Thursday, March 27, noon
Museum of Art | Sinnott Family – Bank of Utica Auditorium
Artist Bio
Ken Marchione is a professor of drawing and painting and chair of Academic Affairs at Pratt Munson College of Art and Design. He has been a working artist for 40 years, lives in the Utica, N.Y., region, and exhibits his work throughout the northeast. He grew up in Massillon, Ohio, and attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, earning his BFA. Marchione later attended Yale University to earn his MFA. Prior to working at Pratt Munson, he served as director of art for the Stamford Museum in Stamford, Conn. In that role, Marchione organized numerous exhibitions over a six-year period and was featured in The New York Times article "What Are We Going to Put on the Gallery's Wall?" Five Curators of Contemporary Art Make the Case for Their Choices" by William Zimmer.
Artist Statement
Witnessing the Watchers and Where Stories Begin
In the spring of 2023, while on sabbatical, I ventured on my first journey off the North American continent and embarked on a two-and-a-half-month exploration of Europe. Visiting nine countries, 16 cities, and 66 museums and spending hundreds of miles of aimless walking, the time was an encompassing experience that transcribed virtual knowledge of places and people to direct 360-degree sights, sounds, and smells from which I fed on from the earliest light of the morning until I could no longer walk or indulge in at night.
Of the myriad observations I experienced, one aspect of the trip sticks with me as a focus in my studio since my return. I had expected and was not surprised to see the many magnificent displays of architecture that allude to periods of opulence and fortune in these great cities. Many, or at least the ones that caught my attention, ornamented and accessorized with figurative sculptures jutting out, overhanging, suspending, or bracing every corner, crevice, doorway, and façade. As I acclimated to the rich visuals, my attention and thought processes concentrated predominantly to these figurative adornments as I traversed from city to city. Soon I was able to discern those that were merely repetitive castings, although still splendid in their quality, that served as balcony supports or doorway decor, from those that served a respective purpose, to celebrate heroes or heroines, mythological protectors, or moral guides, and were made specifically for that individual building. And as I looked at them, I realized that they were there for me, as my guardians, heroes, storytellers of history, humor, horror, and nightmares, humanizing the buildings around me.
Conversely, as I reflected on aspects of our contemporary culture, cameras are monitoring unceasingly from similar vantage points of these stewarding sculptures, and as some of those cameras benignly record our movements only to erase the data after a few days, others are connected to sporadically distracted attendants, who may or may not follow our existence without discourse. They take, but do not give back.
The work I have started since my return is focused on the idea of public art and the concept of who or what is a “witness.” As an artist, I am perpetually reminded of my role as an observer and my role to interpret what I see or think. I reflect on these architectural sculptures, and murals in some instances, as our constant witnesses, and because I often know who or what they represent, I have a sense of how they see or judge me. At the same time, I cannot disregard the anonymous witness behind the cameras perched around various porticoes that are blank pages allowing others to write the narrative.
About the Elizabeth Lemieux Faculty Lecture Series
Pratt Munson faculty are masters of their craft and practicing artists. One way faculty artists’ achievements are highlighted is the annual Elizabeth Lemieux Faculty Lecture, given by a select member of the faculty to present their work in the field and creative research to students and the general public. The lecture is named for its donor, who established the fund in 2013.
