By Dr. Marianne Berardi

New York artist Antonio Petracca’s most recent body of work, a meditation on the subject of ethnic bigotry collectively titled in this exhibition Identity Theft, was born of ashes — first from those of post 9/11 New York and subsequently from a visit to the ancient Southern Italian city of Pompeii, an ash-covered casualty of Mount Vesuvius’ cataclysmic eruption in 79 AD which killed 2,000 people, roughly 1,000 fewer than the number who perished in the 9/11 bombings.

Less than a year ago, in the summer of 2005, Antonio Petracca and his wife Kim visited Pompeii on the way south to Sicily—a journey aimed at locating the birthplace of his father Emanuel who emigrated from Palermo to the United States as a five-year-old boy on March 17, 1904. The impetus for the artist’s trip, however, ultimately had its origins in the events stemming from the World Trade Center bombings of 2001. Before the disaster, Petracca had never had any particular interest in rummaging around Southern Italy for vestiges of his heritage—either concrete or spiritual. Even in his art there was no inkling of such an interest. Petracca’s paintings focused on poetic slices of architectural space and form, often presenting urban views glimpsed from implied urban structures on elegantly crafted canvas-over-wood supports. These he constructed to suggest beams, cornices, and junctures of walls suggesting rooms in which we spend our lives. But after watching the twin towers collapse from the window of his Battery Park apartment, he, along with other New Yorkers who were close at hand, found himself physically and psychologically displaced. He lived in a hotel for two months, and was literally forced to view the course of response to the disaster from a new vantage point. For someone so keenly attuned to spatial concerns, the different viewpoint brought about a profound shift in what he wanted to express as an artist.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, people were at their best. They exerted boundless energy and compassion in a heroic effort to find the dead, mourn them, and rebuild. Inspired by the collective effort, Petracca’s first artistic impulse was to paint a response to the disaster, using the imagery of the disaster itself. It was very direct. The towers figured prominently on the artist’s long canvas-covered beams both as intact structures, their tops blinking against the sky, and as the torqued and mangled skeletons they became after the bombings. Petracca also threw his hat into competition for the 9/11 memorial project, which sought to deal with the great gaping hole in the middle of his world.

Over time, however, the artist saw how the powerful unity of people became tired, splintered and profoundly frustrated. Looking desperately for someone to blame, people around him lost their positive energy, and attitudes devolved into indiscriminate ethnic hatred and intolerance. “There was an intense fear of Muslims,” the artist recalls. “Anyone with a Middle Eastern accent was suspect. It was horrible. The result was a climate of fear and misunderstanding.” The artist came to realize that this human fallout, occurring long after the dust had settled, was an insidious repercussion of the tragedy.

Thinking about it day after day led him to examine for the first time the extent to which his own Southern Italian heritage had been mangled by stereotyping in this country—stereotyping he had encountered throughout his life, but had never confronted before either personally or in his art. After he saw it, he couldn’t un-see it, in the same way that one responds to those figure-ground optical puzzles. First you see only the two black profiles facing one another but not the white vase formed in the space between them. Then once you see the vase, you see it as well as the profiles forever. You see both. After recognizing the features of the Southern Italian American caricatures we have created in the United States—characters we fear to love and love to fear—Petracca began encountering them everywhere, overt and implied. Here they are, spread all over the media, in film, in politics, in newspapers and magazines, on the internet and on television—most notably in the stunning popularity of the recent Sopranos series which HBO advertises on huge billboards across the country: the dumb, uneducated, Mafioso thugs, molls and clueless wives, culturally unsophisticated, superficial, self-absorbed, and frighteningly volatile. One minute they are shamelessly weeping over the tender thought of a long-deceased mother and the next are plugging some unfortunate member of a rival famiglia with more ammunition than remotely necessary.