Utica: Then and Now

Exhibition runs from February 18th through March 14th, 2025.

Opening Reception:Tuesday, February 25 • 12-2 pm

About the show:

Utica: Then and Now commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Larry Pacilio’s powerful first exhibition - East Utica: 1973-74—the first one-person photography show at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute. “East Utica” featured 50 photographs, mostly of local Italian American life when the immigrant generation was passing on. Twenty-six of those photographs—preserved in the collections of the Oneida County History Center—are displayed here for the first time since 1975.

To complement Pacilio’s work, the Oneida County History Center, in collaboration with the Utica Public Library, assembled over 30 photographs of the ethnic communities across Utica that have added new vibrancy to this community in recent years. The faces and the cultures have changed, but these images demonstrate that Utica’s story remains a very American story, as this community and this country have always changed thanks to newcomers.

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Utica Then:

Larry Pacilio has been a working professional photographer for over fifty years. Educated at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, his career began as an editorial and documentary photographer. In this capacity, he published nationally and internationally in publications such as The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, The New York Times, Newsweek, Paris Match, and The Guardian. Additionally, he has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions over the course of these past five decades.

Photography has been both vocation and avocation for over a half-century. From his earliest days as a Boy Scout earning a merit badge in the Observer-Dispatch darkroom, the practice remains a source of magic and joy.

In the early 1980s, he relocated to the desert Southwest, photographing commercial and residential architecture, as well as editorial and industrial projects for a long list of architects, interior designers, developers, manufacturers, and corporations throughout the West, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest. This work has been published in many broad circulation periodicals such as Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Better Homes & Gardens, Metropolitan Home, Adirondack Life, Phoenix Home & Gardens, Newsweek, Arizona Highways, Fine Homebuilding, and Historic Preservation.

Returning to Utica, he was employed by Utica College as Director of Publications & Photography, retiring from that position at the close of 2016. Additionally, he taught at the college, serving as Adjunct Professor of Journalism for fifteen years.

He continues to pursue personal projects for exhibition, work that has been exhibited as both solo and group shows at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art, the Schenectady Museum, the Balch Institute, the Barrett Gallery at Utica College, the Kirkland Art Center, the Earlville Opera House, and the Light Work Gallery.

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Utica Now: