"A Legacy of Making" at Regis College, Weston, Mass.

Calandra Institute, New York City, A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists

 

Connecticut College, New London, A Legacy of Making: 26 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage

A new version of the show A Legacy of Making: Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage, Part 1 opens in the Carney Gallery at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts, on Saturday, September 28, and runs through December 21. The work of  New England artists is featured in this dramatically angled space in the Fine Arts Center. 

A peek before we begin our walk-through of the Carney Gallery at Regis College

Here, the work of Jennifer Cecere, suspended from the ceiling, takes the modesty of women's traditional handwork into ambitiously large scale: Doily, printed and laser-cut industrial screening, eight feet in diameter

We are the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants. We are American by birth, education, and culture, but by heritage and home life we are Italian. We grew up navigating between identities in the languages we spoke or responded to, the foods we ate, the references we understood, and the often vastly different expectations each culture held for us (especially for women). 

Despite the disjunct, we recognized early on the richness of our Italian traditions. While much was passed down along gendered lines—the women sewed and cooked; the men built—there were exceptions. Men were tailors or chefs, just as women made wine or tended businesses. Everyone made things, fixed things, figured out ways to get things done. We observed and learned, often helping out. Filtered through the experience of art school training, we brought many of these skills into our art practice. Our progenitors might be shocked at how we have put our skills to use, but translating is not just for language. In Part One of A Legacy of Making, on view through the end of this semester, we look at these translations of culture in three areas: Immigration, the Natural World, and the Textile Tradition.

Gallery hours are Monday-Saturday, 9:00-4:00. (Scroll to the end for a campus map.) And take note: Part 2 will take place mid-February through mid-May. 

View from the entry. We begin our tour from the left wall

From left: Charyl (Urbano) Weissbach, Claudia DeMonte, Joanne Mattera, Brian Alterio

Charyl Weissbach
Baroque, celadon, 2017, encaustic, gold leaf, mica pigments, UV resin on Belgian linen on panel, 16 x 16 inches

Etude 8, 2020, encaustic and gold leaf on panel, 24 x 12 inches

Baroque, peacock, 2014, encaustic, mica pigments, and gold leaf on Belgian linen on panel, 12 x 12 inches

Charyl (Urbano) Weissbach is represented by a selection of small, ornate paintings in encaustic. The element of Neapolitan Baroque is strong in her work: dramatic patterns in high relief inflected with gold leaf. If there is a suggestion of wrought iron in the compositions, it may be because her paternal grandfather was a metalsmith, a trade that fascinated the young Weissbach, especially when she watched him cast molten metal into objects. And although it may not be intended by the artist, there is the visual suggestion of brocade, a silk fabric embellished with floral patterns. This richness of design is brought to bear in the medium Weissbach chooses for her painting, neither metal nor fiber, but encaustic paint. Worked when molten, encaustic, which is pigmented wax, can be built up or carved into, making it ideal for the sensuous physicality of the artist’s expression.

Claudia DeMonte
Cose Che Ho Fatto (Things I have Done), embroidery on linen, 49 panels, overall 73.5 x 60 inches

Detail below

Here’s a little of what you will learn from Claudia DeMonte’s installation, Cose Che Ho Fatto (Things I Have Done): She danced with Rudolf Nureyev at a disco, walked on the Great Wall of China with Mohammed Ali, had lunch with the protean sculptor, Louise Nevelson. She sailed on the Ganges, made offerings to the orisha Yemanja on New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janiero, and worked as a model. This is not the life of an Italian American girl who grew up in the Sixties, yet she conveys the anecdotes of a world traveler through the medium of embroidery, which every Italian woman learned at home.

Weissbach, DeMonte, Joanne Mattera, Brian Alterio

Joanne Mattera
Silk Road 338, 2016, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches

My own work is suggestive of fabric. In a series I have titled Silk Road, the paintings are first and foremost color fields, reductive in hue and composition. However, a textile influence is apparent in the edge-to-edge swipe of the paint, just as a fabric is woven selvedge to selvedge, and in the visually tactile surfaces whose ridges and slubs are suggestive of douppioni silk. 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 expression. The sewing and knitting I did with my aunts opened a creative pathway to art school, and there I became a painter.

