When he left New York in 1979, Turners Falls stone carver Tim de Christopher got some parting advice from his former boss, Arturo DiModica, the Sicilian creator of Wall Street’s iconic “Charging Bull.”
“Hey … Stai Furbo,” DiModica told de Christopher, with one of those accompanying Sicilian body gestures: a peeled-down lower eyelid with an index finger, exposing the bottom of his eyeball. “Be careful. Pay attention. Watch your back,” it meant, an expression the departing artist had never heard before.
Stai Furbo is one of the stone sculptures of “Wide Awake,” an exhibit featuring about a dozen of de Christopher’s stone works at Holyoke’s Pulp Gallery. The exhibit, which also includes paintings by Florence artist Nora Riggs, opened Dec. 11 and will be on display through Jan. 9 at the gallery, at 80 Race St.
Stai Furbo, on a steel base that brings the tank-top-wearing guy’s height to about 5 feet, gestures his silent warning with the right index finger raised, a cigar held discreetly in his left hand below. He’s actually Stai Furbo II. An earlier version literally lost its head while being transported on de Christopher’s fork lift, as if to amplify DiModica’s warning. As Stai Furbo swung right off the lift’s forks, it also landed on the foot of a helper, breaking three of her bones, de Christopher laments. He’s since had the fork lift’s steering and brakes reconditioned.
Most of the works in the Holyoke exhibit are smaller, table-top, pieces. But they still weigh in heavily with de Christopher’s characteristic droll humor.
There’s a pair of sculpted crew boats (or are they galley ships?): “Come Away My Brothers” and “Farther Along.” The crews have arms raised or holding the shoulders in front of them. There’s also mill-town-inspired “Factory Boat” and “Industrial Boat.” Floating stone factories that echo Turners’ large, abandoned mill buildings? No problem.
“I don’t have any real explanation. I don’t even know what that’s about,” the artist admits of his stone boats, which were originally planned for a grand “cathedral project” that morphed into an unrealized “will and testament” legacy project.
The exhibit includes a recent work, “Two Guys Fighting,” which was based on one of the hundreds of saved napkin sketches from as far back as when de Christopher moved to New York in 1977 to study design at Cooper Union. From their facial expressions, you can tell they’re really slugging with gusto.
De Christopher has exhibited at Oxbow Gallery and William Baczek Fine Arts in Northampton, at the De Cordova Museum in Concord, Chesterwood in Stockbridge and Boston’s New England Spring Flower Show.
Yet Dean Brown, who opened Pulp Gallery in 2019, discovered de Christopher through the artist’s 2017 “Rock, Paper, Scissors” three-piece sculpture on Avenue A in Turners Falls, and “It stopped me in my tracks. It’s not often you see stone carvings. It was magical, and imbued with the essence of folk art.”
He sees de Christopher’s art as similar stylistically to that of William Edmonson, the first African American artist to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who “told stories related to spirituality.”
As for de Christopher, Brown said, “There’s an unfiltered beauty to his work. Something about it resonates (with the viewer) because it’s so approachable. It invites you in.”
De Christopher grew up in the San Francisco Bay area the son of a graphic, toy, product and interior designer who also had his own drawing show on TV. His grandfather had worked as a stone carver in the quarries in Italy from the age of 9 before immigrating to this country in his teens.
“He did the traditional stuff: Mary, Joseph and Jesus,” said de Christopher, who never got to see his grandfather work. “I grew up with all kinds of stories about my grandfather, the stone carver from Italy,” who’d launched a monument business with his brother in this country. “We’d play hide-and-seek and run around the tombstones in his front yard.”
During his sophomore year at Cooper Union, de Christopher surrendered to the urge to take up carving, traveling to work beside artesiani in Italy.
“I was a foreigner, an artist, but I was working with the tradesmen. Some of their work was architecture, some was purely sculpture,” he recalled.
He returned to this country to finish college, then worked for five years making architectural models before beginning to earn an architecture degree at Columbia University. But the carving bug again got him.
