David Amoroso’s artistic journey from Mexican icons to Dr. Fauci

BY HOLA · DECEMBER 10, 2020

The local artist’s recent exhibition provides a glimpse into his passion for Latinx culture and the ways he has adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On a quiet Saturday afternoon at the ARTfactory in Old Town Manassas, David Amoroso is painting a portrait of Frida Kahlo. I am videotaping his progress, while people approach him, saying hello or chatting about the local art community.

I’m not the only one filming. A man asks Amoroso if he can record him for a “Hollywood friend” who works in construction and moonlights as an artist. Amoroso gladly accepts. He strikes up a conversation with the man without pausing in his work on the Otomi embroidery pattern in the foreground of the painting. He points out a vibrant portrait of a man who is both a woodworker and painter. “I think people that work with their hands are used to the process of creating,” Amoroso says. “[T]hey may not think of themselves as artists. But if you can build something, you’re an artist.”

These kinds of encounters are typical for Amoroso, who is often present on Saturdays at his exhibition, “Un Poco de Todo Amoroso” (A Little Bit of Everything Amoroso), at the Northern Virginia ARTfactory. The Arlington-based artist has performed art demonstrations most weekends since the show opened in October. On October 24, for instance, he demonstrated how to cut tissue paper to create papel picado, a traditional Mexican craft. He loves to talk with the people who attend.

The gallery itself is ideal for adhering to COVID-19 social distancing guidelines. There is plenty of space for visitors to appreciate the portraits displayed on three walls, representing the themes of the exhibition: Mexican iconography, Latino products and machismo. The front door is open to invite in passersby, while allowing air to circulate. That said, Amoroso and the gallery director Jordan Exum have had to re-envision the exhibition and make several adaptations due to the pandemic.

“Initially, the plan was to do a huge Día de los Muertos event and create several separate rooms within the gallery space,” Amoroso says. “But then the world changed.”

However, he and Exum’s efforts did not falter in the months leading up to the show. “We started to talk about ways that we could pivot,” Exum says, “and ways that we could use this challenge to our advantage, in a way, as far as virtually interacting with the community.”

Un Poco de Todo Amoroso, which closes this coming Saturday, was an opportunity for both Amoroso and Exum to have an art exhibition within a new normal. “The first time we had the doors unlocked and open to the public was the first Saturday in October when David’s exhibit opened,” Exum says. Even though they had to reduce the number of paintings, the exhibit still feels expansive.

Towards the end of my visit to the gallery on November 21, Amoroso invited me to scan one of the QR codes by the paintings. I choose a portrait with numerous “El corazón” loteria cards. The code takes me to a mitú YouTube video about Lotería. Suddenly, a single portrait is multidimensional and interactive.

Amoroso has used QR codes in past exhibitions and thought it would help provide background information and context about his work.

“Jordan had said she wanted to make it informational in case people didn’t know what the cultural references were or didn’t know about the images,” says Amoroso. “I thought it might be interesting to try the QR codes again…They can provide some background, but I like having the people sort of jump in.”

The QR codes aren’t the only thing Amoroso brought back from past exhibitions for the current art show. He has also recycled the title, Un Poco de Todo Amoroso. “That was actually the title of my very first show” in 2000, Amoroso says.

That first exhibit twenty years ago was the result of a transformative trip to Mexico in the ’90s. His Mexican odyssey started out as “a well-needed vacation” after the chain of photography stores he managed had gone out of business. “I got the first flight out of the country,” he recalls, “and spent a summer in Mexico photographing.”

At the time, Amoroso still thought of himself as a photographer, an artform he had been drawn to since high school. However, he was not satisfied with the pictures he took.

“When I came back, I was looking at the photos. I felt like none of them really captured everything I wanted from the trip,” he says. “So I decided I’d make a painting.”

Without any formal training, that’s how Amoroso began to paint. “I tried to make the entire trip into one painting,” he recalls. “The painting got a little overcrowded.”

He decided to make several paintings to show the different elements he was trying to represent. One painting became a dozen.

“At that point I thought, ‘What am I going to with these?’” Amoroso says. “A friend of mine said ‘my friend owns El Tamarindo. They’ve got a lot of wall space there.’” The owner his friend mentioned was Jose Reyes, who opened the well-known D.C. Salvadoran/Mexican restaurant with his wife in 1982.

Reyes organized a reception for Amoroso, who exhibited paintings of people, places and advertising that stood out to him during his trip to Mexico. He ended up selling half of the exhibited artworks that night. Suddenly, what was a spontaneous creative decision became a new artistic path.

Since then Amoroso has travelled all across the country exhibiting his contemporary representations of Latinx culture and history. He has garnered praise from organizations in the D.C. area and participated in collaborations with institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (or NIH).

For his NIH exhibition, which closed Nov. 7, Amoroso had originally planned a portrait series titled “Influences” that would focus on the musical and television personalities who have inspired him. However, as the pandemic progressed, Amoroso decided to create portraits that would be colorful and uplifting for NIH staff members and the few patients who had clearance to visit the gallery.

After a suggestion from Lillian Fitzgerald, the coordinator of the Clinical Center Arts Program, Amoroso started to paint people who had visited the NIH. “I did Elizabeth Taylor because she worked very closely with Dr. (Anthony) Fauci (director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) when they were doing HIV research in the ’80s,” Amoroso says.

At the time, “I was just watching Fauci on the news all the time. I [asked] Lillian ‘Do you think they’ll let me paint Fauci?”

Amoroso got the green light, and painted a portrait of Fauci surrounded by viruses.

“I created a universe around him,” Amoroso says. “The goal was to make something a little bit surreal, but very much his world.”

The portrait was well received by NIH staff members. Eventually Amoroso decided it should end up in Fauci’s hands. Amoroso says he gave the painting to Fauci as a show of support “in appreciation for everything he does.” Amoroso presented the portrait to Fauci in person at the NIH Clinical Center on November 23.

“He spent 10-15 minutes talking to me. I would have expected in and out in three seconds,” Amoroso says. “It blew me away how engaged he was. He mentioned that some members of his family were artists from Italy.”

Amoroso’s exhibitions this year have given him the rare opportunity to have meaningful interactions with others. His next show is planned for March 2021 at the Quirk Gallery in Richmond. While he has had to re-envision how he shows his work and focus more on building a following on Instagram, Amoroso still feels like he is able to interact with the community despite the restrictions on in-person gatherings at art galleries.

“I feel like I’m at least in the game,” Amoroso says, “versus watching it on TV.”

—Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe