"I want your skin to tingle when you see my work."
I want you to experience the entwined thrills of joy and fear that you experienced as a child agog at an amusement park, your face sticky with candy, your eyes wide, your throat tight as you walked under the wild eyes of the big, smiling, gaudy faces that beckoned you into the funhouses and lured you onto the rides. I want you to get inside its swirling art-of-many-colors.

There is a city that adjoins that tingling place, and together we will explore that, too. We’ll find its rough beauty. We’ll peer behind things that hide something else, something, perhaps, with a more joyful story, or a sadder story, or someone’s forgotten story, or a story that’s simply been mislaid.

Artist Philomena Marano is a daughter of Brooklyn.
She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute, is an intimate of the gaudy mysteries of Coney Island, created the winning poster for the first Spirit of Brooklyn poster competition, is currently uncovering the often disdained details of urban life, and is a master of papier collé, the elegant cut paper technique she learned as a studio assistant to Pop artist Robert Indiana.

Marano’s acclaimed series, “American Dream-Land,” a decades-spanning project of papier collé originals and limited edition prints, penetrates the soul of Coney Island to reveal its twin promises of candy-colored Paradise and garishly ornate Nightmare. Images from the series have been exhibited by Tabla Rasa Gallery, ACA Galleries, Prince Street Gallery, the Municipal Art Society, The Museum of the City of New York, The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Coney Island Museum among others in the New York area and elsewhere, and are also represented in private, corporate and museum collections. “American Dream-Land” and Marano’s work as a co-founder (with artist Richard Eagan) of the Coney Island Hysterical Society were featured in Charles Denson’s award winning book “Coney Island Lost and Found” (Ten Speed Press, Berkeley /Toronto, 2002). Additional publications featuring Marano and “American-Dream-Land” include Amusing the Zillion, 24/7 Magazine, The New York Times, the Daily News and others.

Her current work expands into the larger city, exposing the often disregarded elements of urban life: the underappreciated grace of an out-of-the-way tire shop; the disquieting lure of an exit sign at night. In addition to creating papier collé images for this examination of the city’s overlooked beauty, she is also working on a cut-paper animation, “Take Me There,” a fantasy inspired by the Franklin Avenue subway. The “Take Me There” trailer is posted for viewing on You Tube.

Marano and her husband reside in Brooklyn. They recently moved back to her childhood neighborhood of Bensonshurst, a few subway stops from Coney Island.