Isole: A Voyage Among My Dreams

on view September 18 2024 through June 22, 2025

Working in paint, pigment, assemblage, and sculpture, Cianne Fragione (b. 1952) explores the fluidity of motifs and memories of the sea, anchored in Italian poet Eugenio Montale’s work. Pulling from her experiences as a dancer, Fragione explores fragments, movement, and liminal boundaries through visual marks, colors, and spatial relationships.

Isole is contextualized in art history through the lasting impact and legacy of Abstract Expressionism, Funk, and the Figural movement practiced in the post–World War II San Francisco Bay Area. Fragione’s mentors and teachers—artists Jay DeFeo, Frank Lobdell, and Manuel Neri,—demonstrated a visceral, multimedia, and universal interest in the human condition that sought to embrace the ordinary and reimagine art as experience. The impact of these artists is explored in the group exhibition Visceral Processes (on view fall 2024).

About the Artist

Cianne Fragione

Influenced by her Italian heritage, Cianne Fragione (b. 1952, United States) draws on personal and cultural experience during her creative process. She received her MFA (1987) in Painting/Mixed-Media at John F. Kennedy University Fiberworks Center for the Arts in Berkeley, California. Over five decades, she has developed work that crosses boundaries between abstract painting and sculpture, navigating a wide range of artistic mediums. In addition to the exhibition at Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art (SMCMoA), her work has been shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions. This includes the traveling exhibition, Pocket Full of Promise, at Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery, Coker College, Hartsville, South Carolina, and Anne Wright Wilson Gallery, Georgetown College, Kentucky. Other showcases have taken place at the Wiregrass Museum Biennial 24, Dothan, Alabama.; Arts-In-Embassies, Geneva, Switzerland; Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York; American University Museum, Washington, DC.; John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY, New York; Associazione di Museo D’Arte Contemporaneo Italiano, Catanzaro, Italy; a ten-year retrospective at Harmony Hall Regional Center, Washington, Maryland; the University of Scranton Art Museum, Scranton, Pennsylvania; The Textile Museum, Washington, DC; Art in Embassies, Sofia, Bulgaria, and Vilnius, Lithuania; Elizabeth Foundation, New York; Indianapolis Art Center, Indiana; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gallery, California; and Gallery Neptune & Brown, Washington, DC

Listen

Ensemble Assemblage brings forward Desiree Sturrock’s (SMCMoA student assistant) senior music capstone project. Saint Mary's artists—musicians Adanna Ogu (voice + guitar) and Sara Karkal (violin), alongside dancers Cadence Godwin, Lu Price, and Erica Hardy—will collaborate and perform through music and movement to respond to work from the exhibition Isole: A Voyage Among My Dreams.

Read

The exhibition Isole: A Voyage Among My Dreams is accompanied by a 68-page full-color catalogue with a complete illustrated checklist. The catalogue includes a director's introduction (Lauren MacDonald), an artist's essay (Cianne Fragione), a curator's essay (Britt Royer), and an MFA poem (han briner). Designed by Olivia Basic Please inquire for hardcopy. ISBN: 979-8-218-49259-5

Watch

Recorded on September 18, 2024 this artist and curator talk explores the work of Cianne Fragione in the current exhibition Isole: A Voyage Among My Dreams.