Guancione: The Art of Labor and the Labor of Art

Sometimes I feel like a foreigner in my own home. From an early age I felt the desire to run, flee, move far away. My mother said that when I was two years old, she opened the front door and I raced like a speeding dog down the steps and down the street, gleefully exclaiming in a quasi-Italian accent “I gotta fasta feet.” She was fast too, but I was almost at the end of the block before she could reach me.

Not only have my “fasta feet” taken me down the street, but in later years they carried me to other continents for years at a time. They transported me into the worlds of art, music, dance, community, language, teaching, political action, and arts advocacy. These activities have shaped every aspect of my life and work. I am a visual artist who creates interdisciplinary works—often integrating mixed media constructions, handmade books, and sculpture that incorporates household objects, printmaking, dance elements (with performers moving within an installation and calling upon viewers to join them), live music, ritual, and video. My work focuses on women’s work and ethnicity, issues of identity and class, as well as forms of resistance that challenge injustice and inequity. Large-scale installations, often spanning hundreds of square feet, have been created around the topics of prostitution, domestic work, the environment, immigration, labor, and faith. My life, labor, and travel experiences have all profoundly influenced the way I see the world—and, as a result, have shaped the art I create.

For most of my life, while learning new languages, I recorded my explorations and observations in richly collaged journals that now number in the hundreds. The vocabulary has continued to expand, reflecting new paths and experiences, as well as an immersion in performance and the language of ritual. An important element of my work is audience participation and includes sustaining community art projects in the United States, Mexico, France, Italy, and elsewhere.

To explore the questions surrounding women’s work and the value placed on labor, I often employ traditional, labor-intensive methods such as painstakingly cutting, tearing, sewing, assembling, and disassembling materials; arranging tens of thousands of singular pieces; and methodically reconstructing them. This repetitive process is like those found in piecework and domestic tasks—associations I intentionally bring into an art environment. I continue to be interested in work that reveals the art of labor and the labor of art. I often use found materials and intense applications of color that share a sensual delight in “the stuff of life.” The ever-present aesthetics of accumulation and excess resonate in my world.

The maternal side of my family immigrated from Sicily to Argentina and New York City, later moving to Easton, Pennsylvania, and Newark, New Jersey. The paternal side, an enormous Neapolitan, clan started life in America in Newark and soon after populated nearby Montclair and the environs with hundreds, and today, literally, over one thousand cousins. Many of them were skilled tailors and seamstresses. My maternal great-grandmother, whom I never knew, learned to sew at the age of seven at the turn of the 20th century. It was simple then: you sewed, the work was examined, deemed unworthy, ripped out, and you started anew, until you got it right. My mother told the story matter-of-factly, and without much judgment, but I cannot help but reflect on how the need for perfection and artistry has persisted in all of us. The need for flawless craftsmanship resurfaces in everything: sewing, cooking, housekeeping, manner of dress, arrangement of drawers and closets, and countless other tasks. The old world work ethic was passed on and much of my work honors the skilled handwork, the intense beauty, and the delight that comes with its creation.

Vagabondaggio: The Makings of an Artist

When I was 19, in the mid-1970s, I left the United States and completed my last year of art school at Hornsey College of Art in London at the height of Punk. I had plans to discover Italy, go south, and then work my way toward the east. I thought I’d go to Egypt, work on a kibbutz in Israel, travel overland through Afghanistan and other countries, and eventually make it to India, the mecca of the times.

After a year of hitchhiking and adventure in Europe, Russia, and North Africa I unexpectedly found calm in the gentle hills and foggy winter vineyards of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy. I settled in Travazzano where medieval castles stood between groves of chestnut and fruit trees. The rolling hills were covered with grape vines, and the last vestiges of rural life continued as it had for centuries. There were small farms, horse traders, cows, sheep, and fields of corn and wheat still tended by traditional farming families who spoke Piacentine dialect, a strange mix of French and other languages that were unfamiliar to me. 

The early times there unexpectedly became a slow, comforting rhythm of cooking, making bread, chopping wood, drawing in tiny osterias filled with old men, and speaking with a minuscule vocabulary that I developed in farm women’s kitchens, which later developed into fluent Italian. Lifelong friendships, deep relationships, and much of what I consider important today began here. With a companion and friends, we worked hard farming, cultivating vineyards for wine production, growing wheat and bountiful organic fruit, vegetables, grains, and other crops using biodynamic farming methods. We raised horses, cows, and goats, grew everything by hand without the use of machines or heavy farm equipment, bartered for anything we could not produce, and bought absolutely nothing. Although I grew up just miles from New York City in a working-class urban environment, everything in the countryside felt like home, far away but familiar, somehow buried in my own distant roots.

Later a strong desire to be in the Mediterranean brought me to southern Italy, the land of my ancestors. I lived in Naples, Fusaro (a small town outside of Naples), Positano, and eventually Chora Sfakion in the southernmost part of Crete. There I created art and ran a small restaurant for locals, decades before remote areas and villages with a few hundred inhabitants became tourist destinations.

I have dramatically changed worlds many times since these early formative years, but my Italian heritage and the stories of immigrants continue to inform my artistic practice. 

I have been an activist for decades, but the election of the 45th president of the United States, encroaching fascism, and the Covid pandemic radically changed my artistic practice. I decided to stop making large installations and dedicate enormous amounts of time to political action, meeting with senators and legislators, protesting on the streets, canvassing for candidates, and participating in countless actions ranging from street theater to civil disobedience with groups such as Gays Against Guns, Rise and Resist, and the Visibility Brigade. Besides direct political action I turned to photography and exhibitions promoting democracy and anti-fascism.