Please join us for an artist’s talk and lunch with sculptor and visual artist, Marianne Lettieri, who will discusses how contemporary artists connect the spiritual and mundane through the use of everyday objects and artifacts.

Lettieri’s first career was in professional marketing; she acknowledged mid-life that she felt called to artmaking and established her second career creating pieces that feature used, found, natural, and recycled materials: her work has been featured in many communities, publications, and museums. Lettieri’s art demonstrates that materials have metaphoric powers. Even the most ordinary objects — an iron, a pin cushion, sawdust from a studio floor — can exude meaning beyond mere existence and utility. In art, they can invite one to pause, wonder, and reflect on the significance of human effort, memory, community, and place-making. How do artists use the ordinary to convey the extraordinary, even the holy? Lettieri’s presentation will prove enlightening.

(Above image: Marianne Lettieri is working on an art installation titled Cobalt, which is made of trees salvaged from a lake.)

Speaker

Marianne Lettieri is a visual artist whose work explores shifts in cultural values associated with everyday objects and historical artifacts. She is interested in the interconnectedness of people and communities through time and the shared human desire to remember.

She holds an MFA in Spatial Arts from San Jose State University and a BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from University of Florida. Her solo exhibitions include Arts Fort Worth (Fort Worth, TX), Museum of Quilts and Textiles (San Jose, CA), Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco, CA), Facebook Headquarters (Menlo Park, CA), and Doug Adams Gallery of the Badè Archaeology Museum (Berkeley, CA).

Numerous books and art journals have featured her work, including Placemaking and the Arts by Jennifer Allen Craft (IVP, 2018); Art-Making Collections & Obsessions by Lynne Perrella, Image Journal, SEEN Journal, Sand Hill Review, and Ruminate Magazine.

She has been awarded artist residencies from Rensing Center (Pickens, SC), Art for Change (New Delhi, India), Center for Arts and Religion Education (Berkeley, CA), and Cubberley Artist Studio Program (Palo Alto, CA). In 2017 SVCreates recognized her with an Artist Laureate Award for achievement in the arts and contribution to the cultural life of Silicon Valley. She currently lives in Granbury, Texas. Learn more at https://www.mariannelettieri.com.