Videos - Ippolito Gift
Robert A. Kennedy, President,
University of Maine: "Jon has also overwhelmed us with his generosity by
donating eight of his father's paintings to the museum, where they'll
become part of our permanent collection. We're most proud and pleased
that Jon and his family have seen fit to make this donation. It's valued
at over $350,000. And we look forward to, sometime in the very near
future, making it available, having it on display. I've only seen
pictures of Angelo's art, and it's stunning, and I think it will make a
tremendous addition to the University of Maine Museum of Art."
Jon Ippolito, Professor of New Media, University of Maine: "They are
big, and they're oil on canvas. A lot of the museum collection right now
is works on paper. These will be a dramatic new presence in the
collection. They'll take up more room in the storage hall, but they're
also large-scale, ambitious, bold, abstract, colorful paintings.
Painterly gestures, in some ways, departure from what you may have
accepted as the traditional "Maine art scene." On the other hand, my
father, having grown up in an essentially medieval town in Italy on the
mountains near the sea, always had a very close connection to
landscape--and a particular kind of landscape, which he always tried to
get back to. Namely, the mountains and ocean together. Well, you've got
that here in Maine, so in some ways he's getting back to his home, and I
think that even though the works are non-representational, you still
feel very much the feeling of the sky, the mountains, and the sea--the
landscape comes forth, even though it's not in as direct a way as some
of the Maine coast sea painters."
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