I am Melissa, an artist and creative from Philadelphia, and Nomad’s Art Director and Co-Curator. I came to Sicily with an art background, moved to Sambuca fifteen years ago, and never left. I look after the relationships at the heart of the gallery, with our artists and with the people who collect their work. When Meredith and I met in early 2024 and decided to turn the raw rooms of her building into a fundraiser with art, we needed one essential thing: artists willing to take a chance on two American women and an idea.
Carla Sutera Sardo, a photographer from Agrigento, once left a career in law for the camera. Her dreamlike images of the feminine body and the Sicilian landscape would later reach Vogue Italia’s PhotoVogue, but in the fall of 2024 she simply believed in what we were trying to do, and lent us her work.
Simone Geraci, a painter and engraver from Palermo, paints the human figure as something half-remembered, bodies emerging from saturated, dreamlike depths, tender and dissolving. He said yes too.
Their art hung on our unfinished walls for that first exhibition, IL BIVIO: Fragmented Feminine. They were not only our first artists. They were our first believers, and they are with us still, part of the roster of twelve we represent today.
