Italian canvas: Santa Fe artist Eileen Olivieri returns to her family's roots

Santa Fe artist Eileen Olivieri is returning home to the Italy of her ancestors through a fresco.

An adjunct creative writing professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Olivieri has created a site-specific installation in Bienno, Italy, as part of her residency there.

Olivieri projected her installation “Returning” onto a 400-year-old deteriorating medieval fresco called “Path of Triumphs: Petrarca and Dante.” The project features her own drawings and photographs onto the walls in an ephemeral tapestry of human topography. It opens on Saturday, Oct. 5.

Italian canvas: Santa Fe artist Eileen Olivieri returns to her family's roots

“When they found it, it was buried beneath four layers of plaster,” Olivieri said of the fresco.

Olivieri first learned about and visited the area in 2022. She worked on the installation during her residency there last spring, creating a reimagined “canvas.”

The installation is personal. Olivieri’s grandfather emigrated from the Italy to the U.S. at the turn of the century when he was 13 years old. He never returned.

“His father put him on a ship,” she said.

It also honors her late mother, who died in 2023.

“I really wanted to draw on the fresco, but, obviously, they wouldn’t let me,” Olivieri said. “They will let me project art onto it. The walls of the gallery are this fresco.”

“Returning I” shows a portion of a fresco detail embellished with Olivieri’s mark-making in an ink-on-paper photo composite. “Returning II” features a she-wolf from Dante’s “Inferno.”

“There were three evil beasts,” Olivieri said. “The she-wolf represented greed, the lion violence, and the panther stood for lust, fraud and betrayal.

“That wolf was actually from another part of the fresco,” she continued. “There are faces on this fresco.”

The fresco gallery was originally the office of a medieval businessman, she added.

After the opening, Olivieri will travel to Rome, where she is working on another piece located in a dry lake basin through the American Academy of Rome. Once the third-largest lake in Italy, the Lake Fucino Basin spans 37 miles around. Olivieri will walk its circumference and create art.

Located in Abruzzo, the area dates to the pre-Christian Indigenous people called the Marsi before the Romans took over, she said. She plans to research the Angitia, the primary deity of the Marsi people.

“My grandfather was from that region,” she added.

Olivieri grew up in Oregon and earned her Master of Fine Arts at New Jersey’s Rutgers University. She moved to Santa Fe after 9/11, eventually becoming the gallery director of the Santa Fe Art Institute.

“I define myself as interdisciplinary,” she said.

Her master’s degree was in studio arts.

“I started in ceramics,” Olivieri said. “My dad got me on the wheel when I was very young — second grade. I just took to clay.”

Then she discovered photography in her 20s.

Her most recent projects have been guided by the question, “What does it mean to decolonize my art practice?” In 2023-2024, Olivieri received a faculty research grant from the American Indian College Fund to explore this question as an artist-in-residence at Borgo Degli Artisti in Bienno.