Angelo Ippolito

Italian-American, b. 1922, d. 2001

Collection Statement:

Between 1988 and 1993, Angelo Ippolito lived and taught on the Greek Island Samos. Highlighted here are 12 works that reflect Ippolito’s urge “to express the limpid air and light of the Aegean Sea outside his window.”

The variety of media and techniques used to create this “Aegean Collection” enabled Ippolito to index his experiences with levels of discretion. A variety of illegible characters and symbols appear across the selected works enforcing through text a sense of social displacement. Ippolito embedded physical remnants of his travels in each piece, abandoning the brushes he had brought with him in favor of “twigs and sponges he picked up along the seashore.” These selected works from Ippolito’s “Aegean Collection” physically and temporarily link each other to a collection of memories sourced in Samos. Delicately assembled and smaller than his renowned work from the 1960s, these works offer colorful scraps of Ippolito’s coastal experience.