Woman in the Fields, paper, fabric, acrylic, cardboard on canvas
EVOLUTION GRANT recipient 2025
STATEMENT
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. I’d fill up on crumb buns and mouth-watering baked ziti until my belly ached while gifted storytellers spun outrageous tales filling the air with drama and intrigue. At 12, I made my first collages out of cut-up magazine clippings of sports stars and luxury cars, heroes of a scrappy DIY kid. Through my 20s and 30s, I made sonic collages writing rhymes and making beats, sampling, truncating, and reconfiguring existing materials into new compositions.
Fragmentation is still central to my practice. Expanding on my Cuba and Sicily photo-collage work, these life-size deconstructed portraits dig beneath the surface to peel back the layers and get to the core of the human condition, in search of the authentic self. My art is a mirror. It’s the realization of what my mother and grandmother, both artists, longed to do. My subjects are humble, ethnic, down-to-earth, 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. And I honor them by illuminating their worlds.
Using bright, intense color, gold leaf, cut-up paper, rich fabric, corrugated steel, 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 demise. 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. What were the benefits of assimilation? What were the costs? And while the truth of U.S. history is being banned in schools, I engage Italian American identity to spark greater awareness and deeper conversations about some of the most salient issues of our time. For, as James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
BIO
Mark Guglielmo (b. 1970, Queens, New York) is a contemporary artist best known for his layered figurative works that incorporate a diverse range of materials to critically engage with themes of race, class, migration, and power. Rooted in his New York upbringing, Guglielmo utilizes collage as a central element of his practice, connecting his art to his background in hip-hop via sampling, truncating, and reconfiguring existing ingredients into new compositions. Through his unique blend of media and technique, Guglielmo explores some of the most pressing issues of our time, sparking healthy dialogue and contributing to contemporary discourse.
From a long line of storytellers, Guglielmo’s fragmented portraits of everyday people invite viewers into the inner worlds of his subjects to consider the nuances of the human psyche, personal history, family, culture, place, and belonging. His significant projects include “Portraits of My People” (2021-2025), which honors his Southern Italian lineage while addressing the complexities of identity and the fraught nature of race-making in America, and “Cubaneo” (2015-2019), his series of large-scale photo-collage portraits, interviews, and field recordings at the intersection of international relations and the personal/collective narrative.
Exhibitions of Guglielmo’s work have been organized at The Loveland Museum, Colorado; The New York State Museum; Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, Boston; Central Connecticut State University; and Vermont Center for Photography. In fall 2025, Guglielmo will mount solo exhibitions at The United Nations and at El Museo Provincial de Cienfuegos, Cuba. Guglielmo is the recipient of awards from The Puffin Foundation; Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts; Deerfield Academy TEDx Talk; and residencies at Sound+Science and The
Man with Shovel, paper, fabric, acrylic, gold leaf, cardboard on canvas
Williston Northampton School. A former rapper and music producer, Guglielmo aka Vesuveo rapped with Eminem on the Top 10 hit “Green and Gold” and shared the stage with KRS-One, Biz Markie, and Black Eyed Peas while his music forms the soundtrack to Pimp My Ride, Jersey Shore, Cribs, and Beavis and Butt-Head. He graduated from Haverford College with a BA in History, spending a year at Université de Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France. He currently serves as Community Advisor for the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts’ ValleyCreates Program, in partnership with MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists. He lives and works in Western Massachusetts.
