Artist John D'Agostino

JOHN D'AGOSTINO

John D'Agostino is an artist based in New York. His practice rescues and re-purposes lost, unwanted or forgotten materials, generating intriguing contemporary implications by re-inventing historical artifacts scarred by the past, from Tiffany stained glass discarded in the Great Depression, to 19th century cabinet cards, to the pixelated remains of cyberspace. Using the medium of photography as a kind of universal solvent to remediate and mix mediums together, he deftly blends multiple fragments from painting, glass, or vintage photography into collages & photomontages of unexpected provocation, collision and redemption. John was recognized as one of "The Ten Most Exciting Photographers" at the Phoenix Art Museum, and on Lindsay Pollock's Art Market Views, Editor-in-Chief of Art in America. His work has been collected or recognized by more than 10 different museums across the country, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, WI, The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, Corning Museum of Glass, NY, and the Getty Research Institute, CA, among others.



BIOGRAPHY



John grew up amongst one of the singular art collections of the 20th century, including paintings, sculptures, rugs & stained glass windows of surpassing quality acquired by his grandfather, collector Vito D’Agostino, much of it during The Great Depression, when many a masterpiece were simply considered out of fashion, and thrown into the trash. Blessed with a discriminating and unerring eye for the finest in art, Vito D'Agostino (1898-1968) emigrated to the United States via Ellis Island in 1908. A schoolteacher of great education, but modest wealth, Vito rescued many a treasure from the trash heap, including records, designs and scrapbooks now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the decades since, his collection has been exhibited or collected by numerous important institutions, including The Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Museum of Art, & Dallas Museum of Art, among many others. At auction, many of the works Vito acquired have eclipsed all previous records at Christie's, Sotheby's and elsewhere.		Deer Window, L.C. Tiffany, 1910.
Today, John D'Agostino creates new works of art from this historic collection, often photographing the Favrile glass his grandfather rescued during the liquidation of Tiffany Studios in 1933, in his one of a kind works on canvas. D'Agostino's work has been exhibited, collected or recognized by twelve different museums across the country, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Phoenix Art Museum, The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, Corning Museum of Glass and George Eastman House, among others. John's paper, The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of The Past Illustrate A Legacy of The Representation of Vision was published in Artforum’s Art&Education, his Monograph, *Empire of Glass, with the Griffin Museum of Photography. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Silvershotz: The Journal of Fine Art Photography, and on the cover of Glass Quarterly*.		"These moody, lyrical, imaginative, evocative, swirling, suggestive, exhilarating, and reverie-evoking photographs by John D'Agostino represent a fascinating act of retrieval, rediscovery, and re-articulation." - James Yood, Flights of Favrile. “Salvaging someone else’s throwaways is a New York City tradition. But to this day, few curbside discoveries can compete in beauty and utility with what Vito D’Agostino piled into his Model T almost 80 years ago.” - Michael Wilson, *Luminous Moods in Shards of Tiffany*