Christy Zuccarini

About the Artist

Education: Goucher College, Towson, MD, BA; Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, Certificate in Literacy Through Photography; Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, MA in Community Art; UC Berkeley Certificate in Visual Storytelling.  Selected Exhibitions, Projects, Publications: Rosenberg Gallery, Towson, MD, 1998, 1999, 2001; Artscape Baltimore, 2005; Pinkard Gallery, Baltimore, MD, 2006; Best in Baltimore Award for Wavery Mural Arts Project, 2009; Baltimore by Hand 2008-2018; Made in Isolation, Library of Congress Web Archive, 2020-2021; Museum of Fine Arts Washington County, 2022; Art Maryland, 2022-23. 

Artist's Statement

I grew up in a suburb of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area—a planned community that took its street names from famous works of art and literature. It was an unassuming place that my parents still refer to as "the land of beige siding."  Half of my family is Jewish and from New York and the other half is German-Italian and from Baltimore. I first picked up a camera in an attempt to reconcile what felt like a perplexing childhood with its own terminally unique yet quotidian dramas. I've carried that experience—of pointing my camera toward what puzzles and mystifies me—since. While my training and education is in photography and community art​, my career has been as a fundraiser and content developer within the nonprofit sector. In that role, I have used photography as a vehicle for stewardship through storytelling. These stories are many and varied: an all-boys charter school in Baltimore City; a youth-led mural project in rural Oklahoma; water security in Guatemala; residential care on Maryland's Eastern Shore; Jewish identity in France. My work is guided by the belief that my role as an artist is to give constant witness. It is a spiritual exercise in observation; a searching for common ground. To that end, my most personal projects are open-ended narratives with central characters—people I love and know well. In this way I'm able to practice being present but indistinct. Kind of like beige siding.