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UMMA - Ippolito Gift

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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."