Warren Artist Tom Culora Unveils Community Arts Project

Warren Artist Tom Culora Unveils Community Arts Project

This month’s ART Night in Bristol and Warren on September 27 will debut an exciting community art project that demonstrates how a whole can be greater than a sum.

More than 40 members of the East Bay Community and beyond joined ART Night featured artist Tom Culora in his studio to create “Allegory of Friendship” – a sculpture comprised of buoy-like objects, each individually painted in an autobiographical fashion.

“The finished piece is a metaphor of the diversity of the community and strength that results when individuals work closely together to form a whole that is greater than the sum,” Culora said. 

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Allegory of Friendship

The original design for Allegory of Friendship, executed in 2006, envisioned a series of buoy-like objects to be executed by a single artist as individual biographical reflections of family, friends and colleagues, Culora said. 

“With the opportunity that Art Night provided me to bring members of the community together to assist in executing the full-scale piece, the individual elements morphed from biographical to auto-biographical reflections of the participants."

The unexpected results necessitated an adjustment to how the piece was originally conceived to be displayed -- shifting to a more unitary and closely spaced final piece. “Whenever an artist collaborates, there is an understanding that they must give up a level of control,” Culora said. “The role of the artist is to work with the results to form the final work, and I am very pleased with what we’ve created.”

The final piece + more

The final piece will be on display at Culora's studio on ART Night on September 27th (from 5 to 9 p.m.), along with other examples of the artist's most recent work. Culora's most recent pieces have examined the psychology of posting personal video streams on the Internet with the reciprocal psychology of viewing these images. He then appropriates images through a highly selective process that results in large two-dimensional work painted on framed hardboard using traditional hand-made oils.

Tom Culora’s studio is located in Parker Mills, 2nd floor, Entrance “C” via Elm St., in Warren.

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