ITALO SCANGA; MADE ART 
BY RECYCLING FOUND OBJECTS

By Myrna Oliver
Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, July 31 2001

Italo Scanga, an innovative neo-Dadaist, neo-Expressionist and neo-Cubist 
multimedia artist who made sculptures of ordinary objects and created prints, 
glass and ceramic works, has died.(Friday from a heart attack.)  He was 69.(A 
sculptor and painter who fashioned many of his works from everyday items in a 
style that blended cubist and folk influences). 

Scanga, whose works were exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 
(1983), New York's Whitney (1972) and (is in the current collection of ) 
Museum of Modern Art , and galleries up and down the West Coast, died Friday 
of a heart attack at his studio home in La Jolla. Born in Lago, Italy, Scanga 
attributed his penchant for recycling things to the poverty of his childhood.

His sculptures included wooden animals, papier-mache vegetables, vases of cut 
flowers, rope, antique irons, shoes, shovels and musical instruments. He 
often scoured swap meets and thrift shops to collect items he could glue into 
his collage sculptures. "He was an alchemist when it came to transforming 
found objects into art," said Hugh Davies, director of the San Diego Museum 
of Contemporary Art. "He was a collagist equally at home sculpting or 
painting, and frequently combined both."

Scanga discussed his work with The Times in 1985, explaining: "I'm using a 
real guitar. Now Picasso, in his Cubist paintings, will paint the guitar 
because it's a symbol--of freedom, individual expression, whatever--whereas I 
just put a real guitar in the work and paint on it. . . . I go back to Cubism 
without hiding it. . . . People say you gotta hide the sources. I don't hide 
anything."

Scanga, who said his family discouraged his interest in art and hoped he 
would sell groceries, came to the United States in 1947 when he was 15.(Born 
in the small town of Lago in Calabria, Italy, he emigrated to the United 
States after World War II.) He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from 
Michigan State University after (working on the General Motors assembly line 
and) serving in the U.S. Army.

Although he created steadily, Scanga did not become a commercially successful 
artist until he was nearly 50. He supported his work by teaching--at the 
University of Wisconsin, the Rhode Island School of Design, Pennsylvania 
State University and the Tyler School of Art.

In 1976, UC San Diego lured him to California as a visiting professor and, by 
promising him a studio, hired him for its faculty permanently in 1978. The 
self-described gypsy teacher and artist had found a home.

Settling in California, he told The Times in 1988, changed his work, making 
it "very colorful, very joyous, happy work. It was about the good things in 
life, not about the horrible things. It wasn't always tragic, like my earlier 
work."

Successful with his art and his teaching, Scanga struggled with what he 
called the schizophrenia of pursuing both. "Great, great, great artists," he 
insisted, "were never teachers."

The artist's amazing range--he even decorated handkerchiefs--confounded fans 
and critics alike. He could, one wrote, "paint ceramic plates in a light, 
buoyant style, full of charm and color . . . assemble sculptures out of 
leather belts, metal machinery fragments and scavenged wood . . . paint and 
make prints . . . and illustrate poems on sheets of old liturgical music."

Another wrote: "Scanga tends to roam at will around the art history map, 
endearingly oblivious to boundary or rule. His work might be figurative one 
moment, only to wander off into abstraction in the next passage."

Scanga's painted ceramic plates, in particular, often incorporated the names 
and imagery of some of his favorite artists and composers--Picasso, Mozart 
and Copland--becoming in effect public fan letters.

The artist staged about 80 one-man shows and contributed pieces to more than 
225 group exhibitions across the United States and in Europe. Examples of his 
work were published in the Arts Yearbook of Contemporary Sculpture, Glass Art 
Mag, Art in America and other publications.

Scanga received several grants, including one from the National Endowment for 
the Arts.

For the last several years, Scanga lived in La Jolla with Thailand-born chef 
and cookbook author Su-Mei Yu. He is survived by her, five children from a 
previous marriage and four grandchildren.