Cultura / Culture

Mark Guglielmo - Exhibition at Vermont Center for Photography

NORTHAMPTON, MA | April 19, 2022 – Mark Guglielmo, in a follow-up to his Cuba series, will mount a new exhibition of painted large-scale photocollages of Sicily at the Vermont Center for Photography,10 Green St, Brattleboro, VT running from May 6—June 26, 2022. It is the New Yorkborn artist’s first exhibition at VCP. The Opening Reception will be on Friday May 6 from 5-8pm (Gallery Walk), and an artist talk will take place on Sunday June 26 from 6-7pm.

Gallery hours are Wed-Sun 11-5, Closed Mon and Tue.

In September 2019, Guglielmo took a three-week pilgrimage to Sicily, his third trip to the island. He went intent on portraying his own culture and family history. His great grandparents were peasants from southern Italy who worked the land with their hands. They migrated to New York City in the late 1890s, opened a produce stand in the Bronx and raised 14 children in 2 rooms. An antiquated and laborious method, Guglielmo makes his photocollages by hand, taping together hundreds of individual 4x6-inch photographs he shot on his Sicilian sojourn. He visited Palermo, Siracusa, Trapani, Erice, and Scopello, and captured dozens of landscape and village scenes using a small, handheld digital point-and-shoot camera and sometimes his smartphone. Aiming the lens in different directions, and moving as he goes, he compiles fragmented, close-up detail images of his subject from multiple angles. Once home, he gets prints made by a lab using a traditional chemical process and begins to assemble each piece in the studio layering, positioning, and re-positioning, one photo next to another until he arrives at a balanced composition. Then, working with archival black and white photographs of Southern Italians as references by such noted photographers as Letizia Battaglia and Lewis Hine, Guglielmo, for the first time, painted and photo-transferred portraits onto his mural-size photographic assemblages to address intersecting themes of memory, vulnerability, im/migration, identity, and the imprinted legacies of his ancestors on the land they inhabited and the people that followed. His creative process was informed by the work of Sicilian artist Andrea Chisesi, whom he met on his trip, acclaimed African American artist Whitfield Lovell and the photocollages of David Hockney from the 1980s. The work is also inspired by the multicultural rich tapestry of Sicilian life, where the history, culture, music, dialect, and people itself are a blend of indigenous peoples (Sicani, Siculi and Elymians), Carthaginians (North Africans), Phoenicians (modern Lebanon), ancient Greeks, Muslim Moors, Jews, and Normans, among others. List of works in the series: 1. The Portal (Pictured above) Scopello, Sicily, 2019 Acrylic and photo-transfers on photocollage 88.5 x 75 inches 2. Making Ricotta Ballaro Market, Palermo, Sicily, 2019 Acrylic and photo-transfers on photocollage 64 x 118 inches 3. Exodus: Harbinger of Things to Come (triptych) Lido Cala Mazzo di Sciacca, Scopello, Sicily, 2019 Acrylic and photo-transfers on photocollage 48 x 192 inches

4. Everything Must Go: The Things We Left Behind (diptych) Ballaro Market, Palermo, Sicily, 2020 Acrylic on photocollage 83 x 96 inches 5. Riserva naturale dello Zingaro Scopello, Sicily, 2020 Photocollage 57.5 x 86.5 inches MARK GUGLIELMO - A 2021 Community Foundation of Western Mass/ MASS MoCA A4A Capital Grant Recipient, Guglielmo received a B.A. in History from Haverford College in 1992 spending a year at Université de Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at von Auersberg Gallery, Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, MA (2019); Loveland Museum, Loveland, CO (2018); Grubbs Gallery, Williston Northampton School, Easthampton, MA (2018); Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, Boston, MA (2017), and A.P.E. Gallery, Northampton, MA (2017, 2013). His work has been featured in Huffington Post, The Sun, Rolling Stone, Art New England, Bay State Banner, The Recorder, The Republican, Valley Advocate, and Daily Hampshire Gazette. A former rapper and hip-hop producer, Guglielmo’s collaborated with Eminem, Evelyn Harris, Cut Chemist, Dilated Peoples, and Young@Heart Chorus, helping facilitate their PrisonVision music program of weekly rehearsals with the incarcerated at two area prisons from 2014 to 2019. His instrumentals were the soundtrack to hundreds of TV shows including Pimp My Ride and The Real World while his artwork is in public and private collections around the world. • To preview Guglielmo’s new Sicily artworks, https://www.markguglielmo.com/work/sicily • To view the exhibition announcement on VCP’s website, https://vcphoto.org/mark-guglielmo-spirits-in-the-land For further Mark Guglielmo info: Mark Guglielmo Studio PH: 917-655-5719 • info@markguglielmo.com For further VCP info: Joshua Farr Vermont Center for Photography PH: 802-251-6051• info@vcphoto.org