Brian Alterio
Garlic Scapes, 2012, photograph

After a long career on the technical side of digital photography, Brian Alterio returned to a view through the lens, as he had in art school. Described in one review as “a digital scientist with a poetic soul,” Alterio photographs nature in all its aspects, from the human form to landscape to plant life, the latter represented in this exhibition by a vividly illuminated black-and-white image. “I think that from my Italian blood was borne a passion for life. That passion spawned my photographic language. My images are about life,” says the artist. With its graceful arabesques, Alterio’s Garlic Scapes connects culturally and horticulturally to one of the most notable elements of Italian cuisine.

Milisa Galazzi, Debra (Messina) Claffey

Milisa Galazzi
Super String Theory,  2015, paper, thread, and encaustic,  93 x 40 x 12 inches

As a child, Milisa Galazzi learned to sew a from her paternal grandmother who dispensed advice like,  “Good girls should always be sewing” and “A lady always mends and fixes.” Galazzi found Grammy’s comments “annoying,” but appreciated learning the skills. Now she makes “lace” that originates as a drawing whose line she stitches by hand. (Grammy would be proud!) After cutting away the negative space of the drawing, Galazzi dips each hand-stitched sheet into a vat of warm wax, which stiffens and transparentizes the paper, and then installs it, with other similarly cut and waxed sheets, into a layered relief sculpture whose shadows are as integral to the work as the cut paper itself. In this installation, her Super String Theory not only dialogs with its own shadows but with the twists and curves of Brian Alterio’s Garlic Scapes, near which it is placed.

Debra Claffey

Turners II, 2017, encaustic monotype in 18 panels, overall, 48 x 96 inches

Although Debra Claffey‘s sole connection to gardening as a child was caring for the family’s backyard tomato plants, she has cultivated a strong relationship to horticulture in her adult life. One might attribute the connection to her Sicilian genes, which are closely aligned with the cycles of planting, cultivating, and harvesting. (She is a Messina on her mother’s side.) A career in garden care—she founded her own company—is intertwined with a studio practice that focuses on plant forms.  “I celebrate plants: their great age and history on the planet, their intelligence and successful adaptations, their beauty of form, shape, and infinite color,” she says. Her Turners II is a large-scale, multipart encaustic monotype dense with layers of ferns, suggestive of a botanical garden.

Claffey, Tracy Spadafora

Tracy Spadafora
Vestige (Part 10), 2012, mixed media on wood boxes, 14 x 10 x 3 inches 
Vestige (Part 11), 2012, mixed media on wood boxes, 14 x 10 x 3 inches.

The maternal side of Tracy Spadafora’s family is from the cool Alpine north while her paternal side is from the hot Mezzogiorno. In Italy this would have been an improbable family union, but in the melting pot of the United States it is not so unusual. Both sides of the family were gardeners, which not only put food on the table but brought color and beauty into their homes. “My own love of gardening and appreciation for the natural environment is one thing from my Italian heritage that has influenced my artwork directly,” says Spadafora, who addresses what she describes as “a complex and shifting relationship between humans, our biological roots, and the shaping of our natural environment.”  Her Vestige (Part 10) and Vestige (Part 11) express her thinking about the environment that sustains us all, right down to the DNA of things.

Spadafora, Jeanne Brasile, John Avelluto

Jeanne Brasile
Mixed Messages, 2021, blended and shredded card catalogs, 15 x 8 x 8 inches

Language is a challenge for non-English-speaking arrivals to this country. Italians typically spoke four languages at home: the dialect of their paese, or village; standard Italian by those sufficiently educated; heavily accented English (usually ungrammatical) laden with Italian syntax, which we referred to as Broken English; and standard English, which was spoken by the younger, American-schooled members of the family. A multigenerational family dinner might have all of these languages going at once. Jeanne Brasile’s shredded text in a blender, Mixed Messages, is a wonderful metaphor for this mescolanza, this mix.

“Though I studied the Italian language, I am far from fluent,” says Brasile. Like many of us, she heard dialect at home but was not encouraged to speak it. When she took an Italian class, she was surprised to learn that the “sharp-sounding” language she grew up hearing bore little resemblance to what she describes as the “mellifluous, even poetic” language she was learning in school. “I felt cheated,” she says, “as if somehow my home experience was not quite authentic.” She needn’t have worried. Italian dialects, as well as the creole and patois of other languages, are increasingly recognized by linguists for their own richness of syntax and expression.

