The American Academy in Rome remembers the artist and 2005 Fellow Jackie Saccoccio, who died on December 4, 2020, at the age of 56. Jackie was a 2005 Rome Prize Fellow who also resided at the Academy in 2012–13, when her husband Carl D’Alvia was a Fellow in Visual Art.
Jackie was represented by Van Doren Waxter in New York and showed her work internationally. A solo exhibition at a Tokyo gallery called the Club closed last week. Jackie’ highly praised paintings were featured in Now Here Is Nowhere: Six Artists from the American Academy in Rome, held at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York in 2017. She also donated a hand-painted print to AAR’s recent Artsy auction, held in conjunction with the 2020 Virtual Benefit.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Jackie Saccoccio earned an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1988. She won a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000 and completed a residency at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, in 2004.
“Characterized by a massiveness that insists on domination and a spontaneity and assertiveness that evokes the raw, unrefined style of Art Brut,” wrote Barbara A. MacAdam in a Brooklyn Rail review from earlier this year, “Saccoccio’s huge paintings … stake a nuanced feminist stance against blunt masculinity.” MacAdam continues: “The artist refers to her paintings as portraits of a sort, and while they are decidedly abstract, with no clearly defined human figure or even attitude detectable, they do contain fragments of shapes—a faint shadow of human head, struggling to emerge, the curve of an ear, perhaps, the outline of a partially bald pate.”
Read Alex Greenberger’s remembrance of Jackie Saccoccio in ARTnews.
Update: Roberta Smith has written an obituary for the New York Times.