Featured Artist for September - November 2000

Featured GiveAway by Italo Scanga Boy with Trumpet, 1999, Cast Brass, 9 oz, 12 x 4 1/2 cm Valued at $1500

Shanna K. Flaschka Oxford, Mississippi

Featured Artist Italo Scanga

Italo Scanga is an internationally recognized master famous for his eclectic works in diverse media. Sculpting from cast and assemblage he produces seemingly endless quantities of alluring objects related historically to folklore. For decades his work has maintained its vigorous drive, supplemented by his teaching of generations of artists since the 1960s. Due to his nationwide influence the Whitney Museum in New York held Scanga's debut survey exhibition in 1972.

Italo Scanga was born in Lago, a small town in Calabria, Italy, where he spent his childhood. He went to church regularly and did woodwork with a local furniture maker, which sparked his interest in art making. In 1947, after World War II, he emigrated to the United States, landing in Pennsylvania. After high school in Michigan, Scanga worked on the General Motors assembly line and served the U.S. Army in Austria, after which he returned to Michigan to earn teaching credentials from Michigan State University.

Immediately upon graduation he taught for several years at Wisconsin University and spent the mid sixties at Rhode Island School of Design, where he met his "brother in art" Dale Chihuly, who had been enrolled in his sculpture course. Since meeting the two have collaborated extensively, booked for a giant outdoor project by the San Diego International Airport and currently showing together at the University of California in San Diego, where Scanga has taught since 1976. Top schools across the country have accommodated Scanga, including a 1990 residency at Skowhegan.

Chain Tree, 1995 Chain and Glass, 144 x 30 in

Scanga has been the subject of well over a hundred one man exhibitions, and included in even more group and traveling shows. He was awarded on two occasions by the National Endowment of the Arts, granted from the Copley Foundation, appeared on the front cover of ArtNews and in leading art publications such as Art in America, Flash Art, Artforum, New Art Examiner and the Journal of Contemporary Art. His work belongs to collections of fellow artists Sol Lewitt and Julian Schnabel, along with public collections like the Modern, Metropolitan and Guggenheim in New York, Broad Foundation, County and Contemporary museums in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC. A permanent museum space is now under construction in the artist's Italian hometown of Lago devoted entirely to his works.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

I don't want to be prejudiced by the idea of limitation. If you're a potter, you've got to be a potter, if you're a glass artist, you've got to be a glass artist, if you're an oil painter, you've got to paint with oil. I think everything should be open. I love pottery. I love glass. I love textiles. I love photography. I love African art. I love Renaissance art, I love Egyptian art. I don't care about the times either, or these days, if it's an early Ellsworth Kelly or a late Ellsworth Kelly, early Picasso or late Picasso. People always say Picasso sort of dropped from his work around 1913, got worse and worse. I like the work he did just before he died and I like the work he did as a boy. If it's good, it's good. I'm free, I'm open. ~ Italo Scanga, October 1989, San Diego