Un Sedicesimo 75

In 2022, as a recipient of an NYC Artist Corp Grant, Vecchio created 31 Degrees (Fahrenheit = 17°Celsius), a public project that aims to bring attention to issues of climate and environmental injustice.

The project title takes its name from a collaborative study that heat mapped several cities in North America. The study demonstrates how poor communities and communities of color are disproportionately negatively impacted by heat. And moreover, that climate inequality follows the same patterns of income inequality.

The drawings, inspired by the work of Dürer and Altorfer, will be transformed into site specific murals to bring some arboreal beauty to neighborhoods where walls are more prevalent than trees.

Riccardo Vecchio is an internationally recognized artist, lecturer, illustrator, and Chair of the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program at The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. The recipient of numerous awards, his multifaceted work is routinely published in “The New Yorker”, “The New York Times”, “New York Magazine”, Feltrinelli Editore, “Die Zeit”, “Rolling Stone”, “National Geographic”, “Vanity Fair”, “Wired”, and several Broadway, and off-Broadway productions.