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DRAWING & PAINTING

MICAELA AMATO
Professor of Art and Women's Studies

Website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/mxa17/

"What arises...in Amato's installations of photographs, paintings, and sculpture, often in combination...is more like a sensation: that of an exotic culture that cannot be identified precisely." William Zimmer, NEW YORK TIMES Sunday, Feb 21, 2000

"These photographs owe a debt to Surrealism and Mexican Magic Realism...the double eyes recall Picasso's use of multiple eyes as a manifestation of the shamanistic power of vision...(recalling) 12th century fresco representations of the Mystic Lamb with multiple eyes...and Persian art, where a third eye is a sign of clairvoyance."
"In the face of troubling history, Amato's photographs and installations suggest reconciliation rather than recrimination...linked to being in a healing garden, a version of paradise."
Robert S. Mattison, "Micaela Amato/A Healing Garden", WOMEN's ART JOURNAL, summer 2001 pages 40-43

"Micaela Amato has been blessed and cursed with memory...By constructing her ancestral past, she says, she is giving herself a future...Since Jewish history has consisted of so many exiles, so much banishment, the homeland is in the head, the mind, the book, the family."
"She compares both blood and memory to the stream of life, its ever changing flow, quoting Rabindranath Tagore: "the same stream that flows through my veins flows through the universe in rhythmic measure."
Lucy Lippard, Tijuana Tavolettas:Conte Hondo, page 5 2000

"...Amato cleverly reworks elements of Spanish and Mediterranean visual cultures to form contrapuntal commentaries on her own and her family's nomadic identity...
a self that is mediated by multiple locations and times...Amato condenses portraits and unites them in a palimpsest of selves. The resulting image is both autobiographical and profoundly art historical in its self-conscious allusions to conventions of portraiture."
Sarah Rich, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS:women and self-representation in contemporary art, 2004, pages 25,26,27, Penn State University Press

Micaela Amato began exhibiting her work in New York City in 1975. Since then, her work has been shown across the US and internationally and is represented in major collections including: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, NY, Chase Manhattan Bank; and the private collections of Vera List and Paula Cooper. Amato's work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ArtForum, Art in America and Art News. She has exhibited her work at ACME. In Los Angeles, and Galerie Durchgang in Hamburg, Germany.

Her mixed media work incorporates painting, photography, sculpture and installation. Often engaging forms of self-portraiture and nomadic identities in a dialogue with her Mediterranean ancestry from Iberia, Morocco, Turkey and Rhodes, Amato's work embodies a multiple self that is mediated by her relationships to numerous locations and historical times. The series, "Dodecanese Apparitions" combines gouache painted, anthropomorphic patterned images on paper with photographic transparencies. As cultural nomad, Amato combines contradictory states of being in hybrid, collaged works.

Micaela Amato is a Professor of Art at The Pennsylvania State University.

GALLERY OF ARTWORK