Pietro Costa (Sant’Arsenio, Salerno, 1960) currently lives and works between Italy and New York, where he moved in 1972.

Costa began his artistic practice in New York in the early 1980s, by exploring the relationship between image and object, real and represented space, art-making and ritual. Since then he has employed a wide range of materials and processes which have included the use of cast materials, hand-blown and cut glass, various types of mirrors, neon, incandescent and natural light, words, live fire fueled by combustible fluids and gasses and his own blood and the blood of donors. 

His most recent project /ri.tràt.ti / pôr trāts/ (April-July, 2022) was exhibited at the Museo di Palazzo Pretorio in Prato, Italy. Both the exhibition and the catalog (published by Silvana Editoriale), were curated by Chiara Spangaro, independent curator and curatore scientifico of Fondazione Aldo Rossi.
The exhibition focused on a group of portraits, made between 2019-2022, using each subjects’ own blood (bloodworks) and various methods of photographic printing. The exhibition was conceived by the artist as a site-specific project in dialogue with the museum’s rich collection of medieval religious portraiture. The artist involved numerous residents of the city of Prato including: Giuliano Gori founder of Fattorie di Celle and two generations of his family (The Gori Family Portrait, 2019), musician Riccardo Onori and author Sandro Veronesi . One of the works from the exhibition (Carlo, 2022) became part of the museum's permanent collection, installed among the other historic works. The exhibition was featured and reviewed by La Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Tirreno, La Freccia (May 2022), Prato Review, LEFT magazine, and online by Artribune and MemeCult.

Costa’s work Good blood/Bad blood (1993) is part of the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He was awarded a NYFA-New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2007.

Critical essays on his work have been written by Chiara Spangaro, Robert Morgan, Albert Mobilio and Robert Mahoney. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Arts Magazine, among other journals, radio and television in the United States and Italy. 

Costa’s rich life experiences include 14 years as exhibition specialist & installation manager with the Guggenheim Museums: New York, Venice and Bilbao, working on the installation of most of the museum’s exhibitions in the US and abroad from 1982-1996. In this capacity he also oversaw the production of major works for numerous artists, including Mario Merz, Enzo Cucchi and Dan Flavin alongside notable curators: Germano Celant, Carmen Giménez, Walter Hopps. He worked with the sculptor Richard Serra as engineering, fabrication and installation manager, producing all of Serra’s large-scale work and installing his exhibitions at Matthew Marks Gallery, Gagosian Gallery, DIA Center for the Arts, New York, MOCA, Los Angeles and Serra’s permanently installed work in the Guggenheim Bilbao, from 1996-1999.

He is founder of two non-profit organizations that cultivate interdisciplinary collaborations: Luquer Street Projects, (2001-ongoing) which promotes collaborations between visual artists, poets and writers and publishes their works and BACAS - Borghi Antichi Cultura Arti e Scienze (2018-ongoing), a center for culture, the arts and sciences, with programming in the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in southern Italy, the artist’s birthplace. During the launch (2018) BACAS received extensive press coverage: RAI 1, RAI 3, Canale 5, La Repubblica, Il Mattino, Marie Claire, and numerous others.

Costa’s interest in architectural space, design and the natural environment have drawn him to complete numerous projects in concert with his art practice. He has restored numerous turn-of-the-century residences, designed a line of one-of-a-kind furniture pieces and designed & built his own studio in the Hudson Valley, New York.

He has also undertaken environmental projects (ongoing) of land and habitat restoration on the property surrounding his studio in the Hudson Valley, New York and in the mountains surrounding his hometown in Italy.

Costa earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College/CUNY, has taught drawing and anatomy at the Parsons School of Design.

Since 2020, he is the New York ambassador for Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Terzo Paradiso, promoting social change through community based art initiatives.