AI e IO: Recent Works by John Avelluto
On view October 15, 2025 - February 4, 2026
Brooklyn-based artist John Avelluto debuts his latest body of work in AI e Io, an
exhibition that stages a dialogue between ancestral memory and artificial
intelligence. Drawing from his Italian American heritage, Avelluto explores how
personal and cultural histories are remixed, mistranslated, and reimagined in an
age of accelerating digital mediation.
At the center of the exhibition is AI e Io (“AI and I”)—a suite of new multimediaworks that entwine hyperreal painted objects, sound installations, and AI-generated narratives. The title, composed entirely of vowels, humorously echoes the musicality of Italian speech while signaling the strange new voices emerging from algorithmic systems.
Avelluto’s practice, known for its meticulous trompe-l’oeil objects crafted entirely from acrylic paint, expands here into layered storytelling and critique. The works deliberately play with trickery: their initial humor and familiarity give way to the unsettling realization that both human memory and machine intelligence can flatten complex lives into clichés. By likening AI’s outputs to the stereotypical, nationalistic narratives often imposed on immigrant identity, Avelluto exposes how reduction—whether digital or cultural—erases nuance. His response is to break the mold: to create works that trigger not only laughter, but also disorientation, recognition, and the possibility of new traditions.
The exhibition also features a selection of new paintings that extend Avelluto’s ongoing visual language. These works combine imagery from his earlier trompe-l’oeil depictions of Italian American foods and surfaces with graphically styled hand gestures, layering humor, history, and abstraction into charged pictorial spaces.
Finally, Avelluto presents a small-scale marble prototype for Can You Hear Me Now?– A Memorial for Antonio Meucci. Derived from a 3D scan of Meucci’s original death mask, the work offers audiences a first encounter with the artist’s proposal for a monumental public memorial to the overlooked Italian inventor of the telephone.
Together, these three bodies of work demonstrate Avelluto’s commitment to material manipulation, cultural reflection, and contemporary critique. His art insists that the spaces between memory and invention—between “AI” and “Io”—are where new traditions are made. And crucially, these traditions are not generated in the digital ether, but here—in real time, in lived space, through the dynamic exchange between artwork and audience.
The show is curated by Kingsborough Professor of Art History Dr. Caterina Y. Pierre. An exhibition brochure featuring an in-depth interview between the artist and the curator will be available.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition Title: AI e Io: Recent Works by John Avelluto
Curator: Caterina Y. Pierre, PhD
Venue: Kingsborough Art Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 15, 2025, 3-5 and 6–9 PM
On View: October 15, 2025 – February 4, 2026
Contact Information
Brian Edward Hack, Director, KAM
(718)-368-4817
