WESTON (MA)
Joanne Mattera Art Blog [New York NY]
April 24, 2025
By Joanne Mattera
Filmmaker Joe Cultrera’s 2007 full-length film, Hand of God, plays on a loop in the gallery. If you can, take some time to view it. The story of his brother’s molestation at the hands of a parish priest, and his family’s triumph over the betrayal, is deeply personal while acknowledging the broader scope of a problem that took years to come to light. Hand of God was featured on PBS’s Frontline and is still viewable there. We are planning an evening screening of the director’s cut followed by a Q&A with Cultrera at a date in April to be announced. I’ll post specifics when they are confirmed. UPDATE: There will be a screening at the college of Hand of God on Saturday afternoon, April 26, at 4:00 pm, followed by a Q&A with the director [and the subject of the film, Paul Cultrera. Parking info below.]
Set in Salem, Massachusetts, Hand of God (2006) is a visual, poetic and provocative look at surviving Catholic clergy abuse. Filmmaker Joe Cultrera tells the story of faith betrayed and how his brother Paul and the rest of the family fought back against a scandal that has afflicted scores of churches across the country and the world. This homegrown detective story follows Father Joseph Birmingham’s trail and the cover-up instituted by his superiors. Grounded in the details of the Cultrera’s Sicilian-American Catholic upbringing, they survive with their humanity and humor intact. A vivid portrait of family, community and the triumph of individual spirit. Come early; the gallery will be open in the afternoon. Signs will direct you to the screening.
Curatorial notes: Thirteen artists, most of whom live, work, or grew up in New England, are featured in the fourth iteration of A Legacy of Making, my curatorial project inspired by Italianità, which I published in 2023 to acknowledge the heritage that informed us as artists. At a time when ethnicity and cultural legacy are topics of discussion in the art world as well as society at large, both A Legacy of Making and Italianità contribute to the conversation with art that expresses the immigrant experience as expressed through Italian American lives.
As you glance around a gallery that features a good deal of abstraction, you may wonder about the Italian connection, so let me share some of the underpinnings of the show. Grace Roselli is represented by photographs of four Italian American women, including herself, who have made contributions to the larger art world; in her drawing, Nonna’s Thread, Carleen Zimbalatti remembers the handwork she learned from her Italian grandmother; Grace DeGennaro draws her iconography from the rose windows of the church, as does Aldo Longo, who went on to explore mandala imagery as well; Thomas Micchelli draws his inspiration from a panoply of Italian sculptors and painters from Michelangelo to Morandi; Wayne Montecalvo taps into cinematic history with an image in his mixed-media work of Napoli’s most famous figlia, Sophia Loren.
The intimate collages on view here contain imagined worlds of history, science, and religion with a sense of the mysterious. “My experience in Italian culture began the day I was born,” says the artist. “Giaquinto translates to already fifth, and I was the fifth male child in the family, born on the fifth of May.”
Longo grew up in an Italian community in New Haven, Connecticut, where the stained-glass windows of the church made a profound visual impact on him. When the Navy sent him to Japan, a new and different culture opened up to him. As an artist, he found himself integrating the two cultures. Among the many bodies of work he has produced in seven decades is a series of mandalas that reflect, he says, the rose windows of churches he attended as a youth and the Japanese temples that affected him so deeply as an adult.
Montecalvo’simages are drawn from a variety of sources, but the processes with which he works them are typically of his own invention. In the series on view here, he gives us three familiar women: the queen of excess, Marie Antoinette; the painter Frida Kahlo as a girl; and the glorious Sophia Loren, in an image from her heyday, on what look to be artifact walls replete with ethnic icons and decorative tiles. Look closer. These “artifacts” are in fact thoroughly modern—digital images mounted on Styrofoam with a mix of other materials, like cardboard and wax.
From a family of stone carvers—her great grandfather worked on Mount Rushmore—and strivers, many of whom worked in creative industries, Zimbalatti brings together craft and fine art in her work. Line is her means of growing geometric shapes: grids or networks that offer a sense of deep space, or chromatic squares with a symmetry that invites contemplative viewing. “Forms emerge slowly and hypnotically from its use,” says Zimbalatti of the line. Nonna’s Thread refers to the handwork practiced by her grandmother.
