Pop-Up Exhibition Francis Crisafio & Robert Raczka

Francis Crisafio’s artistic background began in painting and printmaking with undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Photography was a peripheral skill he used to augment his work but became a primary discipline in the early 1990s. He focuses on portraiture and long-term photographic projects.

Crisafio’s subject for this exhibition is “Samson’s Hair Repaired,” a long-standing documentation of a 95 year old Italian immigrant barber named Tony, who has been cutting hair for eight decades in the same barbershop located in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, PA. It documents the interaction Tony has with his customers, which include multi-generational families and people of all ages, classes and ethnicity, by recording Tony’s and his customer’s stories of the neighborhood they grew up in.

Crisafio’s artwork has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Hoyt Institute of Fine Art in Butler, PA as well as the Wood Street Galleries and 707 Penn Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA.

Robert Raczka is an artist, writer, and occasional curator. His primarily medium is photography, but he also works with collage.

According to the artist, “The connecting thread between my work in photography, collage, and artist-curator projects with ‘found artwork’ is my engagement with popular culture and taste, a preoccupation with the public communications of advertising and marketing, and the often-tenuous connection between representation and reality. In an oblique way these photographs are about our world, which includes elements of nature even as it is filled with manufactured goods and overlaid with images and concepts designed to shape desires and influence behavior.”

For 19 years Raczka taught and directed the art gallery at Allegheny College, where he is emeritus professor of art. Articles about his work have been published in solo exhibitions at Chatham University, Pittsburgh; Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia; Tyler School of Art of Temple University, Philadelphia; University of Rochester; Pittsburgh Filmmakers; Oklahoma State University; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; and 707 Penn Gallery, Pittsburgh. His artwork has been written about in Afterimage, Art in America, The Photo Review, Art Papers, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh City Paper, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Raczka has contributed art criticism to many publications and is a regular contributor to Pittsburgh City Paper. In addition to organizing many exhibitions for Allegheny College, he has guest curated exhibitions including “Crowdsourced” at SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh (2013), and the artist-curator project “The Takeaway: Made with Love” at 937 Gallery, Pittsburgh (2014).