The son of two celebrated Upper Valley arts educators who grew up in Hartland has joined the growing community of artists and craftspeople enlivening the second floor of the historic Bridgewater Mill.

Pete Landis, a year 2000 graduate of WUHS who has spent the last 20 years as a practicing residential architect in New York and Rhode Island, returned to the region with his family last year and in February opened the Pete Landis Studio at the sprawling former textile mill on Route 4 alongside the Ottauquechee River at the gateway to Bridgewater Center.

This weekend, Landis will take his next step as an artist, collector, and curator when he opens the pseudonymously named Pietro Landi Gallery adjacent to his studio at the mill. The first show in the region’s newest contemporary art gallery will feature Landis’ own energetic collages, as well as works by renowned street artist Banksy and Shepard Fairey, the acclaimed creator of the iconic Barack Obama “Hope” poster from 2008.

“I want to show my own work in the gallery,” Landis said on Monday as he led a visitor on a tour of his studio and offered a sneak peek at the inaugural gallery exhibit that will open with a special reception this Saturday evening. “This is the kind of work I started during the pandemic. It’s collage work and it looks back to some of my previous work when I was working more sculpturally. I was taking pre-existing things, found objects and such, and putting them together in a kind of collage approach, although I was working with them three-dimensionally.

“The gallery won’t focus just on my art, however,” Landis continued. “The opening exhibit will include pieces by some friends of mine from my college days and works from the New York street art scene.” Of special note are works by Fairey that are a visual shout-out to the earlier Pop Art works of Andy Warhol and a poster by Banksy, promoting one of the ephemeral, guerrilla street artist’s infrequent gallery exhibits about a decade ago.

Landis’ emerging “Cyborg” series of collage works are, however, the centerpiece of the inaugural exhibit in the Pietro Landi Gallery.  One wall of the gallery is dominated by more than 20 small, prototype collage works that will eventually be transformed to a larger format when art collectors purchase them. Landis spoke about his process as he stood before one of the larger-scale works in the upcoming exhibit.

“This is the way I intend to have my work shown. The smaller works on the wall there are mock-ups,” Landis explained. “This larger-scale work is a dye transfer onto an aluminum sheet. It has a flush frame, but I want people to see this thin edge, which is a kind of callback to the magazine page,” he continued, referencing the fact that virtually all the collages in the “Cyborg” series have as their base images photographs clipped from the pages of high-fashion magazines collected by Landis’ wife, Megan, an interior designer with Sargent Design Company in Norwich.

Read more in the June 15 edition of the Vermont Standard.