Catalog essay for Mother of Grace:
An Exhibition of Gloucester Photographs by Dana Salvo
Cape Ann Historical Museum, Gloucester, MA, 1999

Sanfillippo Home Altar

ana Salvo is fascinated with how people throughout the world share the most intimate practices of domestic devotion. Links between art, culture, and religion distinguish his vision which offers an unusual sense of integration and connectedness to the lives of people. Salvo enables viewers to see the extraordinary qualities of ordinary things. He demonstrates how it is personal experiences and places which most effectively evoke the universal qualities of life. The archetypal is lodged in the details of daily life like cells which contain the blueprints of larger worlds.

The Gloucester pictures presented in this exhibition are part of Salvo's global search for images which show how people evoke sacredness in their everyday environments, how they create devotional altars and household arrangements which sanctify and personalize the places in which they live.

In this era of multiculturalism Salvo finds common ground and a shared aesthetic in varied and distant parts of the world. He describes how the households where he has been welcomed evoke a sense of awe associated with childhood memories. His grandmother, a Sicilian immigrant, created similar collections of pictures and artifacts within her home on radiator covers and on walls. Speaking little English and staying apart from mainstream American culture, she attended to the details and spirits of her household, creating an environment which conveyed a sense of mystery and aesthetic intrigue to her grandson. The household shrines Salvo has photographed throughout the world center on the family and what he calls "ceremonies of memory" and domestic devotion.

The Mother of Grace project documents how a close community of people has sustained its essential character and commitments during a period of rapid change in the surrounding world. The interior scenes and devotional constructions presented in Salvo's photographs convey how people use personal iconography as a way of surrounding themselves with the spiritual. Salvo delights in discovering Gloucester images which vividly express universal themes. The photographs presented in this exhibition celebrate a community of women who are among the many keepers of Gloucester's cultural treasures. The Mother of Grace women are a perfect and truly individuated microcosm of the larger world that Salvo examines and they fulfill the aesthetic vision that he keeps within himself.

The Mother of Grace club currently comprises sixty-three women of Italian and Portuguese descent who are the wives of Gloucester fishermen. Dedicated to the Virgin Mother, the founding women of the club came together during the early 1940s when their fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers were drawn into World War II.

Members of the Mother of Grace Club

In response to their isolation, the women met on a regular basis to support one another, pray, recite the rosary, and sing hymns, all focused on ensuring the safe return of their men. Along with petitioning for the well-being of the men at war, the women began to use the meetings as opportunities to establish friendships which brought support and companionship. After their devotional activities the women shared pasta, pastries, and coffee.

The home is the focal point for their activities. Members construct spaces in their houses where they create shrines consisting of religious objects and images, family photographs, pictures of the sea, souvenirs and memorabilia, real and plastic flowers, candles, and other personal artifacts. These environments can be viewed as what the contemporary art world calls "installations." Where the professional artist may be motivated by formal and purely aesthetic considerations, the members of the Mother of Grace club are inspired by a spiritual necessity which drives the creative impulse to make elaborate configurations. One of the most remarkable qualities of this process is the daily care given to the household shrines which become organic and living parts of the family.

The Mother of Grace Clubhouse Gloucester, Massachusetts

At the conclusion of World War II the women wanted to sustain their group activities. They approached the City of Gloucester with the hope of purchasing an abandoned building in the downtown area. The city deeded the building to the club for $1.00 in 1944. The women, with some help from their husbands, restored the building and transformed it into the Mother of Grace clubhouse that currently exists on Washington Street. Pageants, parades, feasts, and novenas are some of the activities that take place in the Washington Street building, all of which originate in Europe.