DeGennaro draws inspiration from her attendance at church, specifically the glowing light of stained-glass windows and the kinesthetic experience of fingering rosary beads in prayer. “From an early age, Catholicism gave me a sense of the existence of both the visible and the invisible,” she says. DeGennaro makes meditative geometric paintings composed of orderly configurations of dots, which she refers to as “beads.” Here, three paintings from the Rosette series transcend a specific religion. “Each of my paintings is offered as both an antidote to the distractions of our everyday world, and as an entrance to the collective unconscious,” she says.
After almost two decades as the owner of a bookstore, Rizzoli now makes art with a visual narrative suggestive of architecture—buildings, walls, intimate spaces. His small-scale collages and paintings feature a pared-down geometric style, playful yet serious, in which he employs papers and fabrics, most with the soft patina of age. Rizzoli describes his aesthetic as “melding remnants of past time with present sensibility.” A new element in the work on exhibition here is Venetian plaster, a material that has been used on walls since Roman times, which enhances the architectural quality of the work.
“I paint images that express how I perceive organic forms and the world of nature,” says Tucci. Her work bursts with energy, whether in the release of exploding shapes, or the contained dynamism of meandering lines, or here in a tripartite painting, Chance of Storms: Likely, which suggests a powerful meteorological event about to take place. A first visit to Italy as a young adult allowed her to connect with her Italian culture and family, absorbing, she says, “the essence of a living ancestry.”
Martin makes large-scale paintings consisting of horizontal color bands punctuated by vertical demarcations. It is an architectural sensibility rife with rhythm, even musicality. You could say there is nothing necessarily “Italian” about the work, but looking at the shallow geometric space articulated in Sienese paintings, made in the 14th century at the dawn of the Renaissance, you might reconsider. In any case, it was a strong-willed maternal grandmother and generous artist uncle who guided Martin to his career choice. They might not have used the word mentor, but that’s what they were for him. “Much of what I am today I credit to my grandmother, Filomena Maccarone,” says the artist.
Formerly a realist painter of exquisitely serene interiors, Wethli turned his attention to geometric abstraction some 25 years ago. It was a big change, but he carried with him the same compositional sense of balance and harmony. “I try to paint geometry the way that Giorgio Morandi painted bottles—using something as humble as the rectangle,” he says. Wethli is represented in this exhibition by two works: a small constructed piece that could be seen as a flat sculpture or a bas relief painting, and a painting, shown together below. The conversation between the two works is lively. To listen in you need only to spend some time looking.
“Italian art and culture form the double helix defining my life and work,” says Micchelli, who is represented in this exhibition by two multi-element sculptures. Working in wax, clay, or other malleable materials, he carves or builds figures—here, heads—that speak to the human condition. Micchelli depicts a range of human emotion, from consternation to surprise, serenity to anger. While not conventionally handsome, the figures are compelling—present and powerful despite their relatively small size.
Maloney is taken with the structure of the urban landscape. Italian on his mother’s side (Steriti), he was deeply affected by “the passage of time and layers of history” he encountered throughout his travels in Italy. Reflecting those layers, the distinctly American work included in this exhibition is a woodblock print comprised of multiple inkings that results in an impossibly dense metropolitan vision. The work, printed from a 44-by-36-inch plywood plate, carries the marks of the carving process.
Roselli is a painter and photographer. Here we focus on her work as a photographer with four images from her ongoing project, Pandora’s BoxX, which chronicles the intersectional identities and cultural impact of women artists and art practitioners active since the 1960s. In this ambitious undertaking, Roselli is photographing 360 influential art world women, as well as non-binary and transwomen—artists, writers, curators, critics—for what will soon be a book and a series of exhibitions. The four images here depict Italian American women, including the late sculptor Nancy Azara, mixed-media artist Claudia DeMonte, your curator, and Roselli herself behind the lens. The four of us have been part of the Italianità project that has served as inspiration for this and other exhibitions.
AcknowledgementsBig thanks to all the participating artists for your great work. A shout out to Kelly Blasberg, gallery director, for her bravura installation abilities. Her measurement skills are spot on, and she is fearless on the 15-foot ladder. And a special thanks to professor Julia Lisella who, back in June, surmised that A Legacy of Making would be a good fit for the college.
Information about the exhibition
. The exhibition is on view through May 10. Gallery hours: 9:00 to 4:00 Monday-Friday; 12:00-4:00 Saturday; closed Sunday. The Carney Gallery is located in the Fine Arts Center. See it in the lower right quadrant of the map
. There is plenty of parking. You may park on the college access road opposite the entrance to the Fine Arts Center or in the visitor lot behind the building
