B. AMORE

bio | cv

B. Amore is an artist, educator and writer who has spent her life between Italy and America. She studied at Boston University, University of Rome, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara and is the recipient of Massachusetts Cultural grants, a Fulbright Grant, Mellon Fellowship as well as a Citation of Merit Award presented by the Vermont Arts Council. She is founder of the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in Vermont, an international program for sculptors and co-founder of Kokoro Studio Retreat Center.

Amore taught for many years at the Boston Museum School and as an Artist Teacher and Visiting Critic with the Vermont College MFA and ADP programs. She has won numerous public art commissions in both the USA and Japan and is represented by Boston Sculptors Gallery. Life line – filo della vita, her multimedia, six room exhibit, premiered at Ellis Island and has traveled in the US and Italy. It is published as An Italian American Odyssey, Life line-filo della vita: Through Ellis Island and Beyond, by Fordham Press and the Center for Migration studies. Recent commissions include the Centennial Collage for Dorothea’s House in Princeton, New Jersey and Gateways for the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing in East Boston. Her exhibit, Rondini di Passaggio – Birds of Passage, is on view at the Museo di Emigrazione in Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, Avellino, Italy.

She has been a Featured Writer at the Italian American Writers Association, Bluestockings, Phoenix, and the Yale Club New Poetry series. Other publications include Art by Mexican Farmworkers in Vermont, Carving Out a Dream, and her art and poetry reviews in Sculpture magazine, Art New England, the Rutland Herald, and VIA. Her creative writing is found in Brownstone Poets Anthology, Italian Americana, Shabdaguchha, Bridging the Waters I and II, VIA, Biancheria, Speaking Memory: Oral Culture and Italians in America, Daughters and Dads and the Path through Grief; Tales from Italian America, The Italian Americans: A History (PBS), and Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, among others. She is currently editing Living the Dream, a collected history of the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center, which she founded thirty years ago, as well as completing her first book of poetry.

statement

“Experimentation and work with found materials is a key to my working process in which accident and innovation are in constant interplay. My work has evolved from its origins in carved forms to complex installations involving text, ancestral artifacts, alternative photo processes, stone, fabric, and objets trouvés. The installations and assemblages often appear to be meditations on the layered nature of existence. They are sculptural ruminations, which bridge the past and the present.

Diminutive portraits printed on silk are interwoven with salvaged ceiling tin, stone and text to create the wall installation, Stepping Stones, which speaks to the ancient tradition of leaving home in search of a new world, a journey we now call immigration. The random photographs were taken by Amore on street corners in cities around the world and graphically demonstrate the increasingly heterogeneous nature of our evolving societies.The work is literally the “stuff” of life. Rather than being highly finished in a traditional fashion, the stone is incorporated as puzzle-pieces which have been reconfigured. Faces of strangers become anonymous transient characters in the pieces, and yet each visage has the potential power to arrest the viewer’s gaze. In my newest series, Street Calligraphies, found gloves which have been cold cast in bronze, still evoke the mysterious presence of the lost owner. Although the gloves always retain their original gesture, they are combined with other enigmatic elements from city streets and transformed through the artistic process into works of art.” — B. Amore

work

Glove Globe, 2017, found gloves cold cast in bronze, papier maché, acrylic, wood, 37” x 31” x 7”, Photo Credit: Don Ross

Canterbury Pilgrims, 2013
Found bronzed gloves, acrylic, wood, 20” x 60” x 4”, Photo Credit: Don Ross

Cracked Immigrant Mirror, Lo Specchio Spaccato del immigrante, 2011, Streetmade paper, bronzed glove, found objects(Naples/NY), sheet music images, 22.5″ x 32.5″ x 2.25″, Photo Credit: Rick Odell

Heart of the Matter II, 2007
Photo on organza, silk flowers, tin, bone, wood, 2’ x 2’ x 5”
Photo credit: Tad Merrick

Workers’ Mandala/Tracing the Journeys, Mandala de los trabajadores/Siguendo los viajes, 2011, Workers’ gloves, burlap coffee sacks, paper, silk flowers, cross and ex-votos made by anonymous Mexican artisans, 44” x 48” x 3”, Photo Credit: Tad Merrick