excerpts from reviews

"What arises...in Amato's installations of photographs, paintings, and sculpture, often in combination... is more like a sensation: that of an exotic culture that cannot be identified precisely."
- William Zimmer, New York Times, Sunday, Feb 21, 2000

"These photographs owe a debt to Surrealism and Mexican Magic Realism...the double eyes recall Picasso's use of multiple eyes as a manifestation of the shamanistic power of vision...(recalling) 12th century fresco representations of the Mystic Lamb with multiple eyes...and Persian art, where a third eye is a sign of clairvoyance."

"In the face of troubling history, Amato's photographs and installations suggest reconciliation rather than recrimination...linked to being in a healing garden, a version of paradise."
- Robert S. Mattison, "Micaela Amato/A Healing Garden," Women's Art Journal, Summer 2001, pages 40-43

"Micaela Amato has been blessed and cursed with memory...By constructing her ancestral past, she says, she is giving herself a future...Since Jewish history has consisted of so many exiles, so much banishment, the homeland is in the head, the mind, the book, the family."

"She compares both blood and memory to the stream of life, its ever changing flow, quoting Rabindranath Tagore: 'the same stream that flows through my veins flows through the universe in rhythmic measure.'"
- Lucy Lippard, Tijuana Tavolettas:Conte Hondo, page 5 2000

"...Amato cleverly reworks elements of Spanish and Mediterranean visual cultures to form contrapuntal commentaries on her own and her family's nomadic identity...a self that is mediated by multiple locations and times...Amato condenses portraits and unites them in a palimpsest of selves. The resulting image is both autobiographical and profoundly art historical in its self-conscious allusions to conventions of portraiture."
- Sarah Rich, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS:women and self-representation in contemporary art, 2004, pages 25,26,27, Penn State University Press