About Artist Michael Frassinelli

About the artist:

Artist Michael Frassinelli was born in Hartford, CT in 1964. He studied art at the University of Connecticut, with a focus on design and sculpture, receiving his BFA in 1986. He has been a prop maker, set designer, mask-maker, free-lance artist and ship’s carpenter, and has worked with a variety of people, from Berkeley California's Shotgun Players and The San Francisco Ballet and to Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, a German theater production company, and a Balinese mask-carver. Although he has worked in a variety of art mediums over the last 40 years his recent work from the Legend of the Pianistas series which includes sculpture made entirely out of piano parts and photorealistic cabinets of curiosity. His work has been shown previously in California and Connecticut, and most recently at the Butler Institute of American Art, in Youngstown, Ohio (winner of the 2024 Fred Staloff painting Award) as well as various galleries around the Boston area. He has had artist residencies Chalk Hill Residency in California, Cowhouse Studios in Ireland, and LaMachina di San Cresci outside of Florence, Italy (in 2022) as well as the Golden Foundation in New Berlin, NY (in 2019) and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. He was an Artist-in-Residence at Appalachian State University in January of 2011, performing and creating a large-scale installation based on the “Legend of the Pianista” series. He was listed in the MetroWest Daily News’ “Year in Review” issue as one of the “10 Best in Arts and Entertainment for 2008.” In 2011 two figurative pieces and a large dwelling from the Pianista series were purchased by the Ripley’s Believe it Or Not Museum in Orlando, Florida. Since 2002, Frassinelli has taught at the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he is Chair of the Visual Arts Department and Director of the Dana Hall Art Gallery. He lives in Holliston, MA in an old farmhouse with his wife and twins.

About the work:

My work has changed in style and substance over the years to include a variety of materials, methods, and media. What remains in all is an interest in the substance and meaning of objects and materials, storytelling, and often an underlying sense of humor.

My work from the past 20 years features sculptures and installations made from old piano parts. While making these objects originally, a story emerged of a fictional culture known as the Pianistas. In the gallery setting, the objects function as artifacts from this lost culture, which used piano parts for all their material needs, creating everything from tools, ceremonial objects and masks, costumes, and musical instruments, to large-scale structures and weapons, among other things. Catalog texts and other writings by fictional art historians and anthropologists debate and analyze the original purpose, symbolism, and spiritual meaning of these objects. The most recent additions to the series are large, trompé l’oeil-style paintings of cabinets of curiosities based on actual built cabinets full of piano objects.

The series is collectively known as The Legend of the Pianistas, and the work is displayed as a natural history museum exhibit, complete with text panels, archival photographs, video, sound installation, a museum catalog, documentary film and a variety of other ephemera. It has also occasionally included fictional lecture, live music and dance performance. It plays with the idea of how history is created, how cultures are often misrepresented in museums and in scholarly writing by so-called experts, and how images and objects fall victim to cultural appropriation. A parallel narrative reveals that the whole body of artifacts and the legend itself was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a museum docent / folk artist named Alfonzo Veneto from the Chicago Field Museum at the turn of the century.

Info

michaelfrassinelli.artist@gmail.com

www.michaelfrassinelli.com

All images are by Michael Frassinelli unless otherwise noted