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Italo Scanga
A newly acquired body of work by Italian American sculptor Italo Scanga is on view in a new chapter of Turning Corners, a changing exhibition of work by artists across the centuries who have forged innovations through experimentation in media and subject matter. Five works by Scanga were generously donated by the Scanga Family Foundation, established in 2001 following the artist's passing. These stunning sculptures were selected because of their connection with Scanga's Potato Famine from the same period in the 1970s, a sculpture donated to the museum in 1986.
Scanga was born in Southern Italy in 1932 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He imbued his work with a highly personalized symbolic language based on his own émigré experience—his rural Calabrian heritage, Italian culture, Catholicism, and humanism. Scanga's passion for experimentation allowed him to push artistic boundaries, often by combining nontraditional materials—found objects (brooms, candelabras, a bronze eagle in the BAM sculptures), glass, hardware, mass-produced paintings of saints, wood, and ceramic. Scanga fostered this passion for experimentation in the artists he encountered as a teacher at the Pilchuck Glass School, established by Dale Chihuly in the 1970s as a place for artists to explore the use of glass in their work. (Xu Bing, whose work is also on view in Turning Corners, is currently a Pilchuck resident, and so was Fred Wilson.) Scanga also influenced emerging artists at UC San Diego, where he taught from 1978 to the end of his life.
Dara Solomon
Curatorial Assistant, Collections
