Cheryl Capezzuti

Last updated

Cheryl Capezzuti (born 1969) is an American artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who specializes in giant puppets and sculptures made from dryer lint. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Capezzuti grew up in Hampton, Pennsylvania. [1] She originally studied architecture at Penn State University, but switched majors to integrative arts. She also earned a masters in art education at Penn State. [2]

Career and art work

Capezzuti is best known for her giant puppets and sculptures made from dryer lint.

Giant puppets

Giant Blue Bird Puppet by Cheryl Capezzuti Capezzuti Blue Bird Puppet (1).jpg
Giant Blue Bird Puppet by Cheryl Capezzuti

After graduation, Capezzuti was an assistant from puppeteer Sara Peattie of Boston, Massachusetts. After returning to Pittsburgh in 1996 she made a giant puppet for the Pittsburgh First Night parade in 1998. [1]

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2021, she formed a "Giant Puppet Dance Club" on YouTube. Puppets were sanitized and sent to people. The people then danced in them in their yards so other people passing by could see them. They also recorded themselves dancing in them and uploaded the videos to YouTube. [3]

Dryer lint sculptures

Bipedal, Heroic Trio dryer lint sculpture by Cheryl Capezzuti Bipedal, Heroic Trio Cheryl Capezzuti (1).jpg
Bipedal, Heroic Trio dryer lint sculpture by Cheryl Capezzuti

Capezzuti began exploring dryer link as a medium in 1994. [4] Between 2001 and 2004, she ran a community art project that came to be called the "National Lint Project". In the National Lint Project, she invited people from around the US to send her their dryer lint. Many also sent in notes about the objects of special importance they washed that produced the lint (e.g., a favorite baby blanket). Capezzuti then would form art objects from the lint, make a record of the objects, and then return the objects to the original lint donor. [2]

In 2004, she had an ongoing community arts project at the "Dud's 'N' Suds" in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh. In this project, she sculpted tiny angels and people from people's dryer lint. Her lint work also includes giant people.

Very often there is a story behind the lint used in a particular sculpture. Two large sculptures "Angel of Immunity" and "Angel of Shared Strength", for example, were made from sterile lint from a hospital laundry. [4]

Capezzuti is currently a master teacher at the University of Pittsburgh's Falk Laboratory School [1]

Personal life

Capezzuti is married with two children. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gates McFadden</span> American actress and choreographer

Cheryl Gates McFadden is an American actress and choreographer. She is usually credited as Cheryl McFadden when working as a choreographer and Gates McFadden when working as an actress. She played Dr. Beverly Crusher in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, its four subsequent films, the sequel series Star Trek: Picard, and Star Trek: Prodigy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josie Carey</span> American songwriter

Josephine Vicari Massucci Franz, known by the stage name Josie Carey, was a lyricist and a host of several children's television shows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garfield (Pittsburgh)</span> Place in Pennsylvania, United States

Garfield is a neighborhood in the East End of the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Garfield is bordered on the South by Bloomfield and Friendship, on the West by the Allegheny Cemetery, on the North by Stanton Heights, and on the East by East Liberty. Like many parts of Pittsburgh, Garfield is a fairly steep neighborhood, with north-south residential streets running at about a 20% incline from Penn Avenue at the bottom to Mossfield Street at the top. Garfield is divided into “the valley” and “the hilltop.”

The Electric Banana was a nightclub in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Beginning as a disco in the 1970s, it was a punk rock music venue from 1980 until 2000, and helped establish a place in alternative culture for the city of Pittsburgh.

Christine Borland is a Scottish artist. Born in Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland, Borland is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997 for her work From Life at Tramway, Glasgow. Borland works and lives in Kilcreggan, Argyll, as a BALTIC Professor at the BxNU Institute of Contemporary Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pittsburgh Cultural Trust</span>

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust (PCT) is an American, nonprofit, arts organization that was formed in 1984 to promote economic and cultural development in Downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The "Trust" has focused its work on a fourteen-square block section known as the Cultural District, which encompasses numerous entertainment and cultural venues, restaurants, and residential buildings.

