Open Enrollment | A Place to Call Home
Most people seem to decide where to live based on a combination of three factors: family, relationships and work. For artists, the context of one’s life perhaps matters in different ways than it does for other people. Many artists are making work that is context dependent and heavily influenced by their surroundings. On the other hand, many artists forgo the idea of home altogether, and live a nomadic life out of necessity–chasing after residencies, temporary teaching jobs, and project grants. Though it is true that you can be an artist anywhere, different places can support different kinds of art practices, with varying degrees of ease.
Open Enrollment Newbie
For many people, getting an MFA is a way to further develop desired skills, whether theoretical or technical. For others, it is a path to networking, and cracking the hard shell of the Art World and finally “make it.” For me, it is an emergency raft. A sanity anchor.
Finding myself a single parent after earning my BFA and BA, I felt that an MFA was the only way not to get sucked into working at an unsatisfying 40-hours-per-week job that would have made it nearly impossible for me to continue being involved in art-making in a way that felt meaningful. I just wanted to buy more time before the tug of life outside of art pulled me under for good.
I moved from Italy to the U.S. right after I turned 20, with my two year old twin girls in tow. I needed to get away from violence in my family, from a macho culture with little space for women who didn’t want to be mothers, nuns, or TV eye candy, and from a society overburdened by its own history. Nine years later, I find myself at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completely entrenched in this “art thing” as a second-year graduate student in the Painting and Drawing Department.
One of the most cherished aspects of going to school at SAIC is that we are not confined to one discipline, but rather we make up our own course of study as we go. I am not sure how I ended up in the Painting Department, besides the fact that painting is a medium I became familiar with in college. I think there was also a ridiculous stubbornness in knowing that SAIC’s Paintings and Drawings department was the hardest to get into, so I wanted to prove to myself that I could. In any case, I am not making paintings.
I am interested in issues of participation, social inequality, and the lived environment. I look at public space as a place where a sense of ourselves, both as individuals and members of society, is in a state of continual formation and reconsideration. As an artist, I seek to explore how aesthetics can interact with a public setting. I specifically want to investigate how art can “activate” an environment in order to expand how a place is experienced, or to revitalize a passive space. I identify with taking on a multiplicity of roles, and believe in having a flexible and dynamic practice to address the concerns presented by this particular historical moment.
