Tony Gengarelly is Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His academic background and interests are varied. Along with survey courses in American Civilization and Western Art History, his teaching career has included literature, political science, modern and decorative art, and museum studies. He has also taught on the Navajo Nation and introduced Diné weaving and sandpainting, along with the Santero art of the American Southwest, to his college students. For the past several years his work has focused on the creative process and its social and cultural crosscurrents.
Tony is the founder and current Director of the Jessica Park Project at MCLA. Based on the career of Jessica Park, a visionary artist on the autism spectrum, the Project partners with college students and professors, museum curators, and educators to explore the subject of Outsider Art, which features artists who, as a result of circumstance and place, stand apart from the aesthetic and cultural mainstream.
Since 1999 Tony has taught art and bookmaking for The Poetry Studio’s summer workshops. He has been drawn especially to the “outsider” features of young people’s art: its unfettered focus and originality; its direct communication of complex ideas and emotions through color and line; its use of word and image with creative and powerful expression.
Tony has curated individually or produced with his students over 40 exhibitions. Some of these have been featured at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, MCLA Gallery 51, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Endicott College, Eastern Michigan University, Wheaton College, and the 94 Porter Street Gallery at MCLA.
Tony has written and published on a variety of subjects, including Political Justice, Early American Modernism, Native American painting, and Outsider Art. Most noteworthy are articles for the Mind’s Eye and Folk Art Messenger; also contributions on poster art for The Guide to United States Popular Culture (Bowling Green State University Press) and Maurice Prendergast’s applied graphic art for A Catalogue Raisonne (Williams College Museum of Art; Prestel Books). He has edited and written two books on the art of Jessica Park (Exploring Nirvana, MCLA 2008; A World Transformed, MCLA 2014). Other books include Art on the Spectrum: A Guide for Mentoring and Marketing Artists with ASD (KDP Amazon, 2020); Randy Trabold’s Northern Berkshire County (Arcadia, 2003); Distinguished Dissenters and Opposition to the 1919-1920 Red Scare (Edwin Mellen, 1996).
Tony holds a Ph.D. in American and New England Studies from Boston University and a MA from Williams College in the history of art.
contact Tony: a.gengarelly@mcla.edu