Max Crivello


Max Crivello is an Italian artist, illustrator, and art cartoonist.

History

He was born in Palermo. After completing regular artistic studies, Crivello travelled and worked both in Italy and internationally.
His artistic activity has ranged from painting to graphic design to comics: in 1975 he began to exhibit his art and to collaborate with various editors in producing graphic art pages, book illustrations and comic strips. Beginning in 1986 he worked as an independent cartoonist and professional illustrator for the Giornale di Sicilia and since 1987 he has completed various works of public art. During his career Crivello has worked with Dino Buzzati and was associated with the painter Renato Guttuso and with the poet Giacomo Giardina.
Crivello serves as Staff Lecturer at the National Art School in Monreale. Before taking on this role in 1997, he had already founded the Scuola siciliana del fumetto, an unstructured not-for-profit institution with no official staff. Prior to the school's closing in 2001 at Crivello's behest, it offered free mini-courses, exhibitions and seminars on Sequential and Visual Art, aimed at preventing teenage drop-out and disengagement while encouraging young people to continue their studies in school.
After some years Crivello turned to painting, producing cycles of works dedicated to imaginary characters of the world of fables and stories.
In 2004, with the four-panel story Crash Day, a free interpretation of the tragic September 11th attack in New York, Crivello's students Riccardo Ferrigno and Luciano Spaccapietra won the Comic Stories prize of the Dervio International Cartoons and Comics Festival in the secondary school division.
Crivello organized exhibitions and demonstrations with the sponsorship of the city of Palermo and the Sicilian Regional Labor Council and Tourism Council, of which the most noteworthy were the International Exhibition on Pinocchio, and the pre-release exhibition show against the Mafia, Mafia: Architecture of a Pain, dedicated to the memory of the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The struggle against the Mafia is a subject of great concern to Crivello.
Also noteworthy is the publication of the mini-series The Excellent Ones, comic strips dedicated to victims of the Mafia, illustrated by Crivello's students and sponsored by the Regional Province of Palermo in 2000.
Crivello's current projects include one on mobbing: THE MOB. This project foresees an exhibition of illustrations and the publication of a minibook with the history of mobbing, as well as its causes and effects, with texts by various authors collected in Palermo in February 2007.

Work

Portfolios of prints

The most important since 1975 are: