JOHN RUGGIERI, DIRECTOR

Artists get out of the studio and into children's lives on this website of the artistic goings-on of Abstraction Made Elementary. AME is a charitable nonprofit organization that brings together children ages 7-12, accomplished contemporary artists, and their shared community to participate in advanced art forms.


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ABOUT THE ARTIST

John Ruggieri (AME founder and director) holds a B.A. in painting and philosophy from Hampshire College and attended Rhode Island School of Design from 1984-1987. He has written about and studied philosophy of religion, including modern Christian thought, Buddhist poetry, and African philosophy. The artist is an award-winning painter and accomplished graphic designer, curator, and art critic. Ruggieri won first prize, the Jean and Kahlil Gibran Award for Excellence, awarded by guest juror Carl Belz, Director of the Rose Art Museum, in "Manifest '97," a biennial survey of contemporary art at the Copley Society. He has created large-scale, site-specific light installations at Providence, RI, landmarks, including Point Street Bridge and the Roger Williams Memorial at Prospect Park, and the ART@NIGHT public art event at the First Church in Jamaica Plain, Unitarian Univeralist. His travels have taken him to the study of the relationship between art and sacred space in the United States, France, Italy, and Mexico. He served on the committee to create new Visual Art curriculum standards in Boston Public Schools in 1997. He established the first AME program at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum in 1994. His drawings are presently shown as part of the Boston Drawing Project at the Bernard Toale Gallery and at LFL Gallery in New York. His drawings will be shown in the summer 2002 exhibition "Making a Mark" at the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA.


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