I was born and raised in the gritty New York of the 70s and 80s. Hip-hop was my savior, along with Sundays at Grandma’s surrounded by kin. My subjects are humble, ethnic, working-class folk like me, still invisible in museums, caricatured in pop culture, and often nameless in the annals of history. These are my people. Using bright, intense color, gold leaf, cut-up paper, rich fabric, corrugated steel, oil and acrylic paint, I excavate the essence of a disappearing culture to celebrate its magic and explore the underlying issues that have led to its erosion. Overlapping, fractured surfaces mimic the shifting identities Southern Italians have embodied since arriving in the United States as expendable labor, from demonized dark-skinned “other” to violent defenders of whiteness, and everything in between.

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