Mario G Alberico, Artist, Advocate and Advisor, President & Founder of Gallery 119 Inc, and a semi-retired Managing Director for Accenture, a $65 global management consulting, technology, and digital services company. He has been a professional artist and curator for over 25 years and has chaired several non-profit boards focused on social services and healthcare issues – specifically cancer, disabilities, and suicide. His work is informed from over 40 years as a long-term survivor of a rare pediatric cancer (Ewing’s Sarcoma), and his bachelor's degree in art history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2021, he became a member of the board of directors for Intermedia Projects, a global art-science nonprofit, and joined the board of advisors of Legacy Concierge, a cyber-security startup company.
 
Mario’s LIFE PHILOSOPHY is that creative becoming emerges from the “both/and” principle that honors voices of difference, wades into the tensions of opposites, and generates resilience within polarities to overcome the tyranny of “either/or”. In practice, this is how he helps individuals and organizations realize the potential they don’t know possible, takes what is stuck inside them, and reworks it into new forms that release unseen abundance already present in their personal or corporate systems. Below is a link to an article on Huffington Post that featured this “both/and” philosophy.
 
His realization as an ARTIST emerged during his two-year clinical trial of experimental chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Art became a creative outlet for the emotional experiences of a life with cancer through a series of intense, raw self-portraits that captured the toll of his physical and emotional trauma. When he combined them with his research of Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” and Kierkegaard’s “Leap of Faith”, the auto ethnographic essay “Creation Through Suffering” was the result. Mario’s body of art and research represents a unique bridge at the nexus of art, business, science, and healthcare. Created using intermedia methods, his art explores the paradox of trauma conjoined with the magnificence of being and presents propositions about art’s power to transcend suffering and celebrate life. Mario’s artworks and installations have been shown in galleries, museums, exhibitions, online, and public sites throughout the United States. He donates a portion of the proceeds from the sales of his artworks, and other artists he represents in Gallery 119, to charitable organizations that are consistent with his experiences and purpose.
 
Semi-retired because of multiple disabilities from late effects of cancer treatment, he uses his career expertise as an ADVISOR to c-suite executives, consults small companies and nonprofits, and mentors individuals from undergrad through retirement to make optimal decisions at critical junctions in their lives. In his senior leadership roles at two Global 500 corporations, and as an officer at the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange, Mario has been at the forefront of major transformations that have changed our society’s uses of money. Across bedrock changes in capital markets and banking, his work for nearly three decades contributed to the design of businesses and products at the heart of sociological change in the uses of capital and cash.
 
As an ADVOCATE he was Chairperson of the STAR Patient Advisory Board of the Lurie Cancer Center at Northwestern Hospital, dedicated to the long-term wellbeing of adult survivors of pediatric cancer, and continuing education for healthcare professionals unfamiliar with such patients’ unique needs. He was on the board of trustees, and Vice Chair, of The Cornerstone Foundation of the Lutheran Social Services of Illinois, the state’s largest social services agency for over 75,000 people with a variety of needs. Aa a founding board member of Compass to Care, a non-profit organization dedicated to enabling travel arrangements for families required to get their children to the best cancer care possible, he guided them from startup to sustainability. Currently, as Chair of Vision & Strategy on the board of a 160-year-old, 1000-member religious institution in the Chicago area, he has led a multi-year effort to transform governance and leadership, instituted a survey (with 45% participation) of the members for key insights to lead the change from their roots as a traditional neighborhood, clergy-controlled church, into a congregation centric, social services community hub.