Micaela Amateau Amato

Micaela Amateau Amato’s mixed media works incorporate painting, photography, sculpture, (neon, cast glass, ceramic) and text. Often engaging forms of self-portraiture and nomadic identities in a dialogue with her Mediterranean ancestry from Iberia, Morocco, Turkey, and Rhodes, Amateau Amato’s work embodies a multiple self that is mediated by her personal and political engagement with diasporic history. The series “Dodecanese Apparitions” combines painted gouache anthropomorphic images seen through photographic transparencies and film negatives. Her current series, “All the land was sea,” uses detritus/wood/clay as reference to eco-suicide and our environmental state of emergency. “La’am = Yes/No Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle” includes examples from a dozen different series that symbolize a meeting of multiple tribes in dialogue and reconciliation. As cultural nomad, Micaela Amateau Amato is a Professor Emerita of Art and Women’s Studies at Penn State University. She illustrated the book Zazu Dreams Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, by Cara Judea Alhadeff.