artist PROFILE
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A gifted child, Chinni was raised in a large, supportive Italian-American family where his parents and his mother’s five sisters “magnified my accomplishments,” he says. Among his emerging gifts: singing, playing multiple musical instruments, and excelling at sports, theater, and visual arts. At the Art Students League in New York City his talent was noticed and he was referred to the acclaimed Italian art critic and historian Lionello Venturi, who endorsed Chinni for entrance into the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. After his stint at the Accademia, Chinni took private lessons in painting, etching, and sculpture with Italian artists, and participated in several exhibitions. Also crucial to his development as an artist was the Roman family with whom he lived for a time. Highly educated and cultured, the family held Saturday salons frequented by artists, composers, musicians, and poets. Although Chinni’s grasp of Italian was still developing, he remembers listening, mesmerized. Among the important influences he absorbed in Italy was that of the early-20th-century Italian Futurist movement, which emphasized the visual expression of motion, modernity, speed, and light. Initially Chinni “tiptoed,” as he puts it, from figurative into abstract art, but soon began pouring all his creative energy into organic and geometric three-dimensional imagery and forms. Reflecting on a long and remarkable life, Chinni periodically refers to certain works in his studio— 128 TREND Summer 2017