Pre-history

1971-1979

Marsico has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Akron and worked seven years as a construction engineer, specializing in control systems on large scale industrial sites. He left engineering in 1978 to enroll in a graduate architectural program at Carnegie Mellon University, leaving after one year to pursue a life in art.

Archive

1979 to 1990

In 1984 he received a grant from the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which resulted in a comparative photo-essay entitled The Italian Hilltown and the American Main Street Small Town. The photographs were exhibited at the il Diaframma Gallery in Milan and the Graham Foundation Gallery in Chicago. The photo-essay was considered to be on the forefront of the new urbanist movement. During this period his photographs were accepted for permanent collection in the Corcoran Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography and the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1985, in collaboration with the Italian architectural critic Antonio Saggio, a second Graham Foundation grant was awarded. The project was a comprehensive study of the work of Giuseppe Terragni, an Italian neo-realist architect working in Milan and Como during the 1930’s. The photographs were published as a book entitled Giuseppe Terragni, Vita e Opere.

1990 to 2001

For a decade Marsico’s work centered on editorial travel photography. Travel Holiday, Travel &Leisure, and The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler commissioned him regularly. In 1992 he won the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation’s Lowell Thomas Award for the best magazine black and white photography feature, entitled Winter in Tuscany, written by Saul Bellow. The next year he received the top color photography award for the photo-essay Paradise, a story documenting 13 towns named Paradise. In this same commercial period Absolut Vodka (1993) commissioned Marsico for a series of 16 travel vodka ads. Among those were Absolut Rome, Absolut Portugal, Absolut Seville and Absolut Polynesia.

Substance Shift

2002 to 2010

Firmly based in a less global and more personal world and armed with new image-making skills, Marsico returned to being the social observer with the hope of addressing current societal issues. Works created in this period represent a radical departure from the photographer’s established working practice, integrating nontraditional print-making techniques,encryption and viewer triggered lighting into his art.

The first departure from a traditional documentary style of photography occurred in 2003 when he meticulously printed and bound the limited edition artist books Right Noise and Policing Pleasure under the Dionysus Press imprint. Books published under this imprint are in the artist or rare book collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, The Getty Research Institute, the Flaxman Library of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA,University of Iowa and Stanford University.

In 2005 he started to integrate cryptic messages into his photographs. Passion and Politics, at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, was his first installation using his encrypted printmaking process.

In 2009 assimilated currency engravings were encrypted with their perceived (or the artist’s perceived) ideologies. The series entitled Face Value was exhibited at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.

He is presently working on age sensitive issues of the generation born between 1947 and 1955.