Exhibition continues at Brownsville’s Rusteberg Art Gallery

On Silence (Silenzio), an exhibition by UTRGV assistant professor Romeo DiLoreto and colleague Daniel Cosentino, continues through Oct. 30 at the Rusteberg Art Gallery on the adjacent Texas Southmost College campus.

The exhibit includes images DiLoreto took in color at the Sabal Palm Sanctuary with a large format camera but printed in black and white, and 3D models of hands and bones crafted from photographs by Cosentino and made on a 3D printer.

Together, they invite the viewer to consider what is seen and unseen, DiLoreto, an assistant professor of photography at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, said, using the gap between gusts of wind as an analogy to illustrate his point about silence, silenzio in Italian.

DiLoreto has been an assistant professor at UTRGV for three years. Cosentino was his student in Italy. The two reunited during the pandemic after DiLoreto had written recommendation letters for his former student to earn his master’s degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

“He did extremely well at RIT. They offered him a position at their pilot school in Kosovo. Later he taught at Sussex Community College in Sussex, New Jersey, DiLoreto said during a conversation with The Brownsville Herald about the exhibit.

“He stopped doing that and now he’s an independent artist. While we were both in this limbo state, we would have telephone conversations. He was not married. He’s now married. My family is in Italy. I’m here by myself. At one point, I said Daniel, we need to start working on something.”

The two decided to do an exhibition together. In the process, DiLoreto did an artist in residency class at Sussex Community College and also a master class workshop.

“For two years I have been applying for him to come here. Finally, when all was resolved, they accepted for his coming here and we did this collaboration together,” DiLoreto said.

“For both me and Daniel, his is not a finished show. It is a portion of something that’s going to go further.”

DiLoreto conducts summer workshops and master classes in Italy during the summer. He said Brownsville has welcomed him with open arms and wants and looks forward to giving back to the community.

The exhibition comes as development of the new UTRGV-Brownsville School of Art and Design at the former Longoria Elementary School at 2400 E. Van Buren St. continues.

Brownsville ISD closed Longoria in 2019 due to declining enrollment. UTRGV leases Rusteberg Hall from Texas Southmost College and is investing at least $33.8 million in renovations, according to a news release from the university last spring when the acquisition of Longoria was announced.

DiLoreto teaches classes in photography, both analog and digital. He said he doesn’t have enough space at Rusteberg, where the Rusteberg Art Gallery is located. Art students have long criticized the facility as inadequate to their needs.

“If you came yesterday, you would have been shocked because my students are having their own show. They were actively putting their work in frames. I don’t have a classroom. My classroom is a dark room. I do have a digital classroom, which is in the Life Health Sciences Building building which is not too far from here,” he said.

“That’s my space, which is very difficult for me. My colleague and I are working very hard to make photography in the Valley grow, because photography is a subject that should be known by any arts student. … I always tell my students that we see before we learn to read or write. … A good photograph, you should be able to not only see it and observe it, you should be able to touch it. I really believe in using all our senses.”

DiLoreto, a dual Italian and Canadian citizen, received his bachelor’s of applied arts at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, specializing in sensitometry and photographic chemistry.

After graduating, he worked for Kodak Canada, where he was responsible for the technical division of the Kodachrome Processing Laboratories. He received his master’s of fine arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia.

He is an assistant professor, tenure track, at UTRGV.

Cosentino did a one-week residency at UTRGV as part of the exhibition. He earned his degree from Rutgers University.

The exhibition by DiLoreto’s film photography students, titled Silver Jell-O, takes place at The Comminos Center for the Arts, 214 N. A St., in Harlingen.