LUCIA AUTORINO SALEMME'S URBAN DREAMSCAPES

Her mother thought her precociously talented high school daughter was learning art so she could become a fashion illustrator. But Lucia Autorino Salemme didn't draw the skinny, angular models fashion illustration requires.

"They were all like Old Master drawings," says the 79-year-old Salemme, whose work now is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the Chicago Art Institute.

Instead of models, Salemme became known for abstract, prismatic compositions which often depicted New York landscapes. "Hers is a personal vision of place, suffused with affection, nostalgia, hope and wonder," University Museum Director Dr. Jenny Strayer writes in her introduction to the catalogue for Salemme's current show at the museum.

Strayer quotes a decades-old artist's statement by Salemme herself, who wrote: "I paint my vision as a half remembered world, whose relationship to concrete reality is softened and made tolerable by the introduction of dream memories."

The show is titled "Lucia Autorino Salemme: In Place of This."

Salemme will attend the opening reception from 4-7 p.m. Friday. She also will speak at 10:45 a.m. Friday in Kent Library's Little Theatre.

In an interview from her home in New York City, Salemme described growing up there during the Great Depression and said encouragement from adults was important to her early development.

Her father brought her paper from a local bakery to draw on when she was only 5 or 6.

When she was still in elementary school, Salemme created her own comic strip, "Maisie the Model." Her classmates would wait to see it every day.

Then her teacher spotted a strip in which Maisie was standing naked in front of a mirror saying, "What shall I wear today?"

The teacher made her stay after class, but her punishment was to make Christmas decorations for the room.

Salemme was very happy.

Her high school art teacher hired live models and locked the door so her students -- all girls -- could learn figure drawing.

"She would say, Now girls, there's nothing more beautiful than the human body."

Though Salemme intended to become a commercial artist, the teacher told her to forget about applying to design schools. "She said, Of all my students, you're the only one who's going to be a real artist."

The teacher loaned her the tuition for the Art Students League.

Salemme began to flourish as an artist at a time when Klee, Miro and Chagall all were coming to the city. "New York was booming with art," she said. "The museums were not the sideshows they are today."

"...I lived in the Metropolitan Museum. The museums were like churches. You just went quietly."

She married Attilio Salemme, who has his own reputation in the New York art world. Though some artists married to other artists have had trouble getting individual recognition, Salemme said the relationship was only helpful.

"I could never had been married to a businessman," she said. "We were in perfect tune. He certainly encouraged me. He thought I should be the best woman painter in the country," she said, laughing.

She has taught painting at the Art Students League, the Museum of Modern Art and New York University. She also has written three texts about painting: "Color Exercises for the Painter," "Compositional Exercises for the Painter" and "The Complete Book of Painting Techniques." But these are more encouragement for the artist because she is convinced that artists are born, not made.

"Either you have it or you haven't. Some children love to draw, some children love music, some like to hammer things, others like to break things," she said.

"...These are all natural gifts we're born with. If adults are sympathetic they will encourage it."