User:GetDaFacts/Paul D'Agostino

Paul D'Agostino (b. 1977) is an Italian-American artist, curator, writer, translator, and professor, living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. His mixed media and frequently language-based artworks have been featured in group exhibitions in Brooklyn (English Kills, Norte Maar, Storefront, Monumenta Art, Brooklyn Fireproof, CPR, Studio 10), New York (Leslie Heller, Bernarducci Meisel, Pocket Utopia, NYCAMS, The National Arts Club), Queens (Valentine, Small Black Door), Philadelphia (Pterodactyl, Slought) and Paris (FIAC Art Fair). His 2012 debut solo exhibition, Appearance Adrift in the Garden, at Norte Maar Gallery, Brooklyn, featured recent collage works and sets of serialized monoprints, and was accompanied by Bodies, Voids and a Tale of Seas, a limited edition chapbook of the artist’s original writings in five different languages -- German, Italian, French, Spanish and English. In 2013 the Manhattan Lower-Eastside gallery Pocket Utopia presented a solo exhibition of new paintings, drawings, sculptues and collages, titled Twilit Ensembles. An artist’s book was published for the occasion, Floor Translations, in collaboration with C. G. Boerner. The installation at Pocket Utopia was reviewed by The New York Times and The New Criterion with praise for the young artist and his work. During Brooklyn Open Studios 2007, D'Agostino hung a friend's artwork in his shared Bushwick loft on Moore Street, and opened the doors. After over 500 people came through his apartment for that event, he decided to become a curator. Since 2008, he has run Centotto (Italian for 108, his apartment number), one of the neighborhood’s more unusual galleries, out of his home, curating bi-monthly group shows in his living room. A rotating group of established and emerging artists base their contributions on a reading D’Agostino assigns. Unlike conventional galleries, none of the art exhibited is for sale by the gallery. D'Agostino has explained, "It gets more dialogue into an exhibit." He involves participating artists in reading, writing and discussion as well as presenting their artwork's visual components. "Language -- that is, words -- informs everything I do," D'Agostino has said. D'Agostino's Centatto was also included in Arts In Bushwick [AIB] arts festival, BETA Spaces, on November 7, 2009, in East Williamsburg, which focused on the talents of discriminating neighborhood curators.

Dubbed "The Renaissance Man of Brooklyn" [Panero, The New Criterion], Paul D'Agostino is also an accomplished writer, translator and scholar. He holds a PhD in Italian Literature and is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at CUNY Brooklyn College, where he also works in the Art Department as writing advisor to art history students. A polyglot, D’Agostino writes in and translates among a number of different languages, primarily Italian, German, French, Spanish and English. He is Assistant Editor of Journal of Italian Translation since 2008. , and regularly contributes art-related reviews and essays, as well as movie reviews, to The L Magazine's Art section and the magazine's blog "The Measure." His poems, translations, stories and essays have appeared in Birdsong, Juncture, Slice Literary Magazine, and La Fusta: Journal of Italian Literature and Culture,. His reviews have appeared in America Book Review. A limited edition chapbook Mostro / Monster, chapbook with drawings by Thomas Micchelli, was published 2012. D'Agostino is also co-founder of a blog devoted to art writing titled After Vasari.

Paul D’Agostino was born in 1977 in Hackettstown, New Jersey, and grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia. As an undergraduate he attended the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, receiving his B.A. in European Studies / Italian Language and Literature (double major), with honors and Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in May 1999. He did his graduate work at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, receiving his PhD in Italian Literature in October 2004.