the real Jon BOLLO: 2013

Appetites for Destruction

It was with great gusto that fans destroyed this multi-media wall relief Saturday.

Many thanks to the folks at Fulton St. Collective, Koval Distillery, Finch’s Brewery

And ESPECIALLY the team of Lion v. Gorilla. An artist statement follows

The Christening of the AD

Jon Bollo

The Christening of the AD

Pine, Spruce, Found Object, Photographs, Graphite, Ink

2013

Christened in 1951, the Italian Trans-Atlantic liner the Andrea Doria sailed back and forth between Genoa and New York from 1953 to 1956. The Doria’s deck map hung in the sunroom of my grandparents Alton, IL home, almost from that time to the late 1990s. A small pencil square surrounded one of the cabins, a small ‘x’ beside it.

On the 26th of July, 1956 the Swedish vessel the SS Stockholm, in heavy fog, collided with the Andrea Doria, killing 51 people instantly. A young girl dropped by her father into a lifeboat made the death toll 52. Her hospital struggle was front page news in every American newspaper as she hung on for a couple days. While the sinking, which took hours longer than expected, was considered the greatest sea rescue of all time (due to new technologies and it’s proximity to a French ocean liner and the US Coast Guard based out of New York) it was nevertheless the second worst maritime disaster in US waters [second only to the Eastland right here on Clark Street 41 years prior, almost to the day].

The x on my grandparent’s deck map represented the point of impact, the square the cabin they had booked. My father, grandmother, and grandfather were to be in that cabin that night, but my father got sick on Italian food and they opted to stay till he was better and fly home. His stomach troubles wound up saving the lives of his family. Their cabin was ripped apart along with ones above and below all the way to the keel causing 98% of the fatalities. One girl in a neighboring cabin was miraculously flung from her bed to the bow of the Stockholm surviving with only minor injuries.