When artist Joseph Crosetto opened the quirky, eclectic Art-O-Rama on West Irving Park Road in 1989, he was weary of dealing with curators and gallery owners and wanted to provide a showplace for artists like him who had struggled to exhibit their work. But soon Crosetto realized he had little time to paint, and that he had become “a gallery director instead of an artist, which is really not what I wanted.” Art-O-Rama closed after two years.
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During that time, though, Crosetto developed a rapport with some of the artists whose work he exhibited. Pat McDonald and Peter Barnes are two artists who “showed up off the street, introduced themselves, and said, ‘Hey, can we show here?’” At the time Crosetto didn’t pay much attention to their work. “I remember being very busy, and looking at it, and kind of saying OK. But that was the way Art-O-Rama was. I wasn’t really editing things out . . . . When I really got time to look at it, you know, after the opening, I started liking it.”
Therrio, who had his first show at Art-O-Rama, paints vivid, playfully abstract portraits of himself (in which a politically incorrect cigarette dangles perpetually from his lips) and his cohorts. They are almost caricatures, albeit unintentional ones. Crosetto’s depictions of his friends and his wife, Lynn, are similarly colorful and heavily cartoon-influenced, though somewhat more exaggerated and expressionistic.
Encouraged, the group are holding their second exhibition at the Bop Shop through January 2. They are planning at least two more shows there in 1994, having worked out an arrangement with owner Kate Smith in which each artist can exhibit individually in between group shows. With Smith they found the same casualness and openness that made Art-O-Rama so comfortable. “I usually take them on if I like them when I talk to them,” Smith laughs.
