We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mark Guglielmo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Mark, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with us today. We’re excited to dive into your story and your work, but first let’s start with a broader topic that might be stopping many of our readers from pursuing their dreams – haters, nay-sayers, etc. How have you managed to persist despite haters and nay-sayers that inevitably follow folks who are doing something unique, special or off the beaten path?
How do you persist despite the haters, nay-sayers, etc?
As a kid, I dreamed of being a rapper. But I was shy and hated the stage, and I didn’t know anyone involved in rap music. For years, I kept my vision to myself for fear of ridicule and shame. But I loved hip-hop, listened to it religiously, became quite the connoisseur, and quickly started writing and reciting my own rhymes. It was the creative outlet I desperately needed to weather a difficult childhood. I recorded my first demo with a friend in high school. The moment I heard my voice come out the boom box I was convinced — I’d found my calling.
But the decade-long journey to realize my dream was arduous, terrifying, and also, exciting and fulfilling. One story stands out. In 1996, I was 25 and living in Los Angeles, after having relocated there with 2 bandmates to go for it. We’d booked an opening slot on a big concert in a beautiful theater in West Philadelphia. KRS-One and Biz Markie (RIP) were headlining — both titans of rap and large at the time.
The place was packed with 2,000 people. By far my biggest show to date, I was nervous. Two years earlier, I’d had a severe panic attack, my first ever, just minutes before our set. But we’d rehearsed plenty, and felt strong about the 3 songs we’d chosen to perform. Biz Markie was 2 hours late so the crowd was angry and restless by the time we hit the stage. Still underground and unknown, our group’s name wasn’t even on the flyer. We were introduced as a group from Los Angeles at the height of the East/West Coast beef. A chorus of boos rained down.
After our first song, a massive wave of hateful vitriol rained down on us from all corners of the theater. Folks were yelling, cursing, telling us to get the hell off the stage. They hadn’t paid to see us, and they made it known. We couldn’t see anyone from the stage because of the blinding spotlights in our faces. But we could feel them.
We started our second song and knew immediately we were in for a fight for our artistic lives. I remember I was mid-verse, trying to block out the boos and keep my concentration on the intricate rhyme patterns and precise timing of my delivery when I had this realization. Mid-rhyme, I was looking at the metal grille on the microphone I was holding just an inch from my lips. And I instinctively recognized that I simply could not let all this hate infiltrate the sacred space between my lips and my mic.
At that moment, I doubled down on myself, and on everything I’d already given to developing my craft, to living out my dream. So did my partner. The two of us, backed by our stellar deejay, proceeded unfazed, ignited by the intensity of the moment, a trial by fire. After the second song, it was half boos, half clapping. And after the third, everyone applauded.
As a white rapper coming up in the post-Vanilla Ice and pre-Eminem mid-90s, I had to prove myself over and over again. I had to commit to getting good. To daily practice. To daily doubters. To developing the level of skill that can silence doubt. And turn it into praise. Not because I wanted to prove anyone wrong. But because I needed to prove to myself that I belonged.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a visual artist working on a series of portraits honoring my Italian American ancestors, who for various reasons, are still virtually invisible in fine art. My grandparents Grace and Angelo, who had 11 children and still centered me and my siblings in their lives, were so important to me growing up that I want to commemorate them and everything they stood for. I don’t want their memory to die with me. And due in part to my 20-year career as a rapper and hip-hop producer and the lessons I learned about race as a white artist in Black and Brown culture, I am also interested in documenting the shifting identities Southern Italians have embodied since arriving in the United States as expendable labor, from demonized dark-skinned “other” to violent defenders of whiteness, and everything in between. It’s always bothered me that they don’t teach the truth in school, especially in terms of U.S. history. It’s mostly smoke and mirrors. So with my art, I want to pull the wool off our eyes and show clearly how race and racism are made in America, through both choice and coercion, by examining my people’s experiences in this country from 1880 to today. Using bright, intense color, gold leaf, cut-up paper, rich fabric, oil, and acrylic paint, I excavate the essence of our disappearing culture to create welcoming yet provocative space for the ongoing conversations around race, class, migration, and power currently reshaping the art world and Western society as a whole. There’s a lot of healing that needs to happen. So I use my art to bring all of us together — so we can celebrate our shared humanity and all the things we have in common — in our increasingly segregated, siloed communities.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Courage: being honest with myself at every stage of my life about who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do while I am alive and then being/doing it despite tremendous fear.
2. Humility: a consistent willingness to be a beginner over and over again, to look honestly at myself and my issues/weaknesses, and to identify the skills and attributes I know I need in order to be my true self. And then going about learning these skills, despite the inherent difficulties in being bad at something, which we all are when we first begin.
3. Spiritual Tools: When I was younger, no matter what I did, there was a nagging misery in me, from childhood trauma, the death of my mother when I was 2, and my father’s inability to deal with her death and his own personal issues while also raising us children. I vowed to be different. And I am. I’ve prioritized my own healing, and developing sharp tools for dealing with my stuff, for the past 25 years, thanks to great counseling with a wonderful mentor. Life is so much easier when you have good tools to serve you when the inevitable storms roll in.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I believe we must do both. For me, I always try to focus on my strengths. But inevitably, every so often, my journey takes me to a new level. And at this new level, there are things I must learn in order to proceed. I can’t simply rely on what I already know. I must grow. And this requires looking at my weaknesses, and spending some time analyzing what it is I know I want to do, what skills will be necessary to do that, and which of these skills I need to gain or improve upon. This is a cyclical process, like rings around a tree. It never fails. As long as I’m alive, I enjoy periods of creative output exploring a chosen process, theme, or motif, and then there comes a time when I am in need of new inspiration, a new process, a deeper relationship with myself and/or my work. And so, I have to sit in the unknown. I can’t simply do what I know how to do all my life and be happy or fulfilled. It is uncomfortable to grow. It is more uncomfortable to stay stuck in the same chrysalis without ever breaking out and getting our wings to fly onward into new realms of creative power. So I make friends with fear, and the unknown, and I start over, composting all my experiences and knowledge, and expanding on them by learning new things, which serve me at every new stage of life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.markguglielmo.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markguglielmo/
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4mLnoJV0RNcjlxNqd3q16O?si=-0ej4hR5RDm0LxHhNB3Zkw
Image Credits
Headshot photos by Isabella Dellolio. Artwork photos by Jim Gipe.
