J.M. Wasko grew up in White Oak, Pennsylvania. After a
year of interdisciplinary study at the Cook Honors College at Indiana
University of Pennsylvania, Wasko was accepted upon exhibition-based review in
2011 into its College of Fine Arts Bachelor of Fine Arts program in Studio Art
to concentrate in sculpture as expanded media. Pursuing additional studies in
history, art history and arts business, he expects to graduate in 2014.
In 2012, Wasko became an alumnus of Gettysburg College
after being one of four students accepted to the nation’s only Civil War Era
Studies Department's Gettysburg Semester
program. With experience in drawing, painting, printmaking, fibers, 35mm photography,
sculpture, metalworking and woodworking, Wasko has exhibited and
instructed art since 2008 at galleries, independent firms, and museums in the Pittsburgh,
Greensburg, and Indiana areas.
Since 2011, the 150th anniversary of the
beginning of the American Civil War, Wasko has been building a body of sculptural
performances and crafted artifacts. He utilizes the vehicular subject of the war’s
nineteenth century material culture to drive his pieces. With the background of
an avid living historian, he investigates identity and the self by taking on
personas. By its conclusion in 2015, he aims to have achieved incontestable
authenticity in his forms and accuracy of narrative content in the
artistic appropriation of an historical event.
