Born 1979 Brooklyn, NY.

John currently lives and works in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He received his MFA at CUNY Brooklyn College where he studied with Elizabeth Murray, Vito Acconci, William T Williams and Jennifer McCoy.

In addition to his studio practice, Avelluto is the founder of PIACE (Progressive Italian American Cultural Exchange), a nonprofit organization supporting contemporary cultural discourse, scholarship, and creative practice.

Artist Statement

My work explores how cultural identities are transformed through migration, adaptation, and reinvention. Drawing from my experience as a first-generation Italian American, I examine the ways language, foodways, ritual, material culture, and collective memory evolve as communities negotiate new social and geographic realities. Southern Italian dialect enters English vernacular, devotional practices absorb new influences, and inherited traditions persist through repetition, improvisation, and change.

Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and public projects, I am interested in the tension between preservation and transformation. I frequently draw upon vernacular objects, foods, symbols, and narratives associated with Italian and Italian American life not as fixed markers of identity, but as evidence of culture's continual movement and redefinition. Cannoli, hand gestures, religious iconography, family stories, monuments, and popular stereotypes become points of departure for investigating how meaning shifts across generations and contexts.

Through processes of replication, translation, and material experimentation, I explore how authenticity is constructed, performed, and contested. My work considers how communities maintain connections to inherited histories while simultaneously reshaping them in response to new environments, technologies, and social conditions. Recent projects have examined the role of artificial intelligence in the production of cultural memory, the persistence of ethnic caricature and self-representation, and the ways public monuments and historical narratives shape collective understandings of belonging.

Rather than treating identity as something preserved intact or lost entirely, I approach it as an ongoing negotiation between past and present. My work embraces the contradictions, improvisations, and hybrid forms that emerge through that process, finding in them evidence not of cultural decline, but of cultural life itself.