Roman De Salvo

Roman de Salvo (born 1965) is a contemporary American conceptual artist who creates sculpture and installation art.

Roman de Salvo was born in San Francisco, California, in 1965 and grew up in Reno, Nevada.

De Salvo graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Rain Bow, one of his first interactive public works, was displayed in the San Diego Natural History Museum in 1994.

It included a drinking fountain with a small window and window blinds.

When the drinking fountain handle was turned, the blinds opened to reveal an image of the park outside the museum with a rainbow overhead.

In another work from the same year entitled Zurn Fountain, the flushing of a public toilet activated the eruption of a small geyser from a drain in the restroom floor.

In 1995 he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, San Diego.

De Salvo lives and works in Reno.

In the 1998 work Garden Guardians, video game joysticks were mounted on the outdoor patios of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

The manipulation of these joysticks produced an emission of fragrant mist.

Ten years later, de Salvo completed The Legway for the New Children’s Museum.

This mechanism is a human-powered version of the Segway Personal Transporter.

He has shown professionally throughout the United States and in Europe, including at the Whitney Biennial (2000), the Musee d’Art Americain Giverny (2000), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (1998, 2001, 2006), The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art (2002), the Seattle Art Museum (2003), the Public Art Fund in New York (2003) and the Nevada Museum of Art (2004).

Roman de Salvo creates installation and public art.

In the 2000 Whitney Biennial, de Salvo exhibited Face Time, a project that invited the museum's restaurant patrons to eat their meals from the artist's specially designed plates that resembled TV dinners, cosmetic cases and laptop computers.

Two years later, he was featured in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Hugh Davies describes the appeal of de Salvo’s work:

''“What always amazes me is [Roman’s] inventiveness.

Form and solution become indistinguishable.

There’s something peculiarly American about his art.

He’s a jack of all trades who relishes in the challenge to solve problems.

You can’t anticipate the next piece but it always makes absolute sense.

That’s what keeps Roman’s art so fresh.”''

In recent years, de Salvo has turned to more large-scale public works.

His 2003 work Crab Carillon was installed on a bridge spanning California State Route 94 in San Diego.

488 chimes suspended vertically from the bridge's railing serve as a carillon to be played by the passerby.

When struck in order, the chimes sing a musical palindrome composed by Joseph Waters.

2004 Power Maze 3, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada.

2004 Recent Work with Electrical Conduit, Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California.

2005 High Wire Acts, the Holter Museum of Art, Helena, Montana.

2005 Main Street Sculpture Project, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut.

In 2006, de Salvo completed a site-specific work for the Caltrans District 11 Headquarters in San Diego.

Entitled Nexus Eucalyptus, the work is a collection of massive wood segments 125 feet long and 50 feet wide suspended above the courtyard of the headquarters campus.

The organic lines of the wooden pieces mimic the winding paths of rivers and roads.

De Salvo describes the work as “an organic way to express the freeway as organism.”

Roman de Salvo was a recipient of the San Diego Art Prize in 2008.

This award is given to three established artists and three newer artists each year in order to promote art as a cultural value in the San Diego region.

2008 Group Show, Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, California.

2009 Split, Splice, Splay, Display, Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California.