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Celeste Rapone earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Illustration Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. She also earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her work is interested in drawing from themes of Dutch Golden Age painting, specifically the traditions of the grand portrait, the still life, and decorative pattern painting to explore the phenomenon of making memories. In constructing scapes that project nostalgias, Rapone’s paintings start in a place of “pretty,” and, in examining the subject’s non-idealized environment, become increasingly violated trough the use of garish color, rough texture, and a surface sediment of store-bought, celebratory trash. Rapone’s work has been shown in New York, Chicago, and Rhode Island and has been included in the 2013 New American Paintings MFA Annual.