Italo Scanga (June 6, 1932 – July 27, 2001), an Italian-born American visual artist and educator. He was known for his sculptures, ceramics, glass, prints, and paintings, working as a neo-Dadaist, neo-Expressionist, and neo-Cubist; his art was mostly created from found objects and/or ordinary objects. Scanga taught for many years at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Early life and education Italo Scanga was born on June 6, 1932, in Lago in Calabria, Kingdom of Italy (now Italy). In 1946, his family immigrated to the United States, when he was age 14. After graduation from Garden City High School, Scanga worked on the assembly line of General Motors factory.
Scanga served in the United States Army from 1953 to 1955 in Austria, within the armored tank division. In 1956, Scanga married librarian Mary Louise Ashley, whom he had five children with.
In 1960, Scanga graduated with a B.A. degree from Michigan State University. His classmates in college included Richard Merkin, and David Pease, who remained friends throughout his life. He studied under Lindsey Decker and Charles Pollock; Decker introduced Scanga to welding and sculpture. He received a M.F.A. degree from Michigan State University in 1961.
Career Scanga taught fine art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and at the University of California, San Diego. He also taught at the Pilchuck Glass School.
In 1972, he had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City. Artwork Scanga's materials included natural objects like branches and seashells, as well as kitsch figurines, castoff musical instruments and decorative trinkets salvaged from flea markets and thrift shops. He combined these ingredients into free-standing assemblages, which he then painted. Although visually ebullient, the results sometimes referred to gruesome episodes from Greek mythology or the lives and deaths of martyred saints.
He considered his artistic influences to be sweepingly pan-cultural, from African sculpture to Giorgio de Chirico. He often collaborated with his close friend, the glass sculptor Dale Chihuly.
Myths had always fascinated Italo Scanga. Many of his sculptures translate written or oral narratives into the realm of visual objects. Constructed of wood and glass, found objects or fabric, his ensembles reflect a trio of activities—working, eating, and praying. These activities dominate the lives of those who live close to the land, but they are also activities that are idealized by many who contemplate, romantically, a simpler, bucolic life.
Scanga — through a vocabulary of basic tools, icons, and foodstuffs, reworked — attempts to restore the original sense of the peasant world: the realities of hard work or religious devotion.
While there is no single source for Scanga's work, many of the stories, traditions, and superstitions retold in his works are native to the folk-life of southern Italy. The culture from the Calabrian countryside of Scanga's native land provides the artist with his most consistent source material.
Whether religious or secular in content, Scanga's works of the past decade are the artist's reflections on the immutable, universal aspects of peasant life. Some, like the series of Italian photographs, are intensely personal, while others use a more generally recognized set of images—old farm tools, wooden bowls or large plaster statues of Saint Joseph and the Madonna. They are all, however, Scanga's own reinterpretation of those universals, his personal memories and thoughts commingled and then frozen for his audience to contemplate.
Potato Famine sculpture series Scanga's series of works, the "Potato Famine" sculptures, are logical extensions of his earlier efforts. He begins with the familiars of saints and tools, but here they are supporting armatures not focal points. If his earlier offerings of herbs, peppers, and the like were presented in blown glass peasant ware or hung as dried provisions domesticating an exhibition space, these potato supplications are affixed directly to the accompanying icons—not unlike the devotions pinned directly to the images of saints and Madonnas as they are paraded before the faithful in street processions. Other spuds rest in huge ladles and bowls just as they are—a simple, raw food—uncooked but potentially nourishing.
Scanga's choice of the white (sometimes called Irish) potato is a metaphor for the meager existence of the rural working class at the time.
Employing real potatoes enables Scanga to extend such parallels even further. His spuds eventually sprout greenery and if left in place long enough return in a desiccated state to an earth-like dust, reflecting the natural cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth.
The politics that concern Scanga here are not specific to Italy, in fact this particular source of inspiration is derived from a different peasant culture, the rural class of Ireland. Soon after his move to the West Coast in 1978, Scanga read detailed information on the infamous Irish Potato Famines of the late 1840s. As he almost always does, he began to research this sociopolitical tragedy and quickly realized the enormity of the facts and figures. Close to one million Irish dead, over a million emigrated caused by successive failures of the staple food crop the white potato. Waves of economic and social upheaval raced through the poor rural class as did epidemics of cholera, typhus, dysentery and scurvy. The population of a nation was decimated in a few decades from 7 million to well under 3 million.
