Corrado Cagli Study Day
January 25, 2024, 10:00 AM - 06:00 PM
General admission: $15. Members and Students: Free
Keynote speaker: Dr. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
The exhibition Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948, curated by Raffaele Bedarida and on view in New York at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) through January 27, 2024, is dedicated to the Jewish Italian artist Corrado Cagli (1910-1976) and sheds light on Cagli’s captivating human and intellectual journey during his transformative years in the United States, from 1939 to 1948.
With this Corrado Cagli Study Day, CIMA’s Research Fellows join prominent and emerging scholars to investigate the themes at the center of the exhibition within and outside of established critical frameworks.
The conference will take place in person at the Center for Italian Modern Art, and will include a keynote address followed by scholarly panels.
Conference Program
10AM – Registration and breakfast buffet
10:30AM – Keynote address
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Castello di Rivoli – Museo di Arte Contemporanea, Turin), Artisti in guerra / Artists In a Time of War. A Sadly Topical Exhibition
11:30AM – Panel 1 – Politics of Representation: Fascism, its Arts, and their Circulation
Joseph Perna (NYU), Circulatory Systems; Terni ’34, Rome ’38
Lorenzo Carletti (Liceo Artistico F. Russoli, Pisa, and Università di Pisa), Cristiano Giometti (Università di Firenze), MoMA, Summer 1940: Fascism and Democracy in a Never Realized Exhibition
Cristiana Antonelli (Università di Pisa), The War Quadriennal (1943): Rhetoric and Ambivalences in the Last Major Fascist Exhibition
Sophia Farmer (University of Arkansas – Fort Smith), Identity, Heritage, and Ecology: Questions of Ethics and Sustainability in the Preservation and (Re)Construction of Fascist Era Monuments
1PM – 2PM – Lunch break – Light buffet lunch will be provided
2PM – Panel 2 – Cagli’s Strategies in Context: Identity, Practice, Iconography
John Champagne (Penn State Behrend), Corrado Cagli and the Italian Vice. Reconfiguring the History of Modern Homosexuality
Filippo Bosco (Scuola Normale Superiore), Lines of Marginality: Dedication, Repetition, and Constraint in Cagli’s Draftsmanship of Exile
Caterina Caputo (IUAV, Venice), Corrado Cagli and the Surrealist Circle in New York in the 1940s: Artworks and Contexts
3:30PM – Panel 3 – Departures and Returns: Art in Times of Exile and Displacement
Rachel Perry (University of Haifa), Survivor Artists in Italy: Regina Lichter-Liron’s Holocaust Album, 1939-1945
Davide Spagnoletto (Università di Roma Tre), Jewish Roots in Exile: from Corrado Cagli to Dario Viterbo
Peter Benson Miller (Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio), Corrado Cagli and Eugene Berman: Partners in Exile
The Corrado Cagli Study Day at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of the Tiro a Segno Foundation.
Book Presentation and Discussion: Alessandro Giammei, “Ariosto in the Machine Age”
January 23, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Join us for a book presentation and panel discussion with author Alessandro Giammei (Yale University), Michele Matteini (New York University) and Emanuele Lugli (Stanford University), moderated by CIMA Fellow Filippo Bosco.
Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2024) reveals how the most influential poet of the Renaissance was conjured or appropriated to shape Magical Realism, avant-garde painting, Fascist cultural propaganda, and cinema in modern Italy between the birth of Futurism and the end of the Second World War.
Based on substantial archival findings, bold iconographic hypotheses, and novel interpretations of literary texts, the book proposes a new account of Italy’s twentieth-century culture through a unique take on Ludovico Ariosto’s early modern poetics and legacy. Starting from the unexpected passéism of Futurists visiting Ferrara on the eve of the First World War, it rereads the development of Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical art and Massimo Bontempelli’s Realismo Magico. The book reconstructs the multimedia archive of the Fascist initiatives for the 1933 centennial anniversary of Ariosto’s death, and then focuses on the passage between Fascist cinema and the birth of neorealism, unearthing unfinished adaptations of the Orlando Furioso by Luchino Visconti and Alessandro Blasetti. Questioning the very concept of reception, this radically interdisciplinary book warns twenty-first-century readers about the risks of monumentalizing the “great authors” of the past.
