STAGING INJUSTICE: ITALIAN ART 1880–1917

The exhibition, including approximately 20 artworks from Italian museums and first-rate private collections, focuses on four main iconographic themes, exploring how painters and sculptors elaborated and adjourned them through a confrontation with the contradictions of contemporary society.  Migration, labor, protest, and social injustice are the fields of intervention that marked the reality of the artists at the center of CIMA’s project—topics whose importance resonates to this very day, both in Italy and in the United States.

Artworks by fifteen artists offer a cross-section of the most advanced Italian artistic production of the time. The show includes heterogenous perspectives, styles, and formal languages, which reflect the artists’ diverse backgrounds in terms of location, training, and their varied alignment with the pictorial tendencies and tastes of that era. The exhibition will thus also become a dialogue between artists who came from different areas of the country, and who were educated in distinct academic contexts.

As always, CIMA’s exhibitions result from the curator’s deep knowledge on the selected topic, but also function as catalyst for new research by our fellows who, in an international setting, gain and share with the public new insights on the themes of the show. The annual exhibition catalogue that CIMA produces functions as a tangible memento that carries a visual memory of the exhibition, with installation views and high quality photo-reproductions of individual works shown, which are color corrected on site next to the originals.

All the studies resulting from the fellows’ research during the exhibition season will be included in an issue of CIMA’s accredited academic online journal, Italian Modern Art, after the end of the exhibition itself, as was the case for our previous exhibitions.

CIMA’s role as international study center and museum incubator that fosters the rise of new art-historical points of view, inverts the traditional process of an exhibition resulting from extensive research: we instead curate an exhibit, and invite young scholars to study in close contact with the works on view for several months, allowing them to develop ideas and research themes whose proceedings are then gathered and published in our Journal.