SilverStories: Parables of Memory and Dream

A biographic work of art by Micaela Amateau Amato.

Micaela Amateau Amato, also known as Michele Amateau, is a visual artist, curator, and writer. Growing up in New York, she gained recognition in the 1960s to 1990s in NYC, Chicago, and Los Angeles for her paintings, large scale cibachrome photographs, and life size cast-glass portrait heads that emerged from her ancient Iberian and Maghreb ancestry.

She has received several National Endowment for the Arts Awards and a Pollock Krasner Award, and illustrated the critically-acclaimed book, Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, written by her daughter and collaborator, Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff.

Amateau is distinguished professor emerita from Pennsylvania State University. She resides in Boalsburg, PA, with her husband, sculptor Don Schule.

“The dizzying reflectivity of Micaela Amateau Amato’s work is intended to throw viewers off balance, into the shifting time and space where the artist lives and which defines her political position. For all her aspirations to peace and balance, the kaleidoscopic frequency of Amato’s surfaces and assembled forms can be downright frenetic. In her search for a density that is never static, she inevitably seems on the edge of overload, pulling the work back from the brink by endowing it with lyrical complexity.” 

~ Lucy R. Lippard

“Amateau Amato’s work ushers us back to raw experience – ecstasy, despair, exhaustion, pain, dignity, persistence, a hybrid presence that verges on the visceral – a wisdom that feels like real, primal strength.”   ~ Leah Ollman

“Amateau Amato combines the Andalucian Arabic poetic concept of casida and the Catalan rauxa y seny…a balance of contradictions of austerity and fecundity that bears the naked shiver of emotion.”   

~ Dr. Robert Rosenblum

“Amateau Amato’s show was breathtaking. Paintings were absolutely luscious…Folding ribbons of color made for a remarkable way of transforming the long, gestural brushstroke into something more like the curling forms of a nautilus shell or shed skin of an insect.”   

~ Dr. Sarah K. Rich