Rosellina Avoscan

The news media was full of harrowing stories of refugees from the Middle East and Africa making dangerous sea crossings to Europe when I began working in 2017 on a Lenten art show with works from my collection on the theme of Exodus: Journeys of Liberation. There were pieces in plenty to be found of the Children of Israel crossing the Red Sea, but I wanted to include several images on this new mass migration, illustrating how such journeys to a modern-day Promised Land not only entailed great personal danger for the would-be immigrants but also the risk of dehumanization and outright rejection at their final destination.

I found what I needed surprisingly close to home in the solo exhibition, Am I Us or Them?, by Italian Artist Rosellina Avoscan at nearby Ohio Wesleyan University. Devoted to the plight of refugees, the show included a bust of the Virgin Mary entangled in barbed wire, an installation of almost 500 glazed figurines of drowned children, and Exodus, the appropriately named panel painting I acquired for my show. A tightly squeezed line of faceless refugees without beginning or end inches across a non-descript stretch of earth and sky. The humanity of the anonymous group is conveyed by the way each asylum-seeker holds on to the person ahead of them, fearful of losing their place in line.

Avoscan knows from experience what she calls “the loneliness of not belonging to anybody or anywhere.” At 14, she ran away from an abusive home in Como, Italy, to live on the streets, an experience so harrowing she attempted suicide. Avoscan joined a commune of Italian social activists, painted signs and harvested melons in Crete, waited on tables in Berlin, and settled in London, where, as a single mother, she supported her daughter as a house cleaner. She was able to enroll at the Chelsea College of Arts and work as an art instructor. After a time in the American Midwest, Avoscan is now back in Italy and considers concern for the homeless an integral part of her art.

The Dreaming series of panel paintings in the collection, also featured in the 2017 art show, was inspired by photos taken a year earlier of refugees sleeping in safety, rescued while trying to cross from Libya to Italy by boat. Avoscan challenges us to look beyond the striking color compositions of the crowd scenes and directly engage with the weeping woman in the plastic rain hood and the brooding girl pressed against a backpack in the lower right and upper left of panel I or the two  sleeping men in red with arms crossed on their chests in panel III. Failing to see the humanity of the figures objectifies them into the shrouded shapes of the final painting in the cycle, as disposable as plastic trash bags.

Avoscan’s advocacy art takes many shapes and formats. A glazed ceramic piece resembling a street altar shows a homeless mother and two children resting with their bundled possessions in an alcove. The back of the sculpture is printed with photos of other families in flight. The artist has also created numerous modern-day Madonnas modeled on refugees. In the acrylic on panel painting, 2019 Years Later, the gold traditionally found in holy images of the Virgin and the Baby Jesus colors a Mylar thermal blanket given to a Syrian mother and child after their sea journey in search of a safe haven.

 Avoscan hopes her images will arouse  the conscience of viewers to the suffering of millions of our displaced global neighbors.  Her art has been displayed at Italy’s refugee center on the isle of Lampedusa, a onetime reception point for immigrants making the Mediterranean Sea crossing, and she has translated at meetings of international students with survivors of the perilous passage. Says Avoscan: “I have known hunger, filth, and the bone-chilling cold of body and soul, when you feel unnoticed and unwanted. I know what it means to quietly dream of the better life you think you deserve. I’m thankful to those people who helped me and showed me love. I want to be like them.”