“A Legacy of Making, Part 2 ” at Regis College

From left: Lloyd Martin, two by Mark Wethli

Curatorial notes: Thirteen artists, most of whom live, work, or grew up in New England, are featured in the fourth iteration of A Legacy of Making, my curatorial project inspired by Italianità, which I published in 2023 to acknowledge the heritage that informed us as artists. At a time when ethnicity and cultural legacy are topics of discussion in the art world as well as society at large, both A Legacy of Making and Italianità contribute to the conversation with art that expresses the immigrant experience as expressed through Italian American lives. 

As you glance around a gallery that features a good deal of abstraction, you may wonder about the Italian connection, so let me share some of the underpinnings of the show. Grace Roselli is represented by photographs of four Italian American women, including herself, who have made contributions to the larger art world; in her drawing, Nonna’s Thread, Carleen Zimbalatti remembers the handwork she learned from her Italian grandmother; Grace DeGennaro draws her iconography from the rose windows of the church, as does Aldo Longo, who went on to explore mandala imagery as well; Thomas Micchelli draws his inspiration from a panoply of Italian sculptors and painters from Michelangelo to Morandi; Wayne Montecalvo taps into cinematic history with an image in his mixed-media work of Napoli’s most famous figlia, Sophia Loren; and filmmaker Joe Cultrera, tells the story of how an Italian family, his own, recovered from improprieties committed by a priest at St. James church in Salem, Massachusetts. Read on. There’s more.

Cultrera’s 2007 full-length film, Hand of God, plays on a loop in the gallery. If you can, take some time to view it. The story of his brother’s molestation at the hands of a parish priest, and his family’s triumph over the betrayal, is deeply personal while acknowledging the broader scope of a problem that took years to come to light. Hand of God was featured on PBS’s Frontline and is still viewable there. We are planning an evening screening of the director’s cut followed by a Q&A with Cultrera at a date in April to be announced. I’ll post specifics when they are confirmed

Behind Cultrera’s poster and  along the first wall, we see work by Michaelangelo Giaquinto, Aldo Longo, and Wayne Montecalvo

Michaelangelo Giaquinto, clockwise from top left: Viewing Distance, 2020; Saturn, 2020; Sitting Cross Leg on the Floor, 2021; Night Dreaming, 2020; all mixed media collage on panel, 10 x 8 inches or 8 x 10 inches

Aldo Longo, Gnostic Vision #1, 2016, oil and collage on canvas,
30 x 24 inches

Wayne Montecalvo,  Marie Antoinette, 2022, mixed media, insulation foam, digital images,
charcoal, cardboard, 36 x 23 x 2.5 inches; Frito, 2023, mixed media, digital images, insulation foam, wax, encaustic
paint, Foamcoat, cardboard, powdered graphite, 40 x 36 x 2.5 inches; Sophia, 2024, mixed media, digital images, wax,
powdered graphite, India ink, insulation foam, cardboard, Foamcoat, caulk, 30 x
22 x 2 inches

Montecalvo’s images are drawn from a
variety of sources, but the processes with which he works them are typically of
his own invention. In the series on view here, he gives us three familiar
women: the queen of excess, Marie Antoinette; the painter Frida Kahlo as a
girl; and the glorious Sophia Loren, in an image from her
heyday, on what look to be artifact walls replete with ethnic icons and
decorative tiles. Look closer. These “artifacts” are in fact thoroughly modern—digital
images mounted on Styrofoam with a mix of other materials, like cardboard and
wax.

Continuing along the wall with Carleen Zimbalatti’s Nonna’s
Thread,
2022, acrylic and ink on paper, app. 24 x 24 inches plus frame

Below: A closer view of Nonna’s Thread

DeGennaro draws inspiration from
her attendance at church, specifically the glowing light of stained-glass
windows and the kinesthetic experience of fingering rosary beads in prayer.
“From an early age, Catholicism gave me a sense of the existence of both the
visible and the invisible,” she says. DeGennaro makes meditative geometric
paintings composed of orderly configurations of dots, which she refers to as
“beads.” Here, three paintings from the Rosette series transcend a
specific religion. “Each of my paintings is offered as both an antidote to the
distractions of our everyday world, and as an entrance to the collective
unconscious,” she says.

After almost two decades as
the owner of a bookstore, Rizzoli now makes art with a
visual narrative suggestive of architecture—buildings, walls, intimate spaces.
His small-scale collages and paintings feature a pared-down geometric style,
playful yet serious, in which he employs papers and fabrics, most with the soft
patina of age. Rizzoli describes his aesthetic as “melding remnants of past
time with present sensibility.” A new element in the work on exhibition here is
Venetian plaster, a material that has been used on walls since Roman times, which
enhances the architectural quality of the work. 

Joyance

A Flower, A Color, and Away!

Untitled (Ovals)

To the right of DeGennaro and Rizzoli is Roberta Tucci, with Thomas Micchelli sculp[ure on pedestal in foreground

Below: Micchelli’s Two Heads, 2022, clay on painted wood base

 

 “I paint images that express how I perceive
organic forms and the world of nature,” says Tucci. Her
work bursts with energy, whether in the release of exploding shapes, or the
contained dynamism of meandering lines, or here in a tripartite painting, Chance
of Storms: Likely, which suggests a powerful meteorological event about to
take place. A first visit to Italy as a young adult allowed her to connect with
her Italian culture and family, absorbing, she says, “the essence of a living
ancestry.”

Martin makes large-scale
paintings consisting of horizontal color bands punctuated by vertical
demarcations. It is an architectural sensibility rife with rhythm, even
musicality. You could say there is nothing necessarily “Italian” about the work,
but looking at the shallow geometric space articulated in Sienese paintings, made
in the 14^th century at the dawn of the Renaissance, you might
reconsider. In any case, it was a strong-willed maternal 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. “Much of
what I am today I credit to my grandmother, Filomena Maccarone,” says the artist. 

Formerly a realist
painter of exquisitely serene interiors, Wethli turned his attention to geometric abstraction some 25 years ago. It was a big
change, but he carried with him the same compositional sense of balance and
harmony. “I try to paint geometry the way that Giorgio Morandi painted
bottles—using something as humble as the rectangle,” he says. Wethli is
represented in this exhibition by two works: a small constructed piece that could be seen as a flat sculpture or a bas relief painting, and a painting, shown together below. The
conversation between the two works is lively. To listen in you need only to
spend some time looking.

Grace Roselli

Above: Claudia DeMonte
Below: Nancy Azara

Read more here

A look back before you leave. And don’t forget to check back for the date of the screening of Joe Cultrera’s film, Hand of God. He will be present for a Q&A afterward; additional guests may be announced

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to all the participating artists for your great work. A shout out to Kelly Blasberg, gallery director, for her bravura installation abilities. Her measurement skills are spot on, and she is fearless on the 15-foot ladder. And a special thanks to professor Julia Lisella who, back in June, surmised that A Legacy of Making would be a good fit for the college.