We are excited to welcome our two new Spring Fellows—Sophia Farmer and Fabio Cafagna—to CIMA, as part of our Giorgio de Chirico and Giulio Paolini season. They join Maria Bremer and Giovanni Casini, who have been here since September.
Sophia hails from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is completing her PhD. Her dissertation focuses on the importance of the machine era to the development of Futurist anthropomorphic objects and imagery. For her CIMA Fellowship she will be examining the role of citation, repetition and appropriation in the works of Giorgio de Chirico and Giulio Paolini as a way to better understand the ironic perspective presented by Italian artworks that celebrate kitsch, pastiche, and parody in the twentieth century.
Fabio is the first-ever MiBACT-SNS-CIMA Fellow. This new six-month fellowship, which focuses in particular on post-1970 Italian art history, is funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture (Ministero dei beni e delle attivita’ culturali e del turismo) and organized in collaboration with CIMA’s academic partner in Italy, the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. Fabio completed a Ph.D. in history of art criticism at La Sapienza – University of Rome (2015); his research project there entailed the reconstruction of the history of the chair of artistic anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin in the 19th century.
During his time at CIMA, he plans to examine the relationships that the US gallery director John Weber had with the Italian artistic avant-garde. He is focusing in particular on the period between the opening of Weber’s New York-based gallery (1971) and the end of the first fruitful decade of activity (1981), when he finally moved away from the famous SoHo Art Building, 420 West Broadway. During these years, the Italian presence was far from accidental. In fact, Weber was one of the most important American dealers of Italian art, and the program of exhibitions he held clearly shows his deep knowledge of Italian contemporary aesthetic research. If examined through a solid core of data, John Weber’s activity will reveal the connections between the growing US art market and the constitution of an Italian aesthetic canon.
CIMA’s fellowship is open to art historians and those in related disciplines, of any nationality. Art history is practiced very differently in different countries, and it is one of the hopes of CIMA’s program to bring together scholars from diverse methodological trainings to enjoy an immersive art historical experience at CIMA, learning from each other in a collaborative environment and taking advantage of the rich opportunities of New York’s cultural landscape.
We are thrilled that this year we have a very international group in residence: Maria Bremer from the Frei Universitaet of Berlin, Giovanni Casini from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Sophia Farmer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Fabio Cafagna from Italy.
Each fellow has his or her own approach to the exhibition, and thus every visit to CIMA is a new experience, a new encounter with these works, full of fresh insights. Come get to know these wonderful young scholars, and get to know de Chirico and Paolini with them! Giovanni is on a six-month fellowship and will be here until early March. Maria is a full-year fellow, and will be here—together with Fabio and Sophia—until the end of the exhibition in June. Book your visit today!
In addition to the main fellowship program at CIMA, we also offer a Travel Fellowship each year, to support the work of someone not based in Italy who wishes to conduct research in Italy, typically related either to a thesis or book project. This year CIMA has two Travel Fellows, Silvia Bottinelli and Rae di Cicco.
Silvia is a full-time faculty member in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Art – Tufts University. For her CIMA travel fellowship, Silvia will be conducting research at libraries and archives in Bologna, Florence, Rome, Milan, Rovereto, and Turin. Silvia’s findings will support the arguments articulated by her book in progress, which focuses on the representation of the domestic in Italian art and visual culture between 1942 and 1972.
Rae is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her Travel Fellowship focuses on the South Tyorlian-born Austrian-Italian artist Erika Giovanna Klien and her collaborations and communication with Italian Futurists, primarily Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Enrico Prampolini.
All of our fellows contribute occasionally to CIMA’s blog. CIMA’s Fellows here in NYC often report on exhibitions or programs or other events (read for example Giovanni’s post on the Picabia show now at MoMA, or Maria’s post on the October program at CIMA with Germano Celant). Our travel fellows often send reports from the road about their experiences in the archives in Italy. So, check back frequently!
The Call for Fellows for next season (2017-18) is open now! The deadline is January 30th.
