In 1965, Joseph Pasquale Aulisio painted a portrait of his former employee, Frank Peters, who worked as a tailor at Lease Dry Cleaners, the establishment that Aulisio founded in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1929. The portrait is a remarkably unvarnished study of the architecture of flesh. Folds in Peters’s face appear both soft and hard, like molded plastic. Each gnarled knuckle and vein in his hands is delineated, testifying to his work as a tailor, and reinforced by the tape measure that he hugs fast against his body. His light-color eyes are unflinching and piercing behind horn-rimmed eyeglasses. What cannot be apparent is that this is a posthumous portrait, a reflection of Aulisio’s memory of his longtime employee who had died years previously in 1954. The portrait is a nod to a significant tradition of capturing loved ones in oil on canvas to be remembered by generations to come—a tradition that transitioned to the prolific post- mortem photographic image captured on metal and glass plates and, later, paper.

Aulisio was the son of Giorgio and Rosina Aulisio, Italian immigrants who came to America in 1898. They were among the vast wave to enter through the port of New York City. They made their way to a growing Italian community in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, where Giorgio found work as a coal miner in the anthracite coal mining industry. Joseph was born in Old Forge in 1910. After graduating from high school, he briefly studied forestry, and worked for a time as a forest ranger before returning to start Lease Dry Cleaners, a play on his family name, Aulisio. Frank Peters was born in Poland in 1882, and immigrated to the United States in 1902, taking up residence in Taylor, Lackawanna, Pennsylvania. In 1918, his draft registration card listed his occupation as coal miner; it is not known when Peters took up tailoring. Today, Lease Dry Cleaners continues to operate as a family-run business.

Stacy C. Hollander, “Joseph Pasquale Aulisio,” exhibition brochure for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020).

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated with new research. Records are reviewed and revised, and the American Folk Art Museum welcomes additional information.　

To help improve this record, please email photoservices@folkartmuseum.org