CARLO PITTORE (1943-2005) was an accomplished and passionate maker. He was a prolific painter, a community activist, and an internationally renowned mail artist who lived and worked in New York City, Southern Italy, and Bowdoinham, Maine.

As a pioneer of the mail art movement in the 1970s, he contributed work to over 1,000 mail art exhibitions and corresponded with such mail art luminaries as Buster Cleveland and Ray Johnson. Carlo was influential in the Maine and New York art communities of the 1970s and 80s, founding Maine’s first statewide artist membership organization, the Union of Maine Visual Artists, and opening one of the first independent art galleries in the East Village, La Galleria dell’Occhio. During this period, Carlo began to experiment in film, theater, and spoken word performance, and participated in international performance art events in New York and Europe. Pittore spent the last 30+ years of his life heavily invested in painting - mostly portraits and nudes. Friends, students, and colleagues featured prominently in his paintings, and his subjects included such figures as street artist Keith Haring and performance artist Bern Porter. 

Carlo was trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1963-66 and subsequently studied at the Portland School of Art in Maine and the Chelsea College of Art in London. The artist, born Charles Stanley, changed his name to Carlo Pittore (Charles the Painter) while residing in Italy in the early 1970s, where he practiced figurative art in Monticello and at the Academia di Belle Arte in Rome. As a recipient of the 1977-78 Max Beckman Scholarship in Advanced Painting, Carlo continued his studies under the tutelage of American modernist Alice Neel at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York. Following this, he worked for two years as an artist and teacher at the New York Cultural Foundation. In 1987 he established The Academy of Carlo Pittore in Bowdoinham, Maine, where his passion for painting and teaching inspired dozens of emerging artists. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by the Maine College of Art in 2005.

In 2017, the Carlo Pittore Foundation dissolved, donating Carlo’s entire collection of artwork and ephemera to International Artists Manifest, which became the organization’s inaugural collection. To schedule a visit, please contact us!

CARLO PITTORE: I Am Still Performing
EXHIBITION IMAGES

CARLO PITTORE, I Am Still Performing
April 8th - May 14th, 2023
Presented in collaboration with SARAH BOUCHARD GALLERY

On Saturday, April 8th, 2023, the Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine opened the first Carlo Pittore exhibition in over a decade. This show featured pivotal works from the artist’s prolific career – including paintings, drawings, collage, mail art, and video.

I Am Still Performing explored Pittore’s complex body of work through the lens of life-and-art-as-performance. The exhibition highlighted the ways Pittore used his image and identity as media, with an emphasis on the more obsessive aspects of his work.  

Some would argue Pittore’s entire life was a performance. This exhibition offered a rare opportunity to view some of Pittore’s most iconic works alongside lesser-known gems. For a complete list of available works, please CONTACT the gallery.

CARLO PITTORE: I AM STILL PERFORMING
CURATORIAL STATEMENT

The most significant piece of work Carlo Pittore created during his lifetime was Carlo Pittore, and he was a piece of work.

Born Charles Stanley, ‘Carlo Pittore’ was a fabricated identity created by a young Jewish kid from Long Island. During a pivotal stay in Montecielo, Italy, the local kids followed Charles shouting ‘Carlo, Pittore!’ - ‘Carlo, the painter’ - and for Charles, that moniker stuck. Much like a vacationer who never wants to return home, Charles took on an identity that allowed him to be forever outside of himself. He often presented as a bit of a buffoon - loud, over-the-top. His art became the art of self-promotion, his likeness plastered in and on everything he could dream up - from paintings to drawings to postcards to video to masks to magazines - all in an effort to understand himself and in so doing, to encourage others to do the same.

Carlo loved food and flesh and wine and opera. He was passionate. What most didn’t see was the depth of self-reflection, the extreme self-doubt. The demons. The inner battle with mild addictions – cigarettes, weed, alcohol – none of which overcame him. He was a very human being who struggled to find connection and longed for adoration. Carlo was finding his way at a time when being a gay Jewish man from Long Island wasn’t an easy option. The pressures and constraints he put on himself were astounding.

The one arena in which Carlo felt truly free was in front of the canvas. In painting, he found his most enduring love. To Carlo, life was painting. Painting was life.

I never met Carlo. I became involved with his work after he passed. For the past fifteen years, I’ve immersed myself in everything he created. One of his most significant works is the mural, La Buffonera - Carlo’s meditation on the life of the artist. Nearly every character under the Big Tent is the same person – the boxer, Steve Nusser. To Carlo, an artist had to be everyone - do everything - to realize his goals. The boxer also signified how he often felt about being an artist - the bruises and blood and sweat. The total exhaustion. But also the idea of becoming a champion. A contender.

Carlo’s self-portraits are some of his strongest works, which makes perfect sense. His identity was his medium. He was consistently playing and defining what it meant to be an artist – based primarily on his experience and adoration for the old Italian Masters, filtered through the time of the xerox machine and multiples and the International Mail Art Network.

The strength of Carlo’s work can be difficult to convey. Some pieces feel more like performance relics than fully realized artworks. They are evidence of an attempt at connection - residue from the effort of creating the entity ‘Carlo Pittore’ – one of the most significant artistic entities the state of Maine has ever seen.

Sarah Bouchard, 2023

A SELECTION OF PAINTINGS

A VIDEO COMPILATION

An unedited version was originally screened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

AUDIO PIECES

MAIL ART POSTCARDS (UNEMBELLISHED)

If you would like to purchase a set of authentic Carlo Pittore postcards, please contact us.

SELECTED WORKS ON PAPER

To learn more about anything you see here, please drop us a line. Select artworks are available for purchase, with proceeds going directly to the ongoing care, preservation and promotion of Carlo Pittore’s artwork and legacy.