Alessandro Giammei is Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies at Yale University. He specializes in modern and contemporary literature and art, questioning their fantasies of genealogical roots in early modern and classical cultures. Trained as a philologist and a literary historian in Italy, he moved to the US to hybridize his research and pedagogy with Queer theory, speculative realism, trans-historical and trans-national perspectives.
Alessandro’s first monograph, Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja (edizioni del verri 2014), won the Harvard Edition of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2015. He co-wrote Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso, 2023, with Ara H. Merjian) and Giulia Niccolai (Quodlibet, 2022, with Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri). He translated Arthur Conan Doyle’s treatise on spirit photography (Fotografare gli spiriti, Marsilio, 2022) and the letters between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (Ti basta l’Atlantico?, nottetempo, 2021, with Chiara Valerio). He authored Una serie ininterrotta di gesti riusciti (Marsilio, 2018), a book of auto-theory and critical fabulation on Fitzgerald and Central New Jersey. His popular essay on gender and objects, Cose da maschi (Einaudi, 2023), was shortlisted for the Bridge Literary Award.
Alessandro is currently working on two short monographs: one about Shakespeare’s ghost in the philology and spiritism of fascist Italy, commissioned by the series Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text, and Il rinascimento è uno zombie, forthcoming with Einaudi. Besides numerous scientific journals and volumes, his essays and translations appeared in The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Nuovi Argomenti, and Flash Art. He regularly writes for national newspapers in Italy, such as Domani and il manifesto.
Emanuele Lugli (Stanford University) specializes in Renaissance Italian art and architecture. As a specialist in the history of measurements, he has published a trilogy on the subject (the latest installment being Measuring in the Renaissance: An Introduction, published by Cambridge University Press). In his most recent book, Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence (Chicago University Press, 2023), Lugli explores the metamorphosis of hair into a repository of moral and erotic ideals during the time of Sandro Botticelli.
Michele Matteini is Associate Professor at the Department of Art History, New York University, and Associate Faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts. He specializes in Chinese painting of the 18th and 19th centuries with special interests in the relationship between painting and antiquarian studies, the material culture of Buddhism, and inter-Asian cultural exchanges. His book, A Ghost in the City: Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China was published in June this year.
Light refreshments will be provided
Public programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Tiro a Segno Foundation.
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Juan Sánchez in conversation with Alejandro Anreus
January 09, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for the final episode in a series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Juan Sánchez and Alejandro Anreus.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948, and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Born to working-class Puerto Rican immigrants in Brooklyn, NY, Juan Sánchez is an influential American visual artist, and one of the most important Nuyorican cultural figures of the latter 20th century. Maintaining an activist stance for over four decades, his art is an arena of creative and political inquiry that encompasses the individual, family, the communities with which he engages, and the world at large. Sánchez emerged as a central figure in a generation of artists using diverse media to explore ethnic, racial, national identity and social justice in 1980s and ’90s.
While Sánchez first gained recognition for his large multi-layered mixed media collage paintings addressing issues of Puerto Rican identity and the struggle against U.S. colonialism, his work has evolved to embrace photography, printmaking, and video. Sánchez exhibited and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. His art is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio, El Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam,Havana, Cuba, the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art, The National Museum of African American History & Culture and The National Portrait Gallery and the Mead Museum of Art.
In 2022 Juan Sánchez received the Artist Legacy Foundation Artist Legacy Award and in 2021 The US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) the Latinx Artist Fellowship. He was the recipient of the 2020 CUAA Augustus Saint-Gaudens Achievement in the Visual Art Award and was inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame. Sánchez received other awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Juan Sánchez is Professor of Art at Hunter College, The City University of New York.
Alejandro Anreus was born in Havana, Cuba to a working class family. He went into exile at the age of ten with his mother, grandmother and two aunt’s, settling in Elizabeth, NJ.
He receive his BA in art history from Kean College, where he was mentored by Marxist art historian Alan Wallach. He received his MA and PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was curator at the Montclair Art Museum (1987-93), and at the Jersey City Museum (1993-2001). From 2001-2023 he was professor of art history and Latin American/Latinx Studies at William Paterson University. In Fall 2023 he was the Lauder Visiting Senior Scholar at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, National Gallery of Art, Wash, DC.
