A framed assemblage from that show is included here.<\/p>\n
\nof her adopted\u00a0 New York City. Born into a family of Tuscan ship captains,
\nshe draws imagery from the ocean that unites both places she calls home. On a
\nmore symbolic level, \u201cthe immense blue,\u201d as she describes it, is a place with
\nno borders. The ships she places into her ultramarine fields symbolize life\u2019s
\npassage, but for many viewers they are emblematic of our ancestors\u2019 long voyage
\nover on a steamship, often in steerage.<\/p>\n
\ncountries and then an immigrant to the United States left her feeling caught
\nbetween worlds. “Moving with my family from Buenos Aires, where I was
\nborn, to Colombia, Indonesia, and then New York, I absorbed diverse cultural
\nenvironments without feeling deeply rooted in any one of them,” says the
\nartist, for whom maps are prominent in her iconography. The thread of\u00a0Italianit\u00e0<\/i>\u00a0is
\none constant, beginning with her paternal great grandfather, Gaetano Gandolfi,
\nwho fought side by side with Garibaldi in Italy’s Wars of Independence, to the
\nItalian traditions her family maintained in Buenos Aires.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/b>John Avelluto<\/b> draws from Southern Italian and Sicilian tropes to create art
\nthat depicts the food and expressions we know so well. His trompe l\u2019oeil relief
\npaintings of pasta and cannoli look tempting enough to taste. But don\u2019t. They
\nare fashioned with acrylic paint. His kinetic sculpture, with thumb and fingers
\nbrought together in a gesture Italians call mano a borsa <\/i>(hand purse),
\nis an outsize and familiar gesture whose meaning ranges from \u201cWhat do you
\nmean?\u201d to \u201cWTF!\u201d depending on the force with which the gesture is made. As
\nchildren we were discouraged from talking with our hands lest we look too
\nethnic. Avelluto has embraced the very symbols that signify ethnicity and made
\nthem larger than life.<\/p>\n
\nsculpture.<\/i> The corno, <\/i>or <\/i>horn, is typically rendered in
\ngold, silver, or coral as a small talisman worn on a chain around the neck. It
\nis meant to ward off the mal\u2019occhio,<\/i> or Evil Eye, a curse leveled at you
\nby someone who is angry with you or jealous of what you have. In the 21st-century
\nthis may seem laughable, but Southern Italians\u2014those from Naples and farther
\nsouth\u2014hold fast to their beliefs. Hey, a little protection can\u2019t hurt, right?<\/p>\n
\nhad a lifetime of extended periods in Italy among the members of his mother\u2019s
\nfamily, the Macellari. His history is not one of Southern Italians fleeing
\npoverty but of educated Northerners remaining on their ancestral land. His is a
\nlineage of accomplished musicians, designers, architects, publishers, and
\npainters. McDowell\u2019s images, while often drawing from art history, also depict
\nour contemporary culture with humor or irony. His Spaghetti Western<\/i>
\nfolds together food and film tropes with politics.<\/p>\n
<\/b>Let\u00a0Jennifer Cecere<\/b>\u00a0describe it: \u201cUntil a
\ngeneration ago, almost everyone practiced handwork. Women, especially, knitted,
\ncrocheted, and embroidered, and girls learned by example. All of us then had a
\nconnection to these traditions. Not so much anymore, but what does endure from
\nmy own experience, in addition to a love of needlework, is how intent my
\nItalian grandparents were in weaving their traditions into the experience of
\ntheir children and grandchildren in this new country.\u201d \u00a0Cecere makes public art: large-scale
\nrenditions of lace in materials as diverse as ripstop nylon and brushed
\naluminum, which she has laser cut, bringing together the modesty of handwork
\nwith the ambition of a professional artist. She is represented here with three
\noutsize paintings of doilies.<\/p>\n
\nroom-size installations\u2014\u201cshrouds,\u201d she calls them\u2014that pay homage to her
\ngrandmothers, Ermenegilda and Rebecca\u2014the red suggestive of birth and blood and
\nthe pricks of so many fingers by so many needles in the making of handwork. A contemporary
\nartist, Miranda nevertheless mines ancient materials, like red cochineal dye
\nfrom insect hulls for the compelling color in her work.<\/p>\n
\nGalazzi\u00a0<\/b>recalls a conversation with her grandmother in which she was
\nexhorted to keep embroidering. \u201cGood girls should always be sewing,\u201d says
\nGrammy. \u201cUgh\u201d responds the young artist. But Grammy prevailed. Much of
\nGalazzi\u2019s work as a mature artist involves sewing, whether in the embroideries
\nshown here or in the sculptural paper\u00a0
\n\u201clace\u201d for which she is also known.<\/p>\n
\nready-to-wear fashion company, brings a number of material influences to her work,
\namong them the threads and notions of dressmaking. Her work is witty, and even
\nwhen small has a large-scale presence. It is the antithesis of passive
\ndomesticity. Perhaps that is a family tradition. She tells the story of an aunt
\nwho, finding a thief in her home, chased him down the street with a broom\u2014an
\nurban Befana* doing her own kind of housecleaning.
