Past Exhibitions
From Italy to America: Photographs of Anthony Riccio
February 1, 2012 - March 30, 2012
For Anthony Riccio (b. 1952), a picture truly is worth a thousand words. For the past four decades, the New Haven, Connecticut, native has documented, in word and image, the experiences of Italians and Italian-Americans not only in Southern Italy - from Campania to Sicily - but also in two culturally rich immigrant communities in America, Boston's North End and New Haven's "Little Italy."
"From Italy to America - Photographs of Anthony Riccio" features twenty-six black and white photographs by Mr. Riccio in addition to audio clips excerpted from his lengthy interviews with his subjects as they reminisced about the changes they experienced and witnessed in their lives.
Through the often poignant, always engaging photographs and interviews of his subjects, Mr. Riccio delves deeply into the lives of those whom he documents. In Boston's North End, for example, he immortalizes the zampognari (singers with pastoral wind instruments) as they perform during the Christmas season. His New Haven images show people at work and play and also capture individuals engaged in moments of quiet reflection who share memories that define them both as individuals and as part of the larger Italian-American community. U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, whose district includes New Haven, CT, observes: "Anthony Riccio produces such a rich and emotional narrative of the Italian American Experience - both through his interviews and photographs that are timeless. I am sure this work will advance his lifetime project and give us insights that will not be lost."
Mr. Riccio's images of rural Southern Italy - an area that saw many of its inhabitants leave in search of the American dream - equally transport the viewer to another world, where captivating vistas and lively images of children are counterbalanced by the hardscrabble realities of an agrarian existence. His evocative view of an olive grove, with the cloud-shrouded hills of Faggiano looming in the distance, for example, is a bucolic counterpoint to his image of Naples, the abject buildings of which suggest a clear lack of financial prosperity. Italian American artist, educator and author writer B. Amore notes: "These are rare photographs of a people at one with village life on the point of change. The intimacy and directness of gaze could only be captured by a photographer like Anthony Riccio, who works with great respect for his subject matter and an authentic interest in his own heritage."
"From Italy to America - Photographs of Anthony Riccio" has been made possible through the generous support of Nestlé Waters North America, and its S. Pellegrino® Sparkling Natural Mineral Water, which is sourced in the Italian Alps, and the National Endowment for the Humanities: because democracy demands wisdom.
Sponsored by:
James Prosek: Un-Natural History
October 21, 2011 - January 27, 2012
Artist, writer, and activist James Prosek made his authorial debut at age nineteen, when he was still an undergraduate at Yale University, with Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). This work established his reputation as a naturalist as well as a gifted artist, whose remarkably detailed watercolors reflect a seemingly boundless depth of talent. Prosek's paintings, which range from the compellingly realistic to the inventively fanciful, have been shown with the Gerald Peters Gallery (New York, NY and Santa Fe, NM); Meredith Long Gallery (Houston, TX); Wajahat/Ingrao (New York, NY); the d.u.m.b.o. arts center (Brooklyn, NY); Reynolds Gallery (Richmond, VA); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) and Yale's Whitney Humanities Center (New Haven, CT). Prosek's prowess as an artist is matched by his talent as a wordsmith. He has written for The New York Times as well as National Geographic Magazine, and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. Prosek's most recent book, Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Prosek's work as both an artist and writer is marked by a critical probing of accepted taxonomies and naming conventions. He is particularly interested in exploring the ways in which language not only serves to organize the world around us, but also to reify extant hierarchies, thus fostering a sense of a “natural” order of things; an order that is, in fact, entirely illusory. The Bellarmine Museum of Art will explore these, and related, questions in James Prosek: Un-Natural History (October 21, 2011-December 21, 2011). Highlights of this dynamic exhibition, which provides a unique forum for cross-curricular initiatives at Fairfield University, include Prosek's captivating watercolors that illustrate these and other novel classificatory schemae as well as the artist's whimsical hybrid creatures, including Cockatool and Parrotfishe.
ekphrasis i:
jeanne delarm-neri (mfa '12)
June 15 - September 15, 2011
ek•phra•sis. n.\'ek-frə-səs\. A literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art.
Poet and prose writer Jeanne DeLarm-Neri has created a series of new poems that respond to works in the Bellarmine Museum of Art's Permanent Collection. From a delicate 14th-century French ivory diptych to casts after masterworks from the Acropolis frieze, DeLarm-Neri engages with a broad cross-section of objects in the museum. In each instance, her writings give voice to a very personal aesthetic experience, which in turn provides visitors to the BMA with a new point of departure for their own interpretations and musings. DeLarm-Neri's poems will be displayed in the galleries next to the objects they address. They will also be posted on the BMA's website together with images of the relevant works.
Read Jeanne DeLarm-Neri's poems.
Kells to Clonmacnoise: Medieval Irish Art in Context
April 18 - May 24, 2011
This exhibition highlights the University's facsimile of the Book of Kells, and four reproductions of Irish medieval metalwork on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. The Book of Kells is a lavishly decorated Irish gospel book, which contains colorful decorations on each calligraphic page, including several full page illustrations. Produced ca. 800 A.D. at the height of Irish monastic influence in Europe, it is a unique record of one of the most vital periods of Christian history from which few liturgical objects survive. This period, the so-called "Golden Age" of Irish art, was an era of rich cultural exchange when Irish and Continental monks helped to spread Christianity throughout the British Isles. Arts, in all media, combined pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic traditions with new Christian forms. Irish monasteries throughout the British Isles were centers of production for sumptuous manuscripts and finely crafted liturgical objects, as this show will make clear. View events related to this exhibition.
Norman Gorbaty: Works in Dialogue
January 27 - March 27, 2011
Over the span of his fifty year career as a graphic artist, Norman Gorbaty has produced a formidable body of work, including sculptures, paintings, and works on paper. A master of abstract empiricism, the artist's work is a testament to his pursuit of pure forms through observation and movement. Using emptiness as a symbol and minimalism as a style, Gorbaty transforms spaces into an evocative blend of mystery, freshness, and beauty. Works in Dialogue will run in tandem with Gorbaty's show of Judaica at the Thomas J. Walsh Gallery (To Honor My People), and will highlight the artist's smaller works on paper and his carved "stele."
Read more about the artist's drawings, and see images of works from his previously unpublished sketchbooks, in "Norman Gorbaty & the Legacy of Disegno."
Gifts from Athens: New Plaster Casts from the Acropolis Museum and Photographs by Socratis Mavrommatis
November 2 - December 17, 2010
This exhibition highlighted photographs by Socratis Mavrommatis, a prominent Greek photographer who gifted 23 works to the university in 2008, and 8 new plaster casts, given by the Acropolis Museum in Athens to Fairfield in July 2010. Mavrommatis's work focuses on the Acropolis, with an emphasis on the beauty and changing nature of monuments and the Athenian landscape. The plaster casts, in contrast, are evidence of the grandeur and monumentality of the Parthenon and other Acropolis sculptures, and remain symbols of the art and mythology of Ancient Greece. This show also explored Athenian "gifts" in the broader sense - that is, of antiquity's enduring legacy in the development and evolution of Western civilization's multi-faceted culture.
See our calendar of events relating to the exhibition and view the photo slide show of works in show.