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 (UC San Digeo).

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, together they had five children. In 1960, Scanga graduated with a B.A. degree from Michigan State University. His classmates in college included Richard Merkin, and David Pease, who remain 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 in a very personal way—attempts to restore the original sense of the peasant world: the realities of hard work or religious devotion, often ameliorated by civilized sentimentality. He invokes myths to give us the essentials of such a cultural experience. While there is no single source for Scanga's work, many of the stories, traditions, and superstitions retold in through adumbrated saints and basketed scythes are native to the folk-life of southern Italy. This culture, inhabiting the time-worn Calabrian countryside of Scanga's native land, provides the artist with his most consistent and powerful 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. Far from being an attempt at humor or funk, Scanga's choice of the white (sometimes called Irish) potato is in fact a perfect conflation of symbols for the peasant life he intends to evoke. The dusty tubers, extracted from the ground, retain much of their earthy character. Beneath their dry brown exterior is a moist, crisp flesh—a humble organic metaphor for the meager existence of the rural working class. 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. Natural cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth, at the core of so many myths, are encapsulated here in a single, ever changing symbol. 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. Thus Scanga attempts to reinvigorate this century-old conflict and restore some of the feelings lost on us today. These events have, as have many, long ago been embroidered by myth, homogenized by history. In a very real sense, Scanga's work is anti-historical, as he tries to undo what the selectivity of history made palatable—he searches for the primal impact, the distilled significance of what really happened—not just facts and figures but sensibility. As part icon and part offering, Scanga's newest works encompass both contemplation and action. These two polarities—thinking and doing—are part of the political process as well. These "Potato Famine" works rekindle our own abilities to be politically conscious, as they are both a reminder and a reinterpretation of universal political injustices wherever they occur.

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

Immigration, family and education

Teaching

Exhibitions 1970's

California

Exhibitions 1979–2001