Roman De Salvo

Roman de Salvo (born 1965) is a contemporary American conceptual artist who creates sculpture and installation art.

Roman de Salvo was born in San Francisco, California, in 1965 and grew up in Reno, Nevada. De Salvo graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. In 1995 he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, San Diego. De Salvo lives and works in San Diego. He has shown professionally throughout the United States and in Europe, including at the Whitney Biennial (2000), the Musee d’Art Americain Giverny (2000), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (1998, 2001, 2006), The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art (2002), the Seattle Art Museum (2003), the Public Art Fund in New York (2003) and the Nevada Museum of Art (2004).

Roman de Salvo creates installation and public art. Rain Bow, one of his first interactive public works, was displayed in the San Diego Natural History Museum in 1994. It included a drinking fountain with a small window and window blinds. When the drinking fountain handle was turned, the blinds opened to reveal an image of the park outside the museum with a rainbow overhead. In another work from the same year entitled Zurn Fountain, the flushing of a public toilet activated the eruption of a small geyser from a drain in the restroom floor.

In the 1998 work Garden Guardians, video game joysticks were mounted on the outdoor patios of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The manipulation of these joysticks produced an emission of fragrant mist. Ten years later, de Salvo completed The Legway for the New Children’s Museum. This mechanism is a human-powered version of the Segway Personal Transporter.

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