BIO: Mark Guglielmo is a contemporary Artist born and raised in New York who lives and works in Western Massachusetts. At the intersection of current events, social history, and Western art, Guglielmo’s oeuvre is defined by a nuanced exploration of race, class, migration, and power through fragmented collage portraiture. Using sight, sound, and story, Guglielmo peels back the layers to get to the core of the human condition. His life-size figurative works synthesize mixed media, painting, and photography to examine themes of memory, identity, and belonging, most recently focused on the Italian American experience. Collage is central to his practice and the bridge between his art and music. For years, Guglielmo employed similar cut and paste techniques producing hip-hop when he’d sample, truncate, and reconfigure existing sounds into new compositions.
From a large blue-collar Italian American family, Guglielmo watched his beloved grandmother go back to school and become a painter in her 60s after raising 11 children with an eighth-grade education. Her home was a haven filled with light, art, family, food, and love. His artistic sensibilities were further cultivated by regular trips to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the explosion of hip-hop on the streets and airwaves of New York. Initially immersed in music, Guglielmo aka Vesuveo rapped with Eminem on their Top 10 hit “Green and Gold” (1998), shared the stage with KRS-One, Biz Markie, and Black Eyed Peas, and produced two dozen records, including “Forever and a Day” from Mystic’s Grammy-nominated Interscope Records debut (2001), and hundreds of instrumentals, which became the soundtrack to Pimp My Ride, Jersey Shore, Wimbledon, America’s Next Top Model, and many other shows.