The Cultural District is a fourteen-square-block area in Downtown Pittsburgh bordered by the Allegheny River on the north, Tenth Street on the east, Stanwix Street on the west, and Liberty Avenue on the south.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lili Lakich</span> American artist (born 1944)

Liliana Diane Lakich is an American artist, best known for her work in neon sculpture. As a child, she had been fascinated by neon advertising, and she built her career around illuminated art, with its special emotional power. Lakich has received many private and public art commissions, in one case assisting the city of Los Angeles in a street-lighting project. She also co-founded the Museum of Neon Art (MONA), the first specialist collection of art in electric media. Her sculptures have been featured in major publications on contemporary sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roxanne Swentzell</span> American sculptor

Roxanne Swentzell is a Santa Clara Tewa Native American sculptor, ceramic artist, Indigenous food activist, and gallerist. Her artworks are in major public collections and she has won numerous awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michelle Lopez</span>

Michelle Lopez is an American sculptor and installation artist, whose work incorporates divergent industrial materials to critique present day cultural phenomena. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lori Verderame</span> American art historian

Lori Ann Verderame, known professionally as Dr. Lori, is an American appraiser of antiques, collectibles, and fine art; she is also a television personality, public speaker, author, professor and museum curator and director. Verderame has been called “America's appraiser" and is "the Ph.D. antiques appraiser". She has been noted for her humorous, conversational, and educational style of appraisal on her road show events.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Senga Nengudi</span> African-American visual artist (born 1943)

Senga Nengudi is an African-American visual artist and curator. She is best known for her abstract sculptures that combine found objects and choreographed performance. She is part of a group of African-American avant-garde artists working in New York City and Los Angeles, from the 1960s and onward.

Moira Dryer (1957–1992) was a Canadian artist known for her abstract paintings on wood panel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl Lynn Allen</span> American lawyer (born 1947)

Cheryl Lynn Allen became the first African-American woman to be elected to the Pennsylvania Superior Court. A Pittsburgh native and former Pittsburgh public school teacher, Judge Allen is a graduate of Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth King (artist)</span> American artist

Elizabeth King is an American sculptor and writer known for movable figurative sculptures that she has employed in stop-frame animations. Her work combines exacting handcraft, elementary mechanics, and digital and electronic technologies, applied in sculptures of half or full figures, heads, arms and hands, or even simply eyes. She often equips figures with subtly illuminated eyes and visible and invisible mechanisms enabling the performance of anatomically correct simple operations, seemingly of their own volition. Writers have described her figures as "insistently nonhuman" yet "uncannily alive" in their ability to project self-awareness, intelligence, agency and emotion. They reflect her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and puppet, literature involving unnatural figures come to life, and human movement. Art in America critic Leah Ollman wrote that King's "highly articulated automatons invite us to consider how consciousness arises from physical being … she portrays her mechanical surrogates as convincingly self-aware, while we are left to ponder that age-old question: where exactly does the self reside?"

Cheryl Lee Henson is an American puppet builder and philanthropist who has served as the president of the Jim Henson Foundation since 1992. A supporter of puppetry arts and artists, she serves as a board member of The Jim Henson Company. She was honored in 2010 at the LaMama Gala, and in 2011, she won the New Victory Arts Award for her leadership in puppetry.

Tip Toland is an American ceramic artist and teacher who was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. She earned a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado and an MFA in Ceramics from Montana State University. Her works, which are figurative and often described as "hyper-real," are held by galleries and museums around the United States.

Sandy Kessler Kaminski is an American painter and mixed-media artist who is also known for her public art murals. She currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where her work can be found in many places throughout the city and the surrounding area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giant puppet</span> Type of large puppet

A giant puppet is a puppet which is tall enough to be easily visible to a street crowd while being manipulated by puppeteers, on the same level. It is therefore most suitable for processions, street theatre and performance art, although some large theatrical animations can be used for the same purpose. Giant puppets are usually articulated and made from a lightweight material. Some are manipulated by puppeteers using rods, strings, stilts, other mechanisms, or a combination of these. Giant puppets have been used worldwide for street entertainment, celebrations or other purposes from ancient times, and they continue in use and in development today. Of the traditional giant rod puppets, the Chinese dragon New Year puppet is "perhaps the most recognized form of the parade puppet". Of the most recent examples, Royal de Luxe of France has produced a notable set of giant string puppets.

Olive Nuhfer (1901-1996) was an American painter. She is best known for her New Deal era mural in the Westerville, Ohio Post Office.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Denise Bonura (May 31, 2023). "How Puppets For Pittsburgh Gives Kids a Creative Outlet to Build Confidence". Pittsburgh Magazine.
  2. 1 2 3 M. Thomas (December 28, 2018). "First Night puppet-meister Cheryl Capezzuti aimed to be architect". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
  3. Amanda Waltz (May 4, 2020). "Cheryl Capezzuti spreads joy through puppets with new social distance public art project". Pittsburgh City Paper.
  4. 1 2 Leslie Hoffman (January 22, 2003). "Exhibitions feature sculpture made from life's detritus". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. p. E3.