Scanga's research revealed that it was not simply the blight and natural forces that caused so enormous a loss, but the presence in Ireland of a domineering political force—Great Britain. The failure of Great Britain to aid the Irish during the crucial years of 1846 through the 1850s, the almost inhuman absence of aid for a country that was almost totally dependent on the British, was the injustice that moved Scanga to create his sculptures.
Scanga attempts to reinvigorate this century-old conflict and restore some of the feelings lost today. These events have been embroidered by myth, homogenized by history. Scanga's work is anti-historical, as he tries to undo what the selectivity of history made palatable. Scanga searches for not just facts and figures but sensibility.
Scanga's newest works encompass both contemplation and action. These two polarities—thinking and doing—are part of the political process as well.
Death and legacy Scanga died of heart failure at age 69 on July 27, 2001, at his Turquoise Street studio in Pacific Beach in San Diego, California. He was survived by his five children. The Italo Scanga Foundation was established in 2001.
Collections His work is in numerous museum collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; among others.
Timeline
Childhood 1932: Born in Lago, Calabria, to Giuseppe and Serafina Ziccarelli, the youngest of four children, the others being Carolina, Mafalda and Nicolino. 1939-1945: Prepares to leave with his mother for America to meet his father and brother. American troops invade Italy on the day of departure and they are unable to leave. Spends the war years in Lago with his mother and very few resources. Works as a cabinetmaker's apprentice and studies sculpture with a man who carves statues of saints.
Immigration, family and education
1947: Emigrates to America with his mother, to Point Marion, Pennsylvania, where his father works as a laborer for the railroad. 1950: Moves to Garden City, Michigan, with his family and works at General Motors lifting transmissions on an assembly line. 1951-1953: Studies at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit, MI. 1953: Due to his language barrier, graduates from Garden City High School at the age of 21 while continuing to work evenings at General Motors. 1956: Marries Mary Louise Ashley, a librarian at the Garden City Public Library. Moves to East Lansing, MI where he enrolls at Michigan State University. 1956: First son, Italo Antonio Amadeo (Tony) born. 1958: Father, Giuseppe dies in Garden City, MI. 1959: Daughter, Katherine Elizabeth (Cici) born. Look Magazine commissions him to do a photographic "human story" about his mother, a widow immigrant, returning with her to Calabria (where she remains until the end of her life). Publishes a book of these photographs in 1979. 1961: First teaching job at University of Wisconsin (through 1964). Meets Harvey Littleton, a fellow instructor. Lives in faculty housing. 1962: Daughter Serafina Annaliese (Sarah) born. 1963: Son Giuseppe Edward (Joe) born. 1969: Son William Frankel (Bill) born.
Teaching
1964: Moves to Providence, Rhode Island, to teach at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Is colleagues with artists Richard Merkin and Hardu Keck. Starts a correspondence with HC Westermann. Spends summers teaching at Brown University; colleague of Hugh Townley. 1966: Moves to State College, PA, and teaches at Pennsylvania State University for one year. Meets artists Juris Ubans, Harry Anderson, Richard Frankel, and Richard Calabro, who remain friends throughout his career. 1967: David Pease helps him get a tenure track position at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA, and the family moves to Glenside, PA. Artists he works closely with include Ernest Silva, Lee Jaffe, Donald Gill, and William Schwedler. Meets graduate student Dale Chihuly while lecturing at RISD and develops a lifelong friendship. 1978: Moves to La Jolla California to teach at University of California, San Diego. Ree Morton was teaching there at the time and recommended Italo as a faculty.
Exhibitions 1970's
1969: One person exhibition, Baylor Art Gallery, Baylor University, Waco, TX. Buys his first home in Glenside, PA, at 2225 Menlo Avenue. Works in his basement studio, creates installations with farm implements, herbs, glass containers and saint iconography. Works very closely with students Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling (who later run a gallery in Philadelphia, PA), and Harry Anderson. Welcomes many artists into his home including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman (a former student), Vito Acconci, Ree Morton and Rafael Ferrer. 1970: Exhibits "Saints, Glass, Tools, and Romances" at Atelier Chapman Kelly, Dallas, TX, one of his first one-person installations. Included in the sculpture annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. Receives Howard Foundation grant from Brown University. 1971: Collaborates with Dale Chihuly and Jamie Carpenter pouring molten glass into bamboo at RISD. Exhibits the work at Museum of Art, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Teaches summer school at University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI (through 1973) and has a show, "Christ & Pythagoras." Shows an installation at Henri Gallery, Washington, DC. 1972: Installations at the Clocktower, NYC, and Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. Teaches in Rome, Italy. for Tyler School of Art.