Sharing his talent: Family donates thousands of artist’s abstract pieces to the Altoona museum
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Through his own works of art, James Mascitelli regularly paid homage to the great abstract expressionists of the 1960s, like Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell. Now, the late Altoona artist is receiving his own due in an exhibition at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Altoona, where 30 of his abstract works are now on display.
They are among more than 2,000 pieces of his art that Mascitelli's family donated to the museum after the artist died in 2016 at the age of 66. "James Mascitelli: R(ock) I(n) P(eace)" is on view through May 12 and is his second exhibition at the museum; his first was in 2005.
"I just sat down and thought about it -- What would Jim want?" said his brother, Joe Mascitelli. "He always talked about the museum, the association they had. He didn't have anything in writing, but I think he would have liked for (his works) to be displayed and shared with other galleries."
Coordinator Barbara Hollander said SAMA already has "made a sizeable donation" of Mascitelli's works to Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, where the artist taught for a time. Other local universities will receive some of his works, as well, as SAMA seeks to "spread the wealth," she said. Besides MAC, Mascitelli also taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he received one master's degree, and Penn State University, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art.
"I'm glad she has them," Joe Mascitelli said. "I think she cares about them as much as I do."
Hollander said she first saw Mascitelli's paintings at his home studio about a dozen years ago and admired his use of a "bold palette and powerful imagery."
"I immediately booked him for an exhibition," she said. "I was intrigued by his prominent use of shape and design that created a new sense of the word abstract. Jim's technical mastery of subject is demonstrated by his hundreds of preliminary sketches and drawings of his chosen subject."
Hollander said his work has received national and international recognition, including an exhibition at the Viridian Artists Gallery in New York City. It also has been displayed at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State and with the Mount Aloysius Art Alliance. It has been recognized by the directors of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Fogg Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum, among other institutions, she added.
In an interview with the Mirror in 2005 during his first exhibition at SAMA-Altoona, James Mascitelli said that his love for art began with a gift from his parents a half-century earlier.
"My parents gave me a paint by numbers set, but then they said I was too young and took it away," he said. "I found it and pleaded with them to let me paint it. Then when I was 9, my parents put me in an arts class for the gifted in Blair County. It was there that I learned art is spiritual and all art isn't academic. I've been doing it ever since."
Joe Mascitelli said his older brother "was always, always drawing something, painting something or coloring something or penciling something," and he showed a talent not inherited by the brother.
"Jim was the artist; he got all that talent," the younger brother said. "He tried to help me," particularly on regular weekend outings when the two would spend hours shooting photographs.
"I don't know how you get that talent; nobody does," he continued. "But that was just Jim. All through school, everybody knew that was what Jim did."
When he was 16, he moved to Wildwood, N.J., for the summer and got a job, according to his brother.
"At 16, without a job to go to, he goes to the beach, gets a job and finds somebody to share an apartment with," Joe said. "When I was 16, I would have never had the courage to do that. That takes a special kind of confidence."
The artist graduated from Altoona Area High School in 1967; he never married.
Joe, who works in the technology industry in State College, said he often challenged his brother for sticking with his vocation when his artwork wasn't selling and he couldn't make a living.
"He'd say, 'That's not what it's all about,'" said Joe, who also came to realize how rare it is for even master artists to be recognized during their lifetime.
Joe had planned to keep one special piece of his brother's work that was created when the younger was in seventh grade and his parents had bought him a pine desk protected by a piece of glass.
"Jim said that needs to have a picture under it," Joe recalled. "He went to the basement where his watercolors were and drew for me a picture of two cowboys walking in the desert. … I came home from school and there it was under the glass."
It stayed there for decades in the family home until their mother, Alvera, moved into a nursing home after James died.
As Joe went to retrieve that early work, "it just crumbled," he said sadly.
Mirror Staff Writer Cherie Hicks is
at 949-7030.