Biography
Lucilda Dassardo-Cooper paints and exhibits her art in the United States, India, Egypt and the Caribbean, countries that traverse the cultural and geographic boundaries of her origin and ancestry. Her layered style reflects her background as an immigrant whose consciousness retains images of her Caribbean birthplace alongside those of other countries in which she has lived. This fusion of geographic and cultural consciousness in her art is discussed in the essay “Chutney, Metissage and Other Mixed Metaphors” by Gita Rajan in the book Afro-Asian Encounters (New York University Press - 2006)
Some of her ancestors migrated from India to Jamaica in the late 19th century, and she returned to their homeland in the late 1990s to live, travel, photograph and paint for three years. She has also painted, and e-journaled her experiences of Egypt during a five month stay on the African continent in 2008. From Jamaica, where she was born, Lucilda adopts the bright primary colors that are reflected in the subtropical sun of the Caribbean.
In India, she painted the Veiled Presence series of 15 portraits of subcontinental women mostly clad in colorful, traditional saris with either their backs turned or faces covered, representing expressions of identity through dress and body language despite the subjects’ seeming anonymity.
The Associated Press described work from the Veiled Presence Series as “jewel-toned” when she represented the U.S. at India’s 9th Triennale, the international exhibit that previously featured the artists such as Sam Gilliam and Louise Nevelson. Lucilda’s life-like paintings in oils on canvas were displayed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi. The entire series has been exhibited at the US Embassy in India and the Parish Gallery in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC.
Returning to India as an artist-in-residence in 2007, she exhibited her watercolor paintings at the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, and led a panel discussion with fellow artists from the Global Arts Village in Gitorni.
For the first five months of 2008, she worked in Egypt. Her oil paintings on the theme Myth, Magic & Metaphors depicted street scenes of contemporary Cairo overlaid with iconic pharonic imagery. The paintings transcended time, linking present and past. By creating new insights on the symbolism of the ancient icons, she showed that the human urge to impose order and continuity was an enduring effort.
Other series of works explored the individual consciousness and the body in various manifestations of energetic cycles and psychological states of being, an avenue she explored from the inside out in her practice of hatha yoga and contemplative meditations.
Lucilda has taught art in community colleges and public schools. She was an instructor at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Wellesley and Roxbury Community College in Boston. At Fillmore Arts Center in DC, the nation’s only art school for elementary and middle school students, Lucilda helped design the visual arts curriculum and taught painting, sculpture, television criticism, advertising, calligraphy and hatha yoga.
She directed public art projects in both cities. While at Fillmore, she directed students in the creation of “Underwater World,” a ceramic and glass mural. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the D.C. Commission on the Arts, the mural still graces the facade of the Hyde School in Georgetown. Another set of murals, “Faces of D.C.,” was created with faculty and students of Fillmore for the General Services Administration. In Boston, “Birds of the Neponset River Estuary” were created with students from the Youth Conservation Corps at the Pope John Paul II Park.
A graduate of Massachusets College of Art, Lucilda lives in Boston and paints in her studio in Jamaica that she designed and built.