* the Italian Christmas witch who rides a broom<\/p>\n
\nforemost color fields, reductive in composition, but the textile influence is
\napparent in the edge-to-edge swipe of the paint and the visually tactile
\nsurfaces. I am the great granddaughter of weavers, the granddaughter of a
\ntailor, and the niece of two women\u2014one a dressmaker, the other an embroiderer
\nand lacemaker\u2014whose handwork has left an undeniable imprint on my creative
\nexpression.<\/p>\n
<\/b>Elisa D\u2019Arrigo <\/b>cites as influences the wooden forms used by her Sicilian
\ngrandfather, a shoemaker, and the beehive hairdos of the Bronx in the Fifties.
\nThere\u2019s more, of course: \u201cEveryone made things, repaired things, jerry-rigged
\nthings. That atmosphere had a powerful effect on my sensibility and is with me
\nstill.\u201d D\u2019Arrigo\u2019s wall sculptures, constructed of repurposed and handstitched canvas,
\nand her hand-built ceramic sculptures, which she may fire multiple times, are a
\ntestament to the legacy of making.<\/p>\n
\nplayful, others like sentinels with a looming, but most often reassuring,
\npresence. Installations of multiple sculptures\u00a0may suggest family
\ngroupings. Cutting stone \u201cfelt right,\u201d says Porcaro. \u201cIt fed a driving need to
\nwork with a material that speaks to tradition, and I knew that the tradition
\nbelonged to my culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nwho hid the past and was suspicious of the present. Her clay or fabric sculptures
\nare wrapped in rope or string, some containing \u00a0texts and objects that are intended to remain
\nunseen. Not all of Zukowski\u2019s work is as mysterious, but much of it is made
\nfrom discarded materials, a legacy of making do. In that regard it is aligned
\nwith\u00a0Arte Povera,<\/i>\u00a0that mid-Century Italian movement which
\nemployed quotidian materials to powerful effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nelbow of his grandfather and father, both of whom were master carpenters.
\nLombardi employs those tools while going \u00a0in a different direction, but the Old Country
\nskills remain. Lombardi cites “high and low” aesthetic influences,
\nfrom Picasso at one end to comic books at the other.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nexcavations from a richly chromatic land. While Moriarty\u2019s interest in geology
\nis amply evident, she has said that the \u201ckitchen culture\u201d of her grandmother,
\nAnna Policella, with its process and improvisation, is an inspiration as well. (As
\na child she was, like many of us, an enthusiastic cranker of the pasta
\nmachine.)<\/p>\n
\nBianchino<\/b>\u00a0relocated to New Jersey with his parents and older sibling.
\nThen they went back to Italy and subsequently returned to the United States. The
\nsaving grace of what Bianchino calls a “rutted journey” were the
\nflights that allowed him to see an aerial landscape without borders. His
\ninstallations, such as the one in Gallery 66, allow visitors to navigate a
\nspace free of conventional boundaries.<\/p>\n
The Natural World<\/span>
<\/b>Spending time in Brooklyn\u2019s Green-Wood Cemetery as a child,\u00a0Denise
\nSfraga<\/b>\u00a0came to understand\u2014remarkably, for a young person\u2014the cycle of
\nlife and death, or as she describes it, \u201cthe balance between quiet moments for
\nthe dead and vibrant flowers adorning those graves.\u201d The life cycle holds her
\ninterest as a painter and a gardener. Her botanical abstractions, some in
\notherworldly hues, burst with germination and growth and the passage back to
\nthe earth.<\/p>\n
\ninconceivable for an Italian American woman growing up in the 1940s, Nancy
\nAzara <\/i><\/b>is here represented by three lyrical scrolls comprised of
\ncollaged rubbings of leaves and plants. Azara divides her time between a
\nplant-filled New York City loft and a residence in Woodstock that is surrounded
\nby vegetation. The scroll format lends itself to forays into the landscape and
\nhas offered creative flexibility during her numerous art residencies in Italy.<\/p>\n
\nAmerican identity and the emotion of Italian Baroque, which is laden with
\nfloral motifs. One need only think of the gorgeous excess of Neapolitan<\/span> churches to understand the aesthetic.
\nMonti considers himself a \u201ccultural Catholic,\u201d drawing inspiration from
\nornamentation rather than religion or ritual. As he sees it, each intertwined
\nvine or bouquet is a \u201cpsychodrama\u201d reflecting the complexities of the sacred
\nand the mundane, particularly as played out in our culture.<\/p>\n
<\/b>Of course ideas come from outside the immigrant culture as well. Even so, informed as we are by our Italian immigrant culture, something of that culture finds its way into the work
Lloyd
\nMartin<\/b>\u00a0typically makes large-scale works that consist of horizontal
\ncolor bands punctuated by vertical demarcations. It\u2019s an architectural
\nsensibility rife with rhythm, even musicality. There\u2019s nothing necessarily
\n\u201cItalian\u201d about the work (well, maybe the intensity of the color) but it was
\nthe force of a strong-willed Italian grandmother and generous artist uncle who
\nguided Martin to his career choice. They might not have used the word\u00a0mentor,<\/i>
\nbut that\u2019s what they were for him.<\/p>\n
\nSchifano<\/b>\u00a0is a painter who has exhibited internationally. Of her work
\nshe says, \u201cShape is the major motivation behind my impulse to paint. The shapes
\nthat catch my eye are usually openings: mouths, theater stages, circus arenas.
\nThese openings are bounded by edges, like lips or curtains, that reveal or
\npartially conceal the void at the center.”<\/p>\n
\nstudents every summer to Italy, introducing them to the country\u2019s history,
\nlanguage, and culture. \u201cI dug deep into Rome\u2019s seemingly endless strata to
\neducate my students on the history of this enduring urban center,\u201d he says. \u201cAt
\nthe same time, I continue to develop my painting and drawing practices as a
\nvehicle for exploring the relationship between experiencing place and making
\nimages.\u201d<\/p>\n
\npaintings are buoyant in color and improvisational in composition. A marvel of
\nfluidity and control, they are built up layer upon layer of acrylic paint
\napplied and then directed into contours and rivulets. There is nothing
\nparticularly Italian or Italian American about them. But allow me to read
\nsomething into the work without ascribing it specifically to Parlato or her
\nfamily: When light hits the surface of her paintings just so, you see each
\none\u2019s history in relief\u2014the ridges, drips, and outlined edges of hidden color.
\nIsn\u2019t that just like our culture? Put on your best face and keep the rest
\nhidden.<\/p>\n
\narrangement away from the wall,\u00a0Mary Schiliro<\/b>\u00a0makes paintings that exist dimensionally in space. Works
\nhung parallel to the wall, but at a slight distance, such as the Slice,
\nPunch, Drip <\/i>trio in this exhibition, create shadows that are integral to
\nthe perception of the work. Among many elements in Italian art and architecture
\nthat have inspired her, Schiliro says that the circle is one she has returned
\nto again and again.<\/p>\n
\nPatalano<\/b>\u00a0has chosen gesture in paint to say in her work what she
\ncannot express in any other language or medium. \u201cThe material itself is
\nseductive in a primal way,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is an elegance, rawness, and
\ndirectness to the material that allows a certain freedom for me. How an image
\nemerges from that is a mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n