Angelo Musco (visual artist)

Angelo Musco (born 3 February 1973) is an Italian-born, New York City-based contemporary artist, known for photographic landscapes comprised of thousands of nude bodies.
==Early years==
Musco was born in Naples, Italy. Weighing more than 14 lbs (6.5 kilos) after an eleven month gestation caused significant birth complications and injury. These complications caused a tearing of the neck, arm, and shoulder nerves on his right side, an injury known as Erb's Palsy. Angelo spent the first ten years of his life in physical therapy, to strengthen and restore the injured side of his body.
 
Musco attended university at the Academia Di Belle Arti in Naples and took a small apartment in the historic part of the city, located near the Napoli Sotterranea. The mysticism, history and legends of this ancient city were an ongoing fascination for the young artist.
 
Musco spent two semesters as an exchange student in Granada, Spain. Limited funding pushed Musco to experiment with installations and different natural materials, such as fire, stones and the bodies of his colleagues, the latter of which would continue throughout his career. 
On December 8, 1997, Musco relocated to New York City. This date holds symbolic significance because it is the Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a public holiday in Italy.
==Work==
Recurring themes relate to Musco's difficult birth–such as confinement–and natural architectures or subterranean worlds. The human body is regularly utilized as a building block of his work, forming "living tapestries [that] take the form of innocuous and breathtaking natural forms like birds' nests, honeycombs, ant colonies, spiderwebs." 
 
In developing a massive archive from which to pull, Musco has held nude photo shoots in private and public spaces, involving volunteers, models, businesses and government institutions.
 
==Parthenogenesis==
While researching ideas of pre-birth in 2005, Musco realized New York and Naples were on the same latitude. Wanting to explore this coincidence, he conceived of an installation of short videos with a recurring script happening in eleven different cities around the world all on the 41st parallel. The number eleven relates to the number of months Musco's mother carried him in the womb. An exhaustive trip was mapped out from NYC to Viseu, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Naples, Italy; Istanbul, Turkey; Baku, Azerbaijan; Beijing, China; Aomori, Japan; Redwood National Park, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; and Lincoln, NE. Unique experiences included filming in the Forbidden City, at the Blue Mosque, and in the oilfields of Baku. The video debuted as a VIP collateral event at the Spring 2012 Armory Show in New York City.
 
==Tehom==
In 2010, Musco presented his first solo show in the United States at the Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago. The title piece–Tehom–presents an underwater world populated with thousands of nude bodies. Etymologically, tehom is derived from Hebrew, meaning “deep” or “abyss,” and references the biblical primordial waters of creation found in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. The artwork is made up of 22 individual panels measuring a total of 12' x 48'. 
This series includes Avernus, inspired by the legendary inland lake supposed by the Romans to be the entrance to Hades; Sibille, a triptych of eleven women that directly references not only Greek mythology, but Musco's numerological reference to his time in the womb; Progeny, an amorphous 8’ x 8’ bundle of limbs and torsos floating like a giant human egg; and Hadal, a vortex of two thousand bodies reminiscent of a floating nest or a school of fish. 
Hadal was presented at the 53rd Annual Venice Biennale in 2009, presented by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
==Cortex Series==
In the summer of 2010, following the Carrie Secrist Gallery exhibition, Musco began production on the Cortex Series–an intricately woven forest environment composed entirely of human bodies. The works in this series draw from the transportive tissues and vessels of plants and trees–Phloem and Xylem–and are named as such, respectively. Also included in this project are a series of nests, titled Ovum.
The complete Cortex Project was presented in a solo exhibition in Paris by Acte 2 Galerie, April 2013.
 
==Fendi Baguette Sculpture==
In 2013, Angelo Musco Studio was invited to create an interpretation of the iconic Fendi Baguette–an art commission project launched by Fendi in 1997. The Baguette sculpture by Angelo Musco is delicately encrusted with eggshells, which play off the artist's dialogue on the power of aggregation. This medium–literal containers of life, reconstituted as one covering, builds a singular image that is both powerful and beautiful, symbolizing purity, fertility, security and the origins of life.
==The Land of Scars==
In 2018, Musco initiated his most autobiographical work, choosing specific models who have left indelible marks on his life. This piece, entitled The Land of Scars, was the first in which the artist himself posed.
A full-length documentary film was produced in 2021 to elaborate upon Musco's process and incorporate participants' perspectives to the artist and The Land of Scars. This eponymous film premiered at the School of Visual Arts Theater in New York City on April 27, 2022. 
==Video==
* Angelo Musco: Conception Documentary trailer
* Ovum
* The Making of XYLEM
* Tehom, The Show
* Asbury Park Shoot
* The Making of Murmek
 
==Bibliography==
*Operaprena (Charta 2003)
*Instant Book: Italian Artists New York (Charta 2009)
*Unconditional Love (Buro 17, 2009)
 
==Citations==
==Sources==
* Time.com Lightbox, 2013
* ArtNet Interview 2013
* Huffington Post, 2012
* My Modern Met, 2012
* Frameweb, 2012
* Chicago Tribune July 2, 2010
* Huffington Post 2010
* New City Art, 2010
 
Category:American people
Category:1973 births
Category:American artists