ABOUT SALVATORE LUMETTA

The art career of Salvatore Lumetta began when the flowers from a sculpture of St. Theresa touched him softly across his tiny head from the other side of his mother’s bedroom. The frail infant, blue at birth and seemingly stillborn, suddenly came alive and gave out with a loud cry, inhaling his first breath of Brooklyn air. His grandmother called it a miracle.

Thus, in the beginning, New York was the city that nurtured Sal as a young artist. There, at Industrial Arts High School, he specialized in commercial art, and subsequently began a homogeneous career as a freelance window designer, sign painter, illustrator and master jeweler.

From this wealth of endeavors, he learned much and traveled frequently, especially throughout the Southwest, where he was exposed to the Native American culture. In time, Sal developed a deep wellspring of affection for the Indian spirit and decided to champion their cause through his art, by telling the story of the pain, the hardship, the dignity , the color and the character of a people whose heritage and land were blatantly appropriated from them under the auspices of the government’s euphemism for usurpation, the catchall appellation, "Manifest Destiny".

In regard to this consuming passion, Sal says, "I try to permeate the canvas with the heart and soul of this great people, putting antiquity in its place, and by the interplay of color, light and motion, I try to capture the anguish of a vanishing breed."

Today, Sal’s paintings are in the hands of many proud collectors around the country, from New Mexico to California to New York and New Jersey to the South and Texas and internationally in Canada and Italy.

His works have been exhibited at the Canyon Gallery in New Mexico, the prestigious Victoria Gallery in New Jersey, and his latest commissioned portrait was of the honorable Menachem Schneerson, the Grand Rabbi of the ultra Orthodox Lubavitcher Sect and esteemed Jewish leader and advisor on Middle Eastern affairs to American Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush. Plans are now in effect for Sal’s portrait of Rabbi Schneerson to be reproduced in prints and distributed in Israel and other parts of the world where the Lubavitcher movement exists.

Yet however far-flung Sal’s travels may take him, and however many accolades may come his way, he remains a devoted family man who gives most of the credit for his achievements in art to , as he says, "The major influences in my life: my mother and father, who always had confidence in my abilities." And to his dearly departed wife, "Who got me started," and supportive son and daughter, "who keep me going."

In fact , Sal’s son, a brilliant director and film-maker in his own right, is now working on a full length- feature film, entitled "The Sacred Earth," in which his father’s complete works will be seen.

The bottom line on Sal Lumetta’s work is that it speaks from experience. During combat in the Korean War, he gained a spiritual insight into why the Creator put us here, when he witnessed "the horrors of broken bodies and broken spirits." Yet through it all, he found "an enlightenment on the realities of life" that he put into his art.