Marianne Lettieri Brings a Mature Perspective to Protest Art

Our city is spoiled for choice when it comes to locally based artists, yet it's always encouraging to hear that another world-class talent is living in the Dallas area.

Having shown her work at the likes of the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, Badè Archaeology Museum and Facebook's corporate headquarters, Marianne Lettieri has been crafting mixed-media and installation pieces in California for decades. She moved to Granbury a few years ago to be closer to her Grammy-Award-winning son Mark Lettieri, and she has embraced her new Texan heritage in a way that both surprised her and influenced her work.

"Mark got married and had a baby, and we thought, 'Let's go to Texas,'" says the artist, who transferred her studio from Silicon Valley in 2018. "I was unprepared for the emotional identity thing that happens when you move. I read [journalist] Manny Fernandez, who says, 'You don't just move to Texas, it moves into you.' The sense of place and people of Texas are really remarkable, and it has affected me and my art. I love being here, but I am trying to find an authentic voice as an expat and find my place here."

As Lettieri is known for her embrace of unconventional materials in her assemblages — including found objects such as bedrock, textiles, sheet music and thread spools — being in a completely different landscape from the West Coast has led her to create work for the Michelson Museum in Marshall that references the beauty of Caddo Lake. She's also conducting an artist's workshop at nearby Karnack this month. The topography of that area appeals to Lettieri because it reminds her of where she was raised, Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"I grew up in a marsh, and our home was literally in sight of the missile [silos]," she recalls. "It was very rural. I spent my days outside exploring and observing wildlife. I became aware at a young age of impermanence and wilderness and progress, and that became a catalyst for me."

But before she could distill these themes in the ornate works she calls "pictorial and sculptural collage," the artist first had to experience the corporate world. After gaining her bachelor of fine arts in drawing and printmaking at the University of Florida, Lettieri went into the most obvious commercial gig available to her, graphic design. As a designer for a large public relations agency, she relocated to Silicon Valley to manage photographers and printers, eventually moving into PR as an independent consultant for influential companies such as Apple.

Growing up when Marianne was still a working mom, guitarist and composer Mark Lettieri says the two launched their artistic careers around the same time at the end of the '90s.

"She was essentially a stay-at-home mom when I was in elementary school and middle school," he recalls. "She could've worked full time but chose to pursue raising her kid. She was super supportive, helping with guitar lessons and things like that, but she did start to dabble back into art when I got older and got into college."

Marianne returned to college at 60 to earn an MFA in spatial arts at San Jose State University. The fact that she "didn't have a minute or a dollar to waste" meant it was full-steam ahead upon graduation. Yet the artist discovered that her years of experience served her well as a seasoned creative, as she could embrace more complex themes and push herself in a way she couldn't in her youth.

"I have to say the perspective of having lived and lost and seen things happening in the world is a totally different viewpoint," she says. "A lot of young people, the best they can do is make work about politics and sex and summer camp. I'm not knocking that. It's what I would've made work about when I was 21. But it's very different when you have a mature perspective, especially if you've been active, met wonderful people, traveled, seen things and paid attention. I wish I would have started earlier, but I do think I have something to say."

Marianne Lettieri’s art explores the shifts in cultural values via the embrace of historical artifacts and objects of domesticity. For a show at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, she created a hanging installation titled "The Art of Manliness," unraveling a handmade rug one fiber at a time, then rewinding the threads around 100 pounds of old worker's tools. For another piece, "Cradle with Bedrock," she sourced 1,500 river stones (a quarter fabricated from paper mâché) and covered them in doilies, staging them around a cradle to evoke the anonymous work of thousands of women.

Her propensity to blend materials and themes is coincidentally similar to her son's music. Mark Lettieri’s Grammy-winning jazz-fusion band Snarky Puppy has the same genre-defying scope as the fine artwork of his mother.

"I think it's because we have a lot of different types of inspirations, but also the ability to communicate with different colors or sounds or mediums," Mark says. "For an artist, it can be a little bit difficult because it could make you a little hard to pin down for an audience, but the people who get it tend to celebrate the diversity. What I've always loved about what she does is it is really unpredictable. Her path is in mixed media, but it's still very diverse."

"[His music] is so much like what I'm doing in my collage work," says his mother. "They're taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that and coming up with new stuff. This whole amalgamation is what I wanted to do in my artwork. It's hard to pigeonhole what my art is, and that's OK with me."

For her newest body of work, she has embraced a music-related theme, with sculptures that incorporate instruments inspired by songs of trial and tribulation, such as "Amazing Grace." Having shown pieces from the series at Fort Worth's Kinfolk House, Lettieri is currently in discussion about exhibiting the group in its entirety.

As Lettieri builds a local tribe of artistic friends, she's delighted to find they speak the same language as she does. The interconnectedness she shares with her son and new colleagues reinforces a feeling she is trying to share through her art while strengthening the ties that bind us — wherever we come from.

"I look at what I do as protest art," she says. "It's quietly protesting a world that is rushed and clashes with the enchantment of the everyday. To bring things people have saved back and look at them in a different context goes back to that same feeling I had as a little girl walking in the marsh. It's saying, 'Hold on, look at the ordinary world' and see what's underfoot. Somebody might say they're just old things, but if you look at [the final result], it's a symbol. It's poetry."