At the Hunterdon Art Museum,
September 27, 2026-January 10, 2027
Opening: Sunday, September 27, 2:00-4:00
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Luci Callipari-Marcuzzo, From the Inside, 2020, digital print; image: 10 x 7 inches
As in many Italian
American families, there is room around the table for others. At the
metaphorical table of A Legacy of Making, there are places for those
born in Italy or elsewhere but living American lives here, and those whose
parents or grandparents emigrated to countries other than the United States, such
as Argentina, Australia, and Canada, where so many Italians established
homes for themselves and their descendants. The artists in A Legacy of
Making draw from the past—from the generations, the journey over, the
language, the traditions—translating these ideas from the original Italian into
contemporary art.
Participating artists: Brian Alterio, B. Amore, John Avelluto, Len Bellinger, Angelica Bergamini, Gianluca Bianchino, Serena Bocchino, Luci Callipari-Marcuzzo, Jennifer Cecere, Chris Costan, Elisa D'Arrigo, Claudia DeMonte, Milisa Galazzi, Diana González Gandolfi, Antonietta Grassi, Karen Guancione, Margaret Lanzetta, D. Dominick Lombardi, Timothy McDowell (Macellari), Thomas Micchelli, Patricia Miranda, Wayne Montecalvo, John Monti, Laura Moriarty (Roccio/Policelli), Don Porcaro, Lucio Pozzi, Patti Russotti, Lorenza Sannai, and Denise Sfraga; curated by Joanne Mattera
.
www.bamore.com
www.angelicabergamini.com
Solo Journey, 2022
collage on paper, 15 x 15 inches framed
www.dianagonzalezgandolfiart.com
www.gianlucabianchino.com
Geography: Oblique State of Affairs, 2024
acrylic pigment, plaster, and flock powder on wood and aluminum, 50 x 20 x 4 inches
Impasta Impasto, 2023, sculpted acrylic paint on panel, 42 x 31.5 inches
John Avelluto, who recently adopted the dialect spelling of his given name, 'mba Giuànne, 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 pastries—“emblematic of Italian American comfort,” he says—look tempting enough to taste. But please don’t. They are painstakingly fashioned with acrylic paint. Woven into the iconography of much of Avelluto’s work, including Pasta Impasto on exhibition here, is a familiar physical expression: thumb and fingers brought together in what Italians call la mano a borsa (hand purse), 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. How many of us were discouraged as children 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.
www.john-avelluto.com
Claudia DeMonte is a storyteller. Here she taps into Italian folklore with her Corno sculpture, embellished with symbolic elements of her life. Typically rendered in gold, silver, or coral as a small talisman worn on a chain around the neck, the corno, or horn, 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?
www.claudiademonteart.com
pewter and gold leaf on wood, 13 x 3 x 3 inches
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www.waynemontecalvo.com
His Spaghetti Western folds together food and film tropes with politics.https://timothymcdowell.format.com/
www.micchelli.net
The Textile Tradition
“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 had a connection to these traditions. Not so much anymore, but what does endure 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 the professional artist she is. Here she is
represented by one enormous “doily.”
www.jennifercecere.com
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Antonietta Grassi shares a parallel narrative with so many of us—the emigration of her parents from Italy to North America, learning to sew at the hands of the women in her family, and making paintings that reflect her textile heritage—but there is a difference of geographic parallel and cultural complexity. She is an Italian Canadian, living and working in Montreal, where she juggled not only Italian and English growing up but French as well. Much of Grassi’s work suggests textiles. In A Legacy of Making her “weaving” is in fact a painting, the melding of culture with art training.
www.antoniettagrassi.com
Soft Edge (After Agnes), 2025
acrylic, ink, oil on linen, 50 x 46 inches
Patricia Miranda dyes handmade lace and pieces it into installations that pay homage to her
grandmothers, Ermenegilda and Rebecca. Red is suggestive of birth and blood and
the pricks of so many fingers by so many needles in the making of handwork. Miranda
began with the laces her grandmothers had made, but given the scale of
the works in this series, she soon ran out. Thus began donations of lace from
family, friends, and other artists eager to support her project, which now
brings together the work of many immigrant hands and histories.
www.patriciamiranda.com
www.chriscostan.com
Born in Sardinia, Lorenza Sannai grew up at a linguistic and geographic remove from the mainland. Now she triangulates her travels to include a studio on the outskirts of Milan with one north of Manhattan, returning occasionally to her island roots. She shows and curates both here and throughout Europe. In her practice she brings together embroidery and contemporary geometric abstraction, a suturing of genre and culture. Sannai is a member of American Abstract Artists.
www.lorenzasannai.com
acrylic and embroidery on canvas, 18 x 18 inches unframed
As with Pozzi, it is a stretch to include Len Bellinger in this group of works with textile referents. He is a painter of vigorous, dense abstractions that integrate all manner of materials. But when you know that his mother’s side of the family comes from Positano, a fishing village in the time of his forebears, his painting, Big Net, fits comfortably within a grouping that includes a brawny oversize doily, an ambitious lace installation, and paintings inspired by rag rugs and loom weaving.
www.lenbellinger.com
bignet, 2015-2018
Talisman #4, 2013
www.donporcarostudio.com
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. Indeed, the shoe form shows up in Going Gray, one of the artist’s three clay sculptures included in this exhibition. Says the artist, “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 hand-built ceramic sculptures, which she may fire multiple times, are a testament to the legacy of making.
