Gallery of late artist’s work peers back into history

The University of Rhode Island’s Art History Department held a reception on Tuesday to usher in the final week of their exhibit, Gino Conti: RI Artist Revealed¸ featuring works of the latest artist.

The exhibit was created by six senior Art History majors as part of a capstone seminar course in their final project for the major. The students, Elisabeth Buell, Alyssa Carroll, Heebe- Te- Tse Lee, Debra Marble, Astrid Peralta and Jessica Walsh, each had a hand in identifying the key themes highlighted by the exhibit, and were tasked with drafting wall-text descriptions of Conti’s art, style and legacy.

“This is what art historians do,” Ronald Onorato, professor for the course and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, said. “They put together exhibitions and do the research for wall-text and articles. The best part of this is that we had a number of works, real objects, for them to work with. The murals at Edwards Auditorium gave us the impetus to do this.”

These murals, located above and around the doors inside the lobby of Edwards Auditorium, were painted by Conti in the 1930s, then covered up and forgotten about for more than half a decade. It wasn’t until 2010, when Edwards Hall was undergoing renovations, that the murals were rediscovered.

“They were re-doing the lobby at Edwards [hall], and one of the workmen was taking down a piece of plaster-board, and saw these paintings through the hole,” Onorato explained. “They didn’t know what it was; they just knew that it was painted and it looked like human figures. The contractors were great; they took the rest of the wall down very carefully.”

The murals were sent to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where they were restored during the course of the year. Of the 6 total murals that were discovered in Edwards Hall, only 3 were able to be saved and restored. Fragments of the other murals can be seen in the gallery. The other pieces in the gallery are mostly pen and ink on paper, which were graciously donated to the university by a couple, who reside in Providence, a number of years ago.

“A couple from Providence had a collection of Conti drawings in their house that they didn’t know what to do with,” Onorato explained. “Their parents had supported and were patrons of Conti, so they asked if we would be interested in them. All of these framed pieces that are done on paper are from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Drucker.”

The students who put together the exhibition each chose a theme represented by the artworks, and wrote wall-text descriptions on these themes which were all displayed alongside the art.

“We really wanted to find out more information about Conti; it was like a mad hunt to find images that we could use to accompany the rest of the art,” Debra Marble, one of the students, said. “Everything was on microfilm and in newspapers. We divided his life up into his education, his teachings, and his travel. When we finished with the writings, we categorized the pieces by style and by time frame. We wanted to have a starting point and have it go onward.”

“We found everything that we wanted to find,” URI student Elisabeth Buell said.

“There are a lot of things we found that we couldn’t even put up because they are so different from the styles showcased here,” Astrid Peralta, URI student, said.

In addition to being a prolific and diverse artist, Conti was an art teacher for many years in Providence. Mr. Robert Schact, one of Conti’s students who studied with Conti beginning in the early 1940s during the height of World War II, was present at the reception. Schact told of his times with Conti, and the fond memories of the time he had.

“I was a kid, so I don’t really know how to say what kind of teacher he was,” Schact said. “But he was a kind man, and he did a wonderful job of getting us excited about art and expression.”

Schact, a long-time lover of art, seemed very glad to be viewing these pieces and pictures of his former teacher.

The exhibit will be up until Friday, located in room A100 of the Fine Arts Center. For more information about the Art and Art History departments, you can visit http://web.uri.edu/art/.