The author of seven books and over 60 catalogue essays, his articles have appeared in Art Journal, Third Text, Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, and Commonweal. He has worked with Maestro Sánchez since 1989 on various exhibition projects, including his 1998 traveling survey of his prints.
Dr. Anreus focuses as a scholar on art and politics of the 1920s and 30s, Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Art. He served on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation from 1998 to 2018.
A poet in his native Spanish, he has published 6 poetry collections.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Leslie Hewitt in conversation with Matilde Guidelli-Guidi
December 13, 2023, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for the fourth in a series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Leslie Hewitt and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948, and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Leslie Hewitt’s hybrid approach to photography and sculpture revisits the still life genre from a post-minimalist perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through the disciplines of photography and film theory, respectively, are spare assemblages of ordinary effects and materials, suggesting the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical histories. Whether discreetly arranged in layers on wooden planks or stacked before a wall in her studio, Hewitt’s objects often include personal mementos such as family pictures, as well as books and vintage magazines that reference the black literary and popular-culture ephemera of her upbringing. Interested in the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory, she decisively challenges both by unfolding manifestly formal, rather than didactic, connections in her heteroclite juxtapositions. She puts pressure on physical space as the ultimate frame of her photo sculptures by displaying some of them leaning against a wall, as they were originally conceived. Hewitt further works with site-specific installation and film as modalities to contend equally with the notions of space and time.
Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator and curatorial department head at Dia Art Foundation.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Corrado Cagli and George Balanchine on Stage: An Artistic Collaboration. A conversation with Jennifer Homans and Raffaele Bedarida
December 12, 2023, 6:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
Join us for a conversation on George Balanchine and his collaboration with Corrado Cagli, the subject of CIMA’s current exhibition. In the years after the Second World War, Cagli settled temporarily in New York City, where he engaged with the local cultural milieu. His acquaintance with George Balanchine, the co- founder of the Ballet Society (today’s New York City Ballet), blossomed into an artistic collaboration and into the staging of The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, performed in New York in 1948, for which Cagli designed distinct costumes and the stage set.
An expert on George Balanchine and author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated biography Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (2022), Jennifer Homans will examine his activities in those early postwar years, while Raffaele Bedarida will illustrate the complexity of the costumes and of the set designed by Cagli for The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. Together they will delve in the historical and political coordinates behind the project, the role of Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder with Balanchine of the Ballet Society, and the importance of performance art at MoMA.
Jennifer Homans is the Dance Critic for The New Yorker. She is the author of Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (2022), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (2010), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and among the NYT 10 Best Books of the Year. Homans was a professional dancer and performed with the Pacific Northwest Ballet before earning a BA at Columbia University and a PhD in Modern European History at New York University, where she is now a Distinguished Scholar in Residence and the Founding Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts.
Raffaele Bedarida is the curator of CIMA’s current exhibition Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948. He is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. An associate professor or art history at Cooper Union, he holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center, New York as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. He was the inaugural fellow of CIMA in 2014. Bedarida’s research has focused on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. He has also worked on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War. His most recent books are Exhibiting Italian Art in the US from Futurism to Arte Povera: Like a Giant Screen (London: Routledge, 2022) and Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, co-edited with Sharon Hecker (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). The English translation of his monograph on Cagli’s exile (Rome: Donzelli, 2018) was published by the Centro Primo Levi Editions in concurrence with the CIMA exhibition.
Light refreshments will be provided
Public programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Tiro a Segno Foundation.
Art, Memory, Place: Ancient and Contemporary Art in the Synagogues. A conversation with Adachiara Zevi and Ittai Weinryb
December 04, 2023, 6:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
Join us for an engaging exploration of the intersection of art, memory, and place in the context of synagogues throughout history. For centuries, synagogues have served as places of worship but also as focal points for communal and intellectual life. As such, their spaces have attracted the interest and intervention of artists. This conversation will delve into the relationship between synagogues and artistic expression, examining cases from different periods and geographical locations. The dialogue will traverse various artistic projects developed at synagogue sites worldwide, spanning from early historic examples to contemporary, site-specific installations. Professors Zevi and Weinryb will specifically highlight notable projects, including Corrado Cagli’s Memorial on the Square of the Old Synagogue in Göttingen, Germany, and the contemporary art initiative Arte in Memoria—a biennial art exhibition situated at the Synagogue in the archaeological park of Ostia Antica, Italy.
