“A Legacy of Making” at Regis College, Weston, Mass.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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, Amore, back view of  Jennifer Cecere’s Doily