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March 2005

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To Sicily with love is offered in Anthony Miraglia exhibit
 

   From his abiding love for the homeland he left when he was a child, Anthony Miraglia offers a paean to Sicily in his exhibit “Ephemera”. The show opens March 18 at the Villanova Art Gallery. Constructed with wood, paper, mortar, paint, brush, and carving tools, Miraglia’s three-dimensional images seek to present the feel of the richly textured architecture that have shaped the culture of his beloved island.

   “When I go back, I feel I’m home,” said Miraglia, who did most of his growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, although the Sicilian dialect of Italian remained the first language of his adopted home in America.

   “Sicily is both of today and of yesterday. The cultural remnants of 2,800 years of conquest by the Greeks, Romans, the Normans, Saracens, and Spaniards are there. It is this time-ravaged layering of civilizations that I strive to evoke in my art,” said the artist a full professor of fine arts at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

   A free public reception to meet the artist will take place Friday, March 18, from 5 to 7 p.m., in the gallery, which is located in the Connelly Center. Refreshments will be served. The exhibit continues to April 17.

   The results Miraglia strives for in his reliefs are achieved in carefully constructed stages. Wood shaped to resemble columns or other architectural fragments serves as a base. Over that is set printmaking or rice paper, which he covers with gold leaf or digital photos reformatted into collages.

   Next is spread a mixture of gesso, diatomaceous earth, modeling paste or thin-set mortat. While still wet, the surface is carved to reveal selected areas of the underlying gold leaf of images. Once dried, color in thin transparent layers is applied until “a final surface that has the soft patina and feel of a frescoed wall” is achieved.

   Into shelled niches and coffers he creates on the surface, Miraglia may place found objects such as robin’s eggs or beach pebbles, or paint a landscape or a plant form. Whatever he adds is intended, he said, “to explore questions dealing with the passage of time, mortality, resurrection, and, in general, things ephemeral.” Miraglia’s Villanova exhibit also includes more abstract ink-jet prints based on digital images of walls, architectural fragments and images taken on his recent trips to Sicily.

   Nothing has had more impact on the direction of Miraglia’s art than his rediscovery of Sicily on his 1977 honeymoon with his wife Kathy, his first time back since leaving as a young boy more than 20 years earlier. “I completely fell in love with the place,” he said, adding, “Each civilization that passed through left behind its own architectural and artistic heritage, leaving combinations not to be found anywhere else. For me, the visual excitement of Sicily is amazing; the mosaics are incredible.”

   Miraglia credits his artisan parents with his artistic bent and skill with his hands. His father, Salvatore, was a cobbler who designed and made shoes from scratch. His mother, Maria, hand embroidered designs with colored thread on bed covers, sheets, pillows, towels and other white wear. “They were tremendously gifted,” said Miraglia.

   He also inherited their code of perfectionism. “My father’s motto was, ‘If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all,’ ” he said. Miraglia still enjoys the memory of seeing his father in the living room window in Cleveland winters, instructing him with hand signals to widen, straighten, and otherwise correctly clear the snow off the walkway from the curb to the house.

   Miraglia is thankful that his father lived to see his first art exhibit and earn his bachelor of fine arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1973. In that same year, he was one of 32 students selected nationally and internationally to attend the prestigious Yale Summer Program in Norfolk, Conn. In 1975, he was awarded a master’s degree in painting from Syracuse University.

   Miraglia and his wife Kathy built with their own hands the Cape Cod home in South Dartmouth that they have lived in since 1979, when it consisted of two finished rooms. Moving the project along with proceeds from the sale of Miraglia’s paintings, they completed the job in 1991. The Miraglias have two children, daughter Caterina, 20 and son Antonio, 18.

   Today, Miraglia returns to Sicily on a more regular basis. After 20 years of chairing the department of fine arts at UMass Dartmouth, he stepped down in 2003 to return to teaching. In addition to his full professorship, he is the International Studies advisor and coordinator for the College of Visual and Performing Arts. He is also an advisor and recruiter for the Mediterranean Studies Program that takes place each June at the University of Messina in Sicily, where he teaches painting.

   Miraglia’s works have recently been included in national juried exhibitions in Philadelphia, Texas and Virginia, and invitational exhibitions in the New Bedford, Mass.  Art Museum. He has won several awards and his works are held in numerous private, public and corporate collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.

   Villanova exhibits receive support of the Pennsylvania Partners for the Arts, the regional arts funding partnership of the Pennsylvania Partners on the Arts. State government funding comes through an annual appropriation by the state General Assembly and from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. PPA is administered in this region by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

   For exhibit hours, telephone the Villanova University Art Gallery at 9 4612. Samples of Anthony Miraglia’s work may be previewed on the gallery’s web site at www.artgallery.villanova.edu .