The conversation will highlight how artists have contributed new interpretations and readings of synagogue spaces, how their projects have brought new life into historical sites, and the significance of contemporary installations that offer fresh perspectives on the role of synagogues in the modern world. The event will also offer the opportunity to learn about the volume La Sinagoga di Ostia Antica: 60 anni dalla scoperta, 20 anni di Arte in Memoria, which examines the history of the oldest synagogue in Europe and its relationship with contemporary art.
About Adachiara Zevi. Architect, art historian, and professor of Art History, Adachiara Zevi was a Fulbright Scholar from 1987 to 1988 at Columbia University in New York. She has always accompanied her academic activities with a historical and critical commitment to the arts with an uninterrupted attention toward such Italian and international artists as Enrico Castellani, Piero Dorazio, Jannis Kounellis, Dan Graham and Sol LeWitt, for whom she has curated exhibitions, catalogues and monographs.
Among her books: Arte USA del Novecento, Peripezie del dopoguerra nell’arte italiana, L’Italia nei Wall Drawings di Sol LeWitt and Monumenti per difetto.
Prof. Zevi was the curator of the Arte in memoria biennial of contemporary art at the Synagogue in Ostia Antica and the Stolpersteine project in Italy. She is the President of the Bruno Zevi Foundation and the Arte in memoria Association, a member of the CDEC (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) scientific committee and a member of the Fondazione Villa Emma scientific committee. In 2018 she received the honour “Cavalierato dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Federale di Germania”. Since 1987 she is a regular collaborator with the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper, and since 2012 with Pagine Ebraiche, the monthly of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.
Ittai Weinryb teaches and writes on medieval and early modern art and material and visual culture from the greater Mediterranean to Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. He is currently completing a book on art and material culture circulating in the Black Sea region during the Middle Ages and another monograph which centers on the sentiment of Hope as a category of artistic creativity. He is the co-editor of the book series Art/Work which is set to narrate a new history of art founded in the study of objects, materials, and technology. He is the author of The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (2016) and of Die Hildesheimer Avantgarde: Kunst und Kolonialismus im mittelalterlichen Deutschland (2023), and the curator of the curator of the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (2018).
Light refreshments will be provided
Public programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Tiro a Segno Foundation.
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Kambui Olujimi in conversation with Rujeko Hockley
November 21, 2023, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for the third in a series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Kambui Olujimi and Rujeko Hockley.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948, and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as “inevitabilities.” This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. His works have premiered nationally and internationally at Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, Sharjah Biennial 15, 14th Dak’Art Biennale, and Kunsthal Rotterdam, among others. Olujimi has been awarded grants, fellowships and residencies from The Andrew Mellon Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Black Rock Senegal, MacDowell, and Yaddo.
Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Inheritance (2023), 2 Lizards (2022), Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing (2021), Julie Mehretu (2021), Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017) and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017 (2017). Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) and was involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kehinde Wiley, and others. She is the co-curator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and travelled to three U.S. venues in 2017-18. She serves on the Boards of Art Matters, Institute For Freedoms, and Museums Moving Forward, as well as the Advisory Board of Recess.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.
WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE EVENT
Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day): A Film Screening at CIMA
November 16, 2023, 6:30 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
In Italian with English subtitles (1 hr and 50 min)
In conjunction with CIMA’s current exhibition Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938 – 1948, we are hosting an in-person screening of Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day), a film directed by Ettore Scola, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren.
In Ettore Scola’s funny, humane ‘A Special Day’, Antonietta and Gabriele are never really a couple, but their brief encounter lights up the screen with the kind of radiance you get only from great movie actors who also are great stars. —Vincent Canby, The New York Times
Synopsis: Released in 1977, this historic film is about May 6th, 1938, the day Adolf Hitler visited Benito Mussolini in Rome for the first time. The film takes place entirely in a working class apartment building where Antonietta (Loren) and Gabriele (Mastroianni) are neighbors. When her husband leaves with their six kids to watch Hitler’s arrival, Antonietta unexpectedly meets Gabriele, the only other person in the apartment complex not attending the parade, and they create an unforeseen friendship. Throughout the film, Antonietta and Gabriele discover things about each other and the world around them that Scola brings to life with perfect detail and context of the start of the fascist regime.