Work across the Columbia campus on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which had resumed in 1979 after a long hiatus, included a stone-yard institute to train inner-city youths in the trade of stone work.
“I’m there as a student with all the other architectural students,” de Christopher recalled, “and there are ‘my people,’ carving stone.”
A year and a half into his graduate studies, the ambivalent architect-in-training asked if there was need for another carver for the summer. He was hired, abandoning his architectural studies. Instead, he worked for two years at Cathedral Stoneworks, which also took on private contracts.
Two gargoyles he carved there — a monkey and a devil — went on a new wing of the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue.
When two fellow workers from his New York crew invited him for a weekend to their cabin in Heath, de Christopher discovered Franklin County, and moved the following year, 1992, to Shutesbury, and subsequently Northampton.
At the outset, he took on contract work from Cathedral Stoneworks, which closed in 1994, until his own sculpture and commissions took over. From a studio in the Greenfield Venture Center, he moved in 2001 to his own first Turners Falls studio, the former Williams Garage.
Soon after his move, the New York City stone yard said it was cleaning up and offered de Christopher its limestone. He ordered six tractor-trailer loads — 120 tons of limestone blocks — be brought up to Turners Falls. And he’s been using it ever since. When he moved to a smaller K Street space in 2018, he gave it to a friend in Greenfield.
As heavy as that limestone is, there’s an unmistakable lightness to many of de Christopher’s stone carvings, which over the years have included loaves of bread, fishes, elephants, dogs and bumbling, everyday humans — like those whose faces peer out from the windows of his 2017 “Rock, Paper, Scissors” paper factory. It’s the same unabashed playfulness the artist uses to convert stories into sculpture.
“I’ll be carving something, and I’ll say, ‘Oh look: There’s a little guy!’ And I carve the little guy. I’m very spontaneous sometimes with a material that’s not all that spontaneous. I’ll see a reflection of light from an angle, and think, ‘Oh, that looks like a nose in the shadow.”
De Christopher admits that his sculpted stories often suggest themselves as he’s in the process of carving, using his pneumatic hammer or a host of other equipment.
“Rarely is it ever pre-determined in total,” he said.
The limestone he cuts from, unlike the napkin sketches where he captures a first inkling of his design, “has its own demands and definitely changes as you make it. You have to make decisions all the way along as you’re carving. It’s the fragility of the stone: it doesn’t have the molecular strength of granite. It’s softer, a looser bind, and it’s delicate. If you hit it the wrong way, it snaps off.”
The smaller works in this show reflect de Christopher’s adjustment as his multiple sclerosis, first diagnosed in 1987, has been acting up over the past couple of years. He now walks with a cane. But after a brief hiatus over the past few years, the stonecutter began busily creating again over the past year or so, with the approach of this exhibit.
Riggs, who moved to Florence seven years ago, is a Massachusetts native who worked as an artist in New York and then Los Angeles and Pasadena before returning to New York. She has fine art degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and Indiana University.
Her paintings and drawings have been shown in New York, California, Georgia and elsewhere.
The Pulse exhibit of her graphite, ink and crayon drawings — works that she’s been able to do quickly on the dining room table while she was unable to get to her Brushworks Art and Industry studio space in Florence — is her first show in this area.
Brown described Riggs’ work as complementary to de Christopher’s with “a naïve quality, not highly polished,” that focuses on domestic scenes.
“There’s an inner life you see in her characters that’s extraordinary,” he said. “You can’t help but wonder what’s happening.”
Riggs, 49, said that rather than painting and drawing from life, “It’s all made up out of my head, all from memory and imagination.”
She likes the “directness and emotional strength” of primitive art, and said, “I want my work to have that, and direct accessibility. I’m attempting to show a kind of inner power and energy in the mundane, a beatification of the mundane.”
The stories told with light folk-art quality of de Christopher’s stone carvings and intense, naïve domestic scenes will complement one another in this pairing at Pulp Gallery that should keep visitors “Wide Awake.”