With a pair of special exhibitions dedicated to the life and art of the late Italian-American artist Italo Scanga (1932-2001), Museum of Northwest Art’s guest curator Matthew Kangas has organized two expansive views of the artist who spent considerable amounts of time in the Pacific Northwest and California where he taught at University of California - San Diego for many years.

The second of the two exhibitions, Geppetto’s Children: Italo Scanga at Pilchuck Glass School, mixes more examples of the artist’s work executed during many summer residencies at Pilchuck with those of well-known artists invited to join him as Artists-in-Residence. They include Lynda Benglis, Donald Lipski, Deborah Butterfield, Buster Simpson, Laddie John Dill and Judy Pfaff.

Their works on paper and experiments with glass are accompanied by pioneer Pilchuck glass artists including the first Italian glass artists to visit the US (Francesco Ongaro, Lino Tagliapietra, Fabio Fornasier, Pino Signoretto, Dino Rosin) and established glass artists such as Benjamin Moore, William Morris, Mary Shaffer, Charles Parriott, Therman Statom, Walter Lieberman, Stanislav Libenský and Vera Brychtová. Together, working with Scanga and Chihuly, glass was introduced into the mainstream of contemporary American art.

About Italo Scanga
The Italian-American artist Italo Scanga came to the US at age 15 in 1947 and became a widely hailed artist active in the US but also, over time, in Italy, Europe, and Asia. The youngest of six children, he became a painter, printmaker, sculptor, ceramist and glass artist who also taught generations of art students, some of whom, like Bruce Nauman and Ree Morton, became quite famous.

Besides his pioneer installations in SoHo of the 1970s, New York’s nascent art quarter, Scanga became an esteemed faculty member at a variety of art schools including Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and University of California—San Diego. His 30 years of summer residencies at Pilchuck Glass School north of Seattle came about at the invitation of his friend Dale Chihuly whom he had met while the latter was at Rhode Island School of Design. Their lifelong friendship was based on a mutual love of making art, road-trips for antiquing and finding lost treasures to incorporate into their art, and a passion for Italian food and wine. They shared an aesthetic of spontaneity, found objects and bright color.