The film will be introduced by Joseph Perna, visiting assistant professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at New York University. Perna’s research centers on vernacular modernism in Italy, with a special emphasis on cinema, photography, and magazines in the years surrounding the Second World War. He has published essays on Max Ophuls and Mario Soldati in the Italianist, and has written on early opera for a volume dedicated to innovation in Counter-Reformation Italy. He is currently at work on two book-length projects: a scholarly monograph on melodrama, Passionate Viewing in Modern Italy, and an English translation of Soldati’s interwar autobiography, America Primo Amore.
Public programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Tiro a Segno Foundation.
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Beatrice Scaccia in conversation with Giorgio Di Domenico
November 14, 2023, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for the second in a series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Beatrice Scaccia and Giorgio Di Domenico.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948, and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Bea Scaccia (b.1978, Veroli, Italy) earned her BA and MFA at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome where she studied with the late Italian artist Gino Marotta. In her paintings, she reworks the elements that collectively give rise to illusions of beauty and constructions of appearance, compressing them on the canvas as surreal, uncanny marks of affectation. Investigating the cultural links between feminine splendor and monstrosity, she builds pictorial compositions that can be read as true parodies of bon ton.
A trained realist painter, Scaccia’s method is more spontaneous rather than it is planned. She uses recurring visual tropes such as faux fur, jewels, wigs, cloth to signify darker psychological themes pertaining to female beauty. Pearls and hair clips become infestations; what was seen as well-ordered in the sensual hairdos of the Baroque and Rococo periods becomes unavoidably disturbing. The result is an over-the-top composition exemplifying an existential struggle to be contained.
Since 2011 Scaccia has been based in New York City, and has exhibited in various galleries and institutions both locally and worldwide including Katonah Museum of Art, New York, Galleria Ugo Ferranti, Rome, Galleria Nazionale, Rome, Magazzino Italian Art, NY, and the American University’s Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C., among others. Her work is found in collections including the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and the Portland Museum of Art.
Giorgio Di Domenico is a PhD student in Art History at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and a former research fellow of the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York. His research focuses on the reception of Surrealism in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. He interned at La Galleria Nazionale in Rome and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and was a visiting graduate student at New York University Casa Italiana. Giorgio published papers on Jannis Kounellis, Diego Marcon, and Alberto Burri, and he is one of the contributing authors to the forthcoming Robert Rauschenberg catalogue raisonné. He writes regularly on contemporary art in magazines including “Antinomie,” “NERO,” and “Flash Art.”
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided!
WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE EVENT
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Sheila Pepe in conversation with Lex Lancaster
November 07, 2023, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Join us for the first in a series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, starting with Sheila Pepe and Lex Lancaster.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948, and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
About Sheila Pepe:
Sheila Pepe is best known for crocheting her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. However, the exhibition Sheila Pepe: Hot Mess Formalism, curated by Gilbert Vicario for the Phoenix Museum of Art, and the catalog published with it, showed us that Pepe has built a more expansive and complex way of working since her start in the mid-1980s.
For more than 30 years she has accumulated a family resemblance (see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations) of works in sculpture—installation—drawing and other singular and hybrid forms. Some are drawings that are sculpture—or sculpture that is furniture, fiber works that appear as paintings, and tabletop objects that look like models for monuments, and stand as votives for a secular religion. The cultural sources and the meanings twisted together are from canonical arts of the 20th century, home crafts, lesbian, queer and feminist aesthetics, 2nd Vatican Council American design, an array of Roman Catholic sources as well as their ancient precedents.
The constant conceptual pursuit of Pepe’s research, making, teaching and writing has been to contest received knowledge, opinions and taste.
Pepe’s My Neighbor’s Garden, commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, will be on view through December 10th. Related press and other links can be found at www.sheilapepe.com.
About Lex Morgan Lancaster:
Lex Morgan Lancaster (they/them) is a scholar and curator who focuses on queer, trans, anti-racist, and crip contributions to the field of contemporary art. The author of Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2022), Lancaster’s scholarship focuses on queer and trans approaches to abstraction and the politics of formal and material strategies in contemporary art. Lancaster is Assistant Professor of Art History at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided!