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A Legacy of Making has legs! The exhibition that took place at the Calandra Institute in New York City has greatly expanded and moved to Connecticut College in New London. In the translation it lost one curator (the estimable Joseph Sciorra) and added five more artists. I flew solo for this effort. With an enormous two-level, three-gallery space, I have been able to show more and larger work by each artist. It's up through October 19.
With its mix of narrative and abstract painting, installation, textile, and sculpture, A Legacy of Making: 26 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage might have you wondering, “What exactly is the common aesthetic thread here?” If you are from a big family, you understand that like any gathering with the relatives, an exhibition such as this brings an entire famiglia to the table, each with different ideas and ways of expressing them. Drawing from all of Italian culture and tradition, we continue the legacy in our studios, reinventing it as American art.
The 26 artists in the show are: B. Amore, John Avelluto, the late Nancy Azara,
Angelica Bergamini, Gianluca Bianchino, Jennifer Cecere, Chris Costan, Elisa
D’Arrigo, Claudia DeMonte, Paul Fabozzi, Milisa Galazzi, Diana González
Gandolfi, D. Dominick Lombardi, Lloyd Martin (Maccarone), Joanne Mattera, Timothy McDowell (Macellari), Patricia Miranda, John Monti, Laura Moriarty (Roccio/Policella), Carolanna
Parlato, Anna Patalano, Don Porcaro, Mary Schiliro, Karen Schifano, Denise
Sfraga, and Lisa Zukowski.
Scroll to the end for hours, directions, and information on two public receptions.
From left: Paul Fabozzi, Lloyd Martin, Carolanna Parlato
Below: Corviale #1, 2012, colored pencil and ink on Mylar mounted on paper, 35 x 27 inches framed
I can say that from the first time I cut a piece of stone, I knew that it felt right. It fed a driving need to work with a material that speaks to tradition, and I new that that tradition belonged to my culture."
Diana Gonzalez Gandolfi
Above: Mapped Waters (Traced Homeland Series), 2021, mixed media on paper, app. 20 x 14 inches
Installation view: Laura Moriarty, foreground; clockwise around: Diana Gonzalez Gandolfi, Timothy McDowell, Nancy Azara
Laura Moriarty
Karen Schifano
Foreground: Laura Moriarty, Don Porcaro; on wall: Lloyd Martin, Carolanna Parlato, Anna Patalano; right: John Monti
John Monti
Things Fall Apart , 12 x 9.5 x 8 inches
Things Fall Apart VI, 7.5 x 7 x 6 inches
UGH
"My birth certificate liste me as Costantino, but when I was 5 years old and beginning public school, my mother shortened the name. She felt it would be easier for me if my origins were not clear. The extended family was disappointed. Once I reached graduate school, I thought about changing it back but felt it was too late. I suppose this is called assimilation."
From left: Silk Road 201, Silk Road 207, Silk Road 205, all 2014, encaustic on panel, 18 x 18 inches
"My maternal bisnonne in Italy wove household linens on looms in their homes. My maternal grandfather, who immigrated here, was a tailor, and his daughter, Lena, was a dressmaker. Lena and her sister Antonette, my beloved aunts, taught me to sew, embroider, knit, and crochet. I learned to weave on my own. I make color field paintings that have an unmistakable visual relationship to fabric. It's in my DNA."
Below: Closer view of Silk Road 2014
Watermelon Sugar, 2016, textile and mixed media, inframed view: 6 x 20 inches
"The immigrant experience for us, the descendants, holds commonalities shared by many. The homeland is a complex mix of familiarity and strangeness, of longing and connection, and of loss. The art, the land, the buildings, the bells of Italy speak deeply to my artistic heart."
Above: Slice, Punch, Dip 2
Gianluca Bianchino
Exhibition Essay:
Everybody Around the Table
With its mix of narrative and abstraction, textile and sculpture, A Legacy of Making: 26 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage might have you wondering, “What exactly is the common aesthetic thread here?” If you are Italian, or Italian American—or indeed, a member of any ethnic group that has its roots in another country—you understand that, like any big gathering with the relatives, it brings an entire famiglia to the table, each with different ideas and ways of expressing them.
The artists whose work is included in this exhibition are aligned,
generally, into two groups: those whose art is manifestly connected to the work
or traditions of their immigrant forebears, and those whose art does not appear
to have an aesthetic association. While our creative expressions are varied,
our Italianità—our sense of Italianness--informs the work in this exhibition,
whether it is apparent or not.
Drawing from Our Heritage
We start with the artists whose contemporary expression has a
connection to the past—to the generations, the journey over, the language, the traditions.
We see how artists translate these ideas from the original Italian.
The Journey
Through a long career, B. Amore has
researched and documented seven generations of her Italian family, maternal and
paternal, a journey that culminated in 2000 in the brilliant installation of
photographs, objects, and papers contained on tables and in vitrines exhibited
at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York City. Lifeline, Filo
Della Vita: An Italian American Odyssey then traveled to museums in
San Francisco and Boston, then Rome, and finally to Napoli, where her family’s
journey began. A framed assemblage from that show is included here.
Angelica Bergamini is deeply rooted in Etruscan culture yet very much a citizen
of her adopted New York City. Born into a family of Tuscan ship captains,
she draws imagery from the ocean that unites both places she calls home. On a
more symbolic level, “the immense blue,” as she describes it, is a place with
no borders. The ships she places into her ultramarine fields symbolize life’s
passage, but for many viewers they are emblematic of our ancestors’ long voyage
over on a steamship, often in steerage.
Diana González Gandolfi's early experiences as a foreigner in many
countries and then an immigrant to the United States left her feeling caught
between worlds. "Moving with my family from Buenos Aires, where I was
born, to Colombia, Indonesia, and then New York, I absorbed diverse cultural
environments without feeling deeply rooted in any one of them," says the
artist, for whom maps are prominent in her iconography. The thread of Italianità is
one constant, beginning with her paternal great grandfather, Gaetano Gandolfi,
who fought side by side with Garibaldi in Italy's Wars of Independence, to the
Italian traditions her family maintained in Buenos Aires.
Italian and Italian American References
John Avelluto draws from Southern Italian and Sicilian tropes to create art
that depicts the food and expressions we know so well. His trompe l’oeil relief
paintings of pasta and cannoli look tempting enough to taste. But don’t. They
are fashioned with acrylic paint. His kinetic sculpture, with thumb and fingers
brought together in a gesture Italians call mano a borsa (hand purse),
is an outsize and familiar gesture whose meaning ranges from “What do you
mean?” to “WTF!” depending on the force with which the gesture is made. As
children we were discouraged from talking with our hands lest we look too
ethnic. Avelluto has embraced the very symbols that signify ethnicity and made
them larger than life.
Claudia DeMonte taps into Italian folklore with her Corno
sculpture. The corno, or horn, is typically rendered in
gold, silver, or coral as a small talisman worn on a chain around the neck. It
is meant to ward off the mal’occhio, or Evil Eye, a curse leveled at you
by someone who is angry with you or jealous of what you have. In the 21st-century
this may seem laughable, but Southern Italians—those from Naples and farther
south—hold fast to their beliefs. Hey, a little protection can’t hurt, right?
Despite his Scottish surname, Timothy McDowell has
had a lifetime of extended periods in Italy among the members of his mother’s
family, the Macellari. His history is not one of Southern Italians fleeing
poverty but of educated Northerners remaining on their ancestral land. His is a
lineage of accomplished musicians, designers, architects, publishers, and
painters. McDowell’s images, while often drawing from art history, also depict
our contemporary culture with humor or irony. His Spaghetti Western
folds together food and film tropes with politics.
The Textile Tradition
Let Jennifer Cecere describe it: “Until a
generation ago, almost everyone practiced handwork. Women, especially, knitted,
crocheted, and embroidered, and girls learned by example. All of us then had a
connection to these traditions. Not so much anymore, but what does endure from
my own experience, in addition to a love of needlework, is how intent my
Italian grandparents were in weaving their traditions into the experience of
their children and grandchildren in this new country.” Cecere makes public art: large-scale
renditions of lace in materials as diverse as ripstop nylon and brushed
aluminum, which she has laser cut, bringing together the modesty of handwork
with the ambition of a professional artist. She is represented here with three
outsize paintings of doilies.
Patricia Miranda takes conventional lace, dyes it red, and pieces it into
room-size installations—“shrouds,” she calls them—that pay homage to her
grandmothers, Ermenegilda and Rebecca—the red suggestive of birth and blood and
the pricks of so many fingers by so many needles in the making of handwork. A contemporary
artist, Miranda nevertheless mines ancient materials, like red cochineal dye
from insect hulls for the compelling color in her work.
In a series of embroideries on linen handkerchiefs, Milisa
Galazzi recalls a conversation with her grandmother in which she was
exhorted to keep embroidering. “Good girls should always be sewing,” says
Grammy. “Ugh” responds the young artist. But Grammy prevailed. Much of
Galazzi’s work as a mature artist involves sewing, whether in the embroideries
shown here or in the sculptural paper
“lace” for which she is also known.
Chris Costan, whose day job for some years was as the color designer for a
ready-to-wear fashion company, brings a number of material influences to her work,
among them the threads and notions of dressmaking. Her work is witty, and even
when small has a large-scale presence. It is the antithesis of passive
domesticity. Perhaps that is a family tradition. She tells the story of an aunt
who, finding a thief in her home, chased him down the street with a broom—an
urban Befana* doing her own kind of housecleaning.
* the Italian Christmas witch who rides a broom
My own work is suggestive of fabric. The paintings are first and
foremost color fields, reductive in composition, but the textile influence is
apparent in the edge-to-edge swipe of the paint and the visually tactile
surfaces. I am the great granddaughter of weavers, the granddaughter of a
tailor, and the niece of two women—one a dressmaker, the other an embroiderer
and lacemaker—whose handwork has left an undeniable imprint on my creative
expression.
Sculpture
Elisa D’Arrigo cites as influences the wooden forms used by her Sicilian
grandfather, a shoemaker, and the beehive hairdos of the Bronx in the Fifties.
There’s more, of course: “Everyone made things, repaired things, jerry-rigged
things. That atmosphere had a powerful effect on my sensibility and is with me
still.” D’Arrigo’s wall sculptures, constructed of repurposed and handstitched canvas,
and her hand-built ceramic sculptures, which she may fire multiple times, are a
testament to the legacy of making.
Don Porcaro stacks stone into anthropomorphic sculptures—some quirky and
playful, others like sentinels with a looming, but most often reassuring,
presence. Installations of multiple sculptures may suggest family
groupings. Cutting stone “felt right,” says Porcaro. “It fed a driving need to
work with a material that speaks to tradition, and I knew that the tradition
belonged to my culture.”
Lisa Zukowski’s sculptures are borne of secrets, the legacy of a grandfather
who hid the past and was suspicious of the present. Her clay or fabric sculptures
are wrapped in rope or string, some containing texts and objects that are intended to remain
unseen. Not all of Zukowski’s work is as mysterious, but much of it is made
from discarded materials, a legacy of making do. In that regard it is aligned
with Arte Povera, that mid-Century Italian movement which
employed quotidian materials to powerful effect.
D. Dominick Lombardi learned to use the hammer, saw, and chisel as a boy at the
elbow of his grandfather and father, both of whom were master carpenters.
Lombardi employs those tools while going in a different direction, but the Old Country
skills remain. Lombardi cites "high and low" aesthetic influences,
from Picasso at one end to comic books at the other.
Laura Moriarty’s chunky sculptures, constructed from wax, suggest miniature
excavations from a richly chromatic land. While Moriarty’s interest in geology
is amply evident, she has said that the “kitchen culture” of her grandmother,
Anna Policella, with its process and improvisation, is an inspiration as well. (As
a child she was, like many of us, an enthusiastic cranker of the pasta
machine.)
After an earthquake reduced Avellino to rubble in 1980, Gianluca
Bianchino relocated to New Jersey with his parents and older sibling.
Then they went back to Italy and subsequently returned to the United States. The
saving grace of what Bianchino calls a "rutted journey" were the
flights that allowed him to see an aerial landscape without borders. His
installations, such as the one in Gallery 66, allow visitors to navigate a
space free of conventional boundaries.
The Natural World
Spending time in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery as a child, Denise
Sfraga came to understand—remarkably, for a young person—the cycle of
life and death, or as she describes it, “the balance between quiet moments for
the dead and vibrant flowers adorning those graves.” The life cycle holds her
interest as a painter and a gardener. Her botanical abstractions, some in
otherworldly hues, burst with germination and growth and the passage back to
the earth.
Although best known as a wood carver, a career that was almost
inconceivable for an Italian American woman growing up in the 1940s, Nancy
Azara is here represented by three lyrical scrolls comprised of
collaged rubbings of leaves and plants. Azara divides her time between a
plant-filled New York City loft and a residence in Woodstock that is surrounded
by vegetation. The scroll format lends itself to forays into the landscape and
has offered creative flexibility during her numerous art residencies in Italy.
John Monti has come to see the connection between his Italian
American identity and the emotion of Italian Baroque, which is laden with
floral motifs. One need only think of the gorgeous excess of Neapolitan churches to understand the aesthetic.
Monti considers himself a “cultural Catholic,” drawing inspiration from
ornamentation rather than religion or ritual. As he sees it, each intertwined
vine or bouquet is a “psychodrama” reflecting the complexities of the sacred
and the mundane, particularly as played out in our culture.
Abstraction and Ethnicity
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
Martin typically makes large-scale works that consist of horizontal
color bands punctuated by vertical demarcations. It’s an architectural
sensibility rife with rhythm, even musicality. There’s nothing necessarily
“Italian” about the work (well, maybe the intensity of the color) but it was
the force of a strong-willed Italian grandmother and generous artist uncle who
guided Martin to his career choice. They might not have used the word mentor,
but that’s what they were for him.
The granddaughter of immigrants and the daughter of artists, Karen
Schifano is a painter who has exhibited internationally. Of her work
she says, “Shape is the major motivation behind my impulse to paint. The shapes
that catch my eye are usually openings: mouths, theater stages, circus arenas.
These openings are bounded by edges, like lips or curtains, that reveal or
partially conceal the void at the center."
As a professor of painting, Paul Fabozzi had led groups of
students every summer to Italy, introducing them to the country’s history,
language, and culture. “I dug deep into Rome’s seemingly endless strata to
educate my students on the history of this enduring urban center,” he says. “At
the same time, I continue to develop my painting and drawing practices as a
vehicle for exploring the relationship between experiencing place and making
images.”
Carolanna Parlato’s poured
paintings are buoyant in color and improvisational in composition. A marvel of
fluidity and control, they are built up layer upon layer of acrylic paint
applied and then directed into contours and rivulets. There is nothing
particularly Italian or Italian American about them. But allow me to read
something into the work without ascribing it specifically to Parlato or her
family: When light hits the surface of her paintings just so, you see each
one’s history in relief—the ridges, drips, and outlined edges of hidden color.
Isn’t that just like our culture? Put on your best face and keep the rest
hidden.
Applying color to strips of Mylar and hanging them in a formal
arrangement away from the wall, Mary Schiliro makes paintings that exist dimensionally in space. Works
hung parallel to the wall, but at a slight distance, such as the Slice,
Punch, Drip trio in this exhibition, create shadows that are integral to
the perception of the work. Among many elements in Italian art and architecture
that have inspired her, Schiliro says that the circle is one she has returned
to again and again.
As an artist who is fully bilingual in Italian and English, Anna
Patalano has chosen gesture in paint to say in her work what she
cannot express in any other language or medium. “The material itself is
seductive in a primal way,” she says. “There is an elegance, rawness, and
directness to the material that allows a certain freedom for me. How an image
emerges from that is a mystery.”
In Somma, In Conclusion
John Avelluto sums up nicely the identity of so many artists of
Italian American descent: "I draw from the culture, I embrace the
mishmash, but I am not an 'Italian American artist.’ I may be painting pasta and pastries now, but one day I may
want to make blue abstract paintings." So we are Italian American and we are artists,
embracing both identities, but separately. Even those of us whose work is
informed by our ethnicity see it filtered through our art training and through
our immersion in the contemporary mainstream.
– Joanne Mattera
What a magnificent exhibition. Each artwork is a jewel to delight in. Thanks for the fabulous work putting this show together.
ReplyDeleteWhat an amazing show! I wish I were closer to see it in person. Thanks for sending me the link, Joanne Mattera.
ReplyDeleteA stunning compilation of varied works. It really shines Joanne.
ReplyDelete