Tomorrow is
EARTHDAYand I found an amazing
artist to celebrate this day with her
beautiful icons, featuring animals.ANGELA MANNO is an internationally exhibited
artist and educator who has been exploring the pattern that connects personal
and planetary healing for over thirty years. She studied Earth Literacy at
Genesis Farm, an ecological learning center dedicated to understanding the
Universe and Earth as a single, unfolding process, and holds a Bachelor’s
degree in French and English from BardCollege.
She studied
at the San Francisco Art Institute, Parson’s School
of Design and l’Ecole des Arts in
Lacoste, France. She was trained by a
contemporary master of batik, the late Jyotirindra Roy and studied the ancient
liturgical art of Byzantine-Russian iconography.
Her award-winning
art resides in private collections throughout the Americas,
Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia and in such prestigious venues as the
National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington,
D.C, the Smithsonian Institution, the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in New York City and museums from Mexico
City to Moscow
In 1988, Angela
was commissioned by NASA to commemorate the U.S. return to space flight with
the launch of Discovery, the first after the Challenger accident.
She is the only female visual artist selected for this honor. Other
artists to capture the novelty of space travel for the space agency include,
Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg and James Wyeth. Her artwork is part
of the permanent NASA space art collection at the KennedySpaceCenter.
Her “Endangered
Species,” a series of artworks of threatened and endangered species painted in
the style of Byzantine icons, explores the environmental crisis and extinction.
In an interview with Treehugger, Angela says, “I hope that my work conveys
the feeling that all life is sacred. That my viewers feel remorse at the
thoughtless decimation of species and habitat, and are moved to action to
preserve what is left.”In May
2022, Angela was commissioned by the Vatican Dicastery on Integral Human
Development to create an audio-visual program to open Laudato Si’ Week 2022,
the seven-year anniversary of Pope Francis’ groundbreaking encyclical. The
program, “Responding to the Cry of the Earth”, featured images from her series Contemporary
Icons of Endangered Species and appeared on computer screens around the world
as part of the global event “No More Biodiversity Collapse: Rebalancing Social
Systems with Nature”.
Icons: All egg
tempera and gold leaf on wood
Top- Chambered Nautilus
Right- Honey Bee
Left- Emperor Penguin
Right- Marsupial Frog