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. Another feature of his personal legacy is a waste-not-want-not mentality that reflects immigrant frugality and resourcefulness.
www.ddlombardi.com
Laura Moriarty’s chunky sculptures, shaped from a conglomeration of beeswax elements, suggest miniature excavations from a richly chromatic land. While Moriarty’s interest in geology is amply evident in her work, 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.) In this exhibition, her three forms reference a family unit, an essential feature of Italian and Italian American life.
www.lauramoriarty.com
Tipped, 2021, urethane resin, pigments, dimensions variable
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. You need only to 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. His floor installation of lily-like forms, Tipped, may suggest to you, as it does to me, the poetic denouement of a garden at the end of the season.
www.johnmonti.com
www.denisesfraga.com
Petrichor, 2024
flashe, acrylic, oil pastel, photograph on wood panel
48 x 36 inches
Patti Russotti scans and photographs botanical forms—ferns, flowers, fungi—the world of life and beauty in her yard. She is taken with the society of plant life, often combining her photographs with what she learned from the society inside her home: the women in her family who taught her handwork when she was a girl. Her photographs, sometimes printed directly onto fabric, are often embellished with free-form stitchery or embroidery and hung from rods. Russotti is passionate about the “alchemical magic that occurs within natural phenomena and the creative process.”
After a lengthy 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. “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.
www.italianita-art.com/brian-alterio
2012, photograph, image: 14 x 11.5 inches
Callipari-Marcuzzo's 2018 embroidered text on Anna Callipari's 1960 emboidered linen doilies
In a series of recent embroideries on linen handkerchiefs, Milisa Galazzi recalls a childhood conversation with her grandmother in which she was exhorted to keep embroidering. “Good girls should always be sewing,” said Grammy. “Ugh” responded the young artist at the end of a frustrating exchange. But her nonna prevailed. Much of Galazzi’s work as a mature artist involves sewing, whether in the thread-on-wax embroideries shown here or in the large-scale sculptural paper “lace” for which she is also known.
www.milisagalazzi.com
The art-and-textile conversation is a thread that runs through the work of so many Italian American artists, especially women, whose relationship with mothers, aunts, and grandmothers is laden with the sharing of domestic history and tradition.
www.serenabocchino.com
il mare, 2025, letterpress (edition of 43), Hanemuhle paper, acrylic paint on handmade Khadi paper, stones, terracotta and ceramic shards from Camogli, Italy; with excerpt from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams; 7.75 x 5.25 inches closed; printed and published by Edizioni Pulcinoelefante, Osnago, Lecce, Italy
Karen Guancinone’s words and images offer a different kind of colloquy. Her handmade books—one-of-a-kind or limited edition—offer an intimate conversation that is kinesthetic and creatively engaging. Poems, drawings, buttons, antique fabrics, porcelain shards, love letters, even trash bags, are collaged into personal narratives shared with the reader. “I often employ traditional, labor-intensive methods such as cutting, tearing, sewing, assembling, and disassembling materials; arranging tens of thousands of singular pieces; and methodically reconstructing them. This repetitive process is like those found in piecework and domestic tasks—associations I intentionally bring into an art environment,” says Guancione, who calls found materials “the stuff of life.”
Like most of the artists in this exhibition, the urge to make is in Guancione’s DNA. “The maternal side of my family emigrated from Sicily to Argentina and New York City, later moving to Easton, Pennsylvania, and Newark. The paternal side is an enormous Neapolitan clan that started life in America in Newark and soon after populated nearby Montclair. Many of them were skilled tailors and seamstresses.”www.italianita-art.com/karen-guancione
-- Joanne Mattera, curator
A Legacy of Making, the fifth incarnation of which you see here, began as an online project in 2020 (www.italianita-art.com) to contribute positively to the cultural conversation about immigration. The project expanded into a book with 59 artists, Italianità: Contemporary Art Inspired by the Italian Immigrant Experience, published in 2022. The book in turn inspired a series of exhibitions. The first, co-curated with Dr. Joseph Sciorra, took place in 2023-24 at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Midtown Manhattan. Successive solo curatorial efforts took place at Connecticut College in New London in 2024, and two at Regis College, in Weston, Massachusetts, in 2024 and 2025.
You can view all previous exhibitions here .....................................................................................................................................................................
Additional information
. The Hunterdon Art Museum is located at 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton, New Jersey
. Hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
. About the Hunterdon Art Museum here
. Talks and events: Schedule coming
. Getting to the MuseumClinton, New Jersey, is about 60 miles from Midtown Manhattan. Traveling by car is your best option, although there are buses that leave from Port Authority. Google Maps will give you specifics
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