Melissa Bianca Amore is renowned Italian/Australian art critic, philosopher and curator based in Paris, and between New York and Melbourne. Her contributions to cultural discourse are extensive and informed by her widely respected and dynamic practice. Amore’s primary area of research is the study of phenomenology and perception in relation to contemporary sculpture and large-scale environments.
An acclaimed critic and essayist, Amore has written for leading publications and authored exhibition catalogues since 2005. Recent reviews include Marco Fusinato’s installation for the 59th La Biennale di Venezia DESASTRES and series of features and interviews with highly acclaimed contemporary artists including, German born, Paris based artist Anselm Kiefer; American artist Doug Aitken and Polish-German installation artist Alicja Kwade for BOMB magazine, New York. Amore is a regular contributor to BOMB Magazine, US; The Saturday Paper, Australia; Artlink Magazine, Australia and Ocula, UK and has written for Art Monthly and Photofile Magazine, among many other publications globally. Amore is a member of the International Association of Art Critics.
Amore was appointed Thesis Respondent for the MFA Fine Arts Graduate Exhibitions, Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York and invited as a guest critic for significant organizations including, Residency Unlimited, New York; Art Omi Artists Residency, New York; Un/Mute presented by the European Union National Institute for Culture, New York and Artspace, Sydney Australia. Amore has chaired several symposiums and presented her research at conferences world-wide. She is an Advisory Board Member for one of Australia’s leading publications, Artlink Magazine and Deakin University’s Creative Arts Degree Program. Amore has been invited as a US judge for important art awards, focused on the Balkans, including the Milcik Award presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Montenegro and the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award, Serbia.
Amore holds a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York, a specialised Masters, chaired by David Levi Strauss, and holds a double degree in Philosophy, History of Ideas and a B.A in Creative Writing (Literature) and Art History (minor), at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, where she graduated with distinction. In addition, Amore also studied cognitive and social psychology. Amore’s academic thesis Observing Observation examined the origins of perception and human consciousness in relation to works by Light and Space artists including, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell. Following her undergraduate studies, she was selected to undertake the Gertrude Contemporary Emerging Writers Program in 2006 under the Directorship of Alexie Glass-Kantor and mentored by Dr. Ashley Crawford.
Amore has over twenty-five years’ experience presenting new research across curatorial programming and publications sectors within museum, commercial, educational institutions and non-profit platforms. Being based in New York for over ten years, Amore has extensive networks globally, and co-founded alongside American curator William Stover, a non-profit arts organization and research forum, Re-Sited in 2016, New York. Re-Sited examines the spatial intersections between sculpture, architecture and site. As a collaborative they have curated several exhibitions including, Sites of Knowledge, 2017 at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, which examined spatial semiotics and language as a visual structure of knowledge, and included works by acclaimed artists Richard Artschwager, Henri Chopin and Michael Rakowitz and curated Traveling Spaces, a series of site interventions and perceptual interruptions at VOLTA Artfair, New York, with artists Willem Besselink, Caroline Cloutier, Reinoud Oudshoorn, and Ira Svobodová.
Amore curated a solo exhibition ThreeFold, 2015 on Australian/American installation artist Natasha Johns-Messenger, at El Museo de Los Sures, in New York, as part of the ISCP off-site program. ThreeFold was a large-scale site installation, an optical prism, predominantly made of mirrors and periscopic devices, and authored an extensive catalogue essay alongside the artists’ solo exhibition Sitelines at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia. Amore’s exhibitions have been featured in Artforum, Hyperallergic, among other publications.
Amore was the Curator for the 2022 Conversations Sector and Director of VIP Programming, International Engagement for Melbourne Art Fair 2022, Melbourne, Australia as well as a Curatorial Advisor for a public art commission where she shortlisted artists including Jeppe Hein, Larry Bell and Sarah Oppenheimer in Australia. Other curatorial roles have included: The Line of Optics — Between Perception and Architecture in the work of Edna Andrade for the ADAA, New York and Structures of Abstraction for Locks Gallery, The Armory, New York which featured artists Lynda Benglis, Joanna Pousette-Dart and David Row. Senior Curator & Creative Director for Primal Mutation, NotFair (2010 & 2012) a curated non-profit artfair, in Melbourne, Australia.
Amore was invited to curate a large-scale exhibition Bal Taschit Thou Shalt Not Destroy at the Jewish Museum of Australia in 2006. The exhibition featured over thirty-five artists including, Mikala Dwyer, Sam Leach and Kathy Temin who examined early scripture including readings from the Torah, the Talmud, and biblical prescriptions about structures of knowledge and the environment. Amore also assisted the Australian team for the First Life Residency exhibition as part of the Year of Australian Culture in China, a cross-cultural exchange at the Xin Dong Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing.
Amore also works as a consultant for artists, assisting with portfolios, programming and content, and for various private and public collections located in the US, Europe and Australia, procuring significant works by internationally renowned artists including, Henry Moore to local artists including, Daniel Crooks, Shaun Gladwell as well as indigenous artists such as Sally Gabori and Daniel Boyd.
Amore has worked as a gallery manager and artist liaison for several local and international galleries, including a private gallery and advisory in New York for several years, working with estates including John Coplans and was the Exhibition, Publication and Sales Manager at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Australia in 2002 for nine years where she managed Australia’s established artists including Robert Owen, Imants Tillers, Guan Wei, Julie Rrap, Pat Brassington, Janet Laurence, among many others.
Re-Sited
Re-Sited, a non-profit arts organization, co-founded in 2016 by Melissa Bianca Amore & William Stover, is dedicated to presenting large-scale installations, public art, curated exhibitions and new scholarly research that examines the intersection of site, sculpture and architecture. Re-Sited raises fundamental questions about “site” and “space” and re-examines how we cognitively “think” space and travel between spaces. We ask: “how does space become an environment, cultural landscape or site, and who or what creates this demarcation and transition?”
Our central mission is twofold: a) to investigate how public art, architecture and immersive environments navigate social behavior, activate a renewed spatial awareness and interrupt pre-conditioned patterns of perception and observation, and b) to examine how context, whether physical, virtual, conceptual or theoretical, modifies and reframes the translation and reception of a work of art.
Re-Sited will evaluate historical and contemporary thinking structures by actively curating exhibitions that examine both the psychology of the “exhibition site” and the “conceptual space” - its particularities, materiality and direct relationship to the work of art.
Re-Sited examines the alterations to the art-viewing process in our current meta-disciplinary age, where the boundaries between the visual arts, science, technology, and architecture, among others, are intersecting into a unified shared space. We aim to curate a series of situations in space to activate perceptual experiences and shift habitual behavior.
Re-Sited translates sculpture as an extended field of vision, as part of the land, site and as an interactive perceptual and architectural space. We aim to generate new knowledge that explores the sculptural alterations to the phenomenal landscape, which not only re-defined the classification of sculpture, but also the cultural field of architecture. Re-Sited encourages new approaches, active collaboration and research across diverse fields–encouraging the transfer of knowledge and the transmission of new discourse within an extended field of inquiry.
As part of Re-Sited’s commitment to examining the psychology and phenomenology of space we are producing a digital publication Re-Verb. This publication will function as a research forum that cultivates original content from leading scholars working in neuroscience, mathematics, philosophy and quantum-physics, among other disciplines. Re-Verb presents new interpretations that extend beyond the traditional art and architectural theoretical canons.