Brasile, Avelluto, Cianne Fragione

John Avelluto
Above: Johnny Cakes, 2023, acrylic on panel, 12 x 9 inches

John Avelluto draws from Southern Italian and Sicilian tropes to create art that depicts our foods, customs, and expressions. His trompe l’oeil relief paintings of pastry look tempting enough to taste. But don’t. They are fashioned with acrylic paint. His drawings depict the mal’occhio (evil eye)—maloik in dialect—and the way to protect against it. To Southern Italians, the mal’occhio is a curse cast upon you by someone who is jealous of who you are or what you have. One way to fight off the curse is with the mano cornuto, or horned hand. The index finger and pinkie make horns of the hand, a little deal with the devil to keep evil away. 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? 

Below
Maloik, 2017, acrylic paint films, 13 x 11 inches framed
Cornuto 2, 2017, acrylic paint films, 13 x 11 inches framed

 

Cianne Fragione

Heaven and Earth Are Dressed in Their Summer Wear, 2007-2009, oil and fabric on canvas, each  90 x 30 inches; from left: Flapper Dress, Red Dress Curtain, Pink Jacket with Blue Ribbon

There are many influences in any artist’s life. One in particular for Cianne Fragione was a Sicilian nonna who ran a dressmaking business out of the front room of her family’s Hartford, Connecticut, home. “With only a door to separate us, I saw my grandmother all the time. She made me dresses, coats, and hats, which reinforced the integrity of the crafted object for me and at the same time contributed to my sense of composition and form,” she says. Fragione’s long-running, mixed-media series, Heaven and Earth Dressed in Their Summer Wear incorporates clothing into her paintings. The three panels presented here are but a few of many that stretch across a wall, offering a visual connection between the artist’s childhood and her present as a contemporary artist. A “clothesline” is thus her metaphor for time.

Fragione, seen through Jennifer Cecere's Doily; B. Amore

 “Until a generation ago, almost everyone practiced handwork,” says Jennifer Cecere. “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 an outsize doily printed on screening that stretches across the gallery.

Continuing around: B. Amore, Timothy McDowell (Macellari)

B. Amore
Following the Thread II: Giovannina,. 2000, mixed media assemblage, 24 x 48 inches
Below: Giovannina’s handwoven linen sheet with her initials 

"We carry the history of out families and our cultures in our psyches as well as our genes," says B. AMORE.

Through a long career, she 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 exhibited at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York City. Life Line, Filo Della Vita: An Italian American Odyssey then traveled to museums in San Francisco and Boston, Rome, and finally to Napoli, where her family’s journey began. A framed assemblage from that show, Following the Thread II: Giovannina Forte, is included here. This work depicts Amore’s maternal great grandmother who came to America at the age of 54, a reluctant immigrant, with her husband and three children, one of whom was Amore’s grandmother, Concettina.

 The filo rosso--the red thread—that runs through the work represents a Neapolitan tradition of departure. The person boarding ship carried a ball of yarn, while the person at the dock held fast to the unfurled loose end. As the ship pulled away, the ball unwound in an attenuated goodbye.

Also on view is a linen bed sheet that Giovannina wove on her domestic handloom and the iron used to press it flat after washing. You’ll note the iron is not electric. Even into the early years of the 20^th century, heavy irons like these were heated on the top of a coal or gas stove and then placed on a fabric to flatten it, a process repeated over and over until the ironing was finished. Domestic chores, carried out almost exclusively by women, were physically demanding.

Timothy McDowell
Dream Park, 2023, oil on panel, 30 x 24 inches
Siren’s Call, Lampedusa, 2023, oil on panel,  25 x 20 inches

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 drawn from art history, also depict our contemporary culture. In Dream Park, a Renaissance figure hovers ever so faintly above a Vespa, the motorized scooter that replaced the bicycle in post-World War II Italy and remains a chic and handy means of transportation. In Siren’s Call, Lampedusa, McDowell looks at a different kind of immigration—not away from Italy but to it. North Africans are making the treacherous journey by boat to Southern Italy, often to the Sicilian Island of Lampedusa, which is closer to the coast of Africa than it is to the boot of Italy, for the same reasons our Italian forebears left for America: to make a better life.

If you plan to visit

The Carney Gallery is located in the Fine Arts Center. You can park on the side of the access road opposite the Fne Arts Center or in the lot behind the building. Click image to expand the map.

Gallery hours are Monday-Saturday, 9:00-4:00.