Ms.
Passantino came of artistic age in the great multi-cultural
fervor of New York City of the late 1980's, when the discos
and the downtown decadence fascinated many European like
her, who invaded NYC, filling the clubs and the deteriorating
urban setting of Lower Manhattan. Andy Warhol had trashed
any division between high culture and ordinary life and
for the first time in the history a bond between art,
music and society was created. Hip hop had just started
and Graffiti was changing the way people look at art and
became a phenomenon who ignored distinction of race and
class. Artists like Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel
Basquiat were still alive and television had shows like
John Belushi's Saturday Night Live.
These influences are reflected in Ms. Passantino's
multi-medium approach and in the unusual found objects
she has incorporated into her art from the start. She
combines the concepts of usable art with essential elements
of traditional Italian mosaic art. Ms. Passantino's
approach to photography reveals an unusual choice of
subjects she photographs, which reminds both the work
of Diane Arbus and the Italian film director Federico
Fellini. Just like in Fellini, her vision of the human
condition has a fantastical mix of levels of reality
and time. Her work both in painting and in photography
has consistently been both inordinately self-conscious
and calculated, yet mystically attuned to primal sources
of energy, which explains her attraction to neo-expressionist
primitive imagery, with its expression of basic human
emotions and nature, and use of type in her work, typical
of Graffiti.
After graduating from the University of Rome in 1983,
Antonella Passantino moved to New York City where she
received her Masters degree New York University’s
Gallatin Division in 1989, and a Certificate in Advertising
Art and Design from the Center for Media Art in 1993.
In New York Ms. Passantino began her career in advertising
and publishing as a Graphic Designer in the late 80’s.
In 1995 she moved to the Hudson Valley, where she studied
privately with the Venetian mosaic artist Peter Zanolin,
whose later work can be seen in several subway stations
throughout Manhattan, and she was introduced to a new
medium, stained glass. Deeply touched by the September
11th events and personally struggling with breast cancer,
Ms. Passantino decided to come back to the Lower East
Side from her exile and make New York City's future
generation artists her priority. She is back to LIU
to get her credentials in Art Education to be able to
teach in public school.
The artist consider herself an Italian, a New Yorker
and a Lower East Sider. The multi-cultural radicalism
of the 80s Art movement is imprinted in her. Even thought
the 80s movement, struggling with feelings of despair
and hopelessness, had a built-in self-destruction mechanism
which killed it at the end (and AIDS did the rest),
the message of tolerance and respect for diversity is
still alive. It is this message that the artist, who
survived that era, is trying to put back together for
the future of a new generation of artists and a better
community.
