Monday, November 24, 2008

Howard Avenue Mansion To Become Italian Cultural Center

Photo by Robin George, The Staten Island Advance

Staten Island needs more people like Gina Biancardi-Rammairone. Ms. Biancardi-Rammairone and her husband, Luciano, purchased the glorious Great Gatsby-like mansion and surrounding land on Howard Avenue and plan to make it into an Italian Cultural Center. In a Staten Island Advance article (click on the headline above to read the full story) Ms. Biancardi-Rammairone states that she frequently drove by the mansion and always admired it. We here at Prodigal Borough can relate to that. Our three Staten Island favorite mansions are Kreischer Mansion, The Pavilion, and this Howard Avenue home. (The Pavilion is still available for sale and would also make a great cultural center or museum).

"We're not going to live here," explained Mrs. Rammairone, who grew up in The Bronx and holds a master's degree in business administration from New York University. "I want to turn it into a not-for-profit. I want it to be a place about Italian history and culture, art and fashion, with classes in cooking and wine tasting. Make it a tourist destination. My life-long passion has been to educate young people about the positive aspects of being Italian. Sometimes there seems to be a disconnect, with people identifying being Italian with 'The Sopranos.' That's a negative stereotype. My dream is a big dream, a grand vision, but I feel the Staten Island community will embrace it."


WE do embrace it. Bring it on.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

CITYTropics: Paintings by Mary Bullock


November 14 - December 19, 2008

Opening Friday, November 14, 6-10pm
Gallery Talk Sunday, November 16, 3-5pm

This exhibition is made possible (in part) by a Premier Grant from the Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island, with public funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.

SHOW Gallery Studio and Theater
156 Stuyvesant Place
Staten Island, NY 10301
across from Borough Hall and up the Borough Hall stairs from the Staten Island Ferry

Hours of Operation:
Tues–Sat 11 am–7 pm

718-524-0855

Also on exhibit (see the post below for more information):

HYPERBOLIC CROCHET CORAL REEF

BEYOND: PHOTOS BY MICHAEL BENSON

SEA EARTH SKY at SHOW


The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef: Sept. 27-Dec. 20, 2008
Coral reefs the world over are dying out at a rate faster than rainforests. In addition to global warming and pollutants, marine life is threatened by a tsunami of plastic that is flooding into our oceans. The handmade reefs on display here are a wooly testimony to the disappearing wonder of actual reefs that now engages women around the globe. The project also celebrates the strange hyperbolic geometry of the ocean realm, which is reflected in the crochet techniques.

This unique work consists of a collossal reef created by hundreds of artists from New York and another by artists from Chicago. The assembled work is continually growing and evolving since it moved to SHOW from the World Financial Center in Manhattan. Each of the hundreds of pieces is a work of beauty in itself created by a different artist. Their placement in this particular reef formation creates a spectacular riot of form and color that can be appreciated in awe from a distance, or approached to reveal more and different forms from a more microscopic view.

SHOW'S windows contain the Chicago Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, all by Chicago area artists, and the mind-boggling seascape of yarn and plastic inside is the New York Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, among whose 100+ creators are over 30 Staten Islanders. Unlike the dwindling coral reefs under the seas, the source of our food chain, the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is constantly growing. In displaying it we hope, as the artists did in creating it, to bring attention to the fact that as with all that strikes us in nature, its physical beauty is a call to its protection.

2008 is the International Year of the Reef.

Created by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, with hundreds of contributing artists.
Presented in association with the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Steinhardt School at NYU.


BEYOND: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes by Michael Benson: Sept. 27 – Dec. 20, 2008
Possibly the most expensive pictures ever created, and the most mind-expanding. Michael Benson has taken photographs of planets, their moons and other parts of our solar system shot by robots on spacecraft over an area of 3 billion miles, and created clear and spectacular images of vistas never seen by human eyes. Through complex digital manipulation, and in some cases, creation of mosaics from many smaller images, he shows us the fascinating corners of "space" that people have dreamed of seeing since they could look up. They turn out to be more spectacular than we could have imagined.


Sur Terre: Photos by Herve d'Eglise: Sept. 27 – Nov. 14, 2008
Swiss-born photographer HervĂ© d’Eglise, who lives in Belgium, has taken photographs of earth formations in Normandie that, in closeup, could be on other planets. "I’ve always loved traveling and finding myself in places that I imagine being the first to discover. Whether it’s a natural cave or an abandoned factory, no one has seen them before me! I shoot my photographs in this spirit." Though the photos are taken in well-travelled area of Europe, the unusual corners found and portrayed by d’Eglise are not discernible as France, or even Earth. Patterns of nature, in all their fascinating complexity and simplicity, are visible here on the land to anyone who will visit Normandie, or explore their backyard, and the resulting photographs look as exotic as if d'Eglise were, as he imagines, the first person ever to see them. The natural patterns under the seas of Earth's surviving coral reefs, are seen by those with the luxury of scuba diving in faraway seas, and are imagined in the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, and, as seen in Michael Benson’s images made with the help of a robot's eye, in many ways as “exotic” as scapes of other planets and in space.

SHOW Gallery Studio and Theater

156 Stuyvesant Place
Staten Island, NY 10301
across from Borough Hall and up the Borough Hall stairs from the Staten Island Ferry

Hours of Operation:
Tues–Sat 11 am–7 pm

718-524-0855