Little Things Gallery
October 2010 through October 2011

About the Collector

Mark Nicolussi was born and raised in Pittsburgh, but has lived in Erie for the past twenty-five years. He spent nearly twenty years collecting refrigerator emblems, beginning in the early 1980’s.

Initially, he pried the emblems off with a screwdriver, but to prevent damage Nicolussi developed a technique of dissecting the entire door and taking the emblems out from behind. His first piece, a knight’s visor with a blue Lucite background, came from a Kelvinator, one of the first companies to sell mechanical refrigeration units.

Each piece has been chosen for its design, rarity, and craftsmanship; the collection features emblems of 1945-1970, what Nicolussi calls the “Golden Age of Refrigerators”. “The fact that you can make a beautiful machine is certainly of interest to me,” says Nicolussi, who has worked at Erie’s General Electric plant as an engineer since 1985.

Nicolussi’s collection is made almost entirely of found pieces, discovered along roadsides, in creek beds, in scrap yards, and even in an abandoned drive-in movie theatre. “I never met any other refrigerator emblem collectors,” Nicolussi recalls, “Although, towards the end of my career I did, on a couple of occasions, find refrigerators without emblems. It was only once or twice, but I remember really being shocked. I thought, ‘Oh my God, was I here before?’ Well, I knew that I hadn’t been. So there’s at least somebody out there.”