Arte al Femminile: Women in Italian Visual Poetry
May 22, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
In conjunction with CIMA’s current exhibition on Nanni Balestrini and the political dimensions of art in the 1960s and 1970s, this event will explore the work of Italian women artists involved in visual poetry during those decades, along with the social, political, and historical context in which they operated.
Art Historian and Curator Leslie Cozzi (Baltimore Museum of Art) will examine a number of women artists that used language in their visual work to engage with questions of gender and to subvert patriarchal narratives and structures.
CIMA fellows Francesca Zambon and Anna Szirmai will complement the case studies presented with a brief historical overview of second-wave feminism in Italy, and with an exploration of innovative approaches in art, such as asemic writing.
Leslie Cozzi, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, oversees the museum’s collection of post-1900 works on paper. Her recent exhibitions include Matsumi Kanemitsu: Figure and Fantasy; Darrel Ellis: Regeneration; A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone, and Baltimore; and Valerie Maynard: Lost & Found. She has published and lectured widely on contemporary Italian art and feminism. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “Protagonismo e non: Mirella Bentivoglio, Carla Accardi, Carla Lonzi, and the Art of Italian Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s,” was awarded a 2010-2011 Fulbright research fellowship as well as the Zora Neale Hurston essay prize by the University of Virginia’s Women and Gender Studies program. Prior to her arrival at the BMA, Dr. Cozzi was the 2017-2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Winner in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome.
Light refreshments will be offered
Words in Freedom and Protest: the Typographic Collage between Political Action and Formal Experimentation
June 04, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
Inspired by the current exhibition Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action—One Thousand and One Voices, Jennifer Farrell, curator of modern and contemporary prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore some of the ways artists have engaged collage, letterforms, and language, broadly considered, and in the process, challenged artistic conventions, as well as cultural, social, and political structures. The talk will examine the various histories of this engagement with linguistic codes from early 20th century European avant-garde movements to the work of more contemporary artists.
Jennifer Farrell is a curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is responsible for modern and contemporary prints and artist’s books. Among her exhibitions at the Met are Modern Times: British Prints, 1913-1939; World War I and the Visual Arts; Workshop and Legacy: Stanley William Hayter, Krishna Reddy, Zarina Hashmi; and Ragnar Kjartansson: Death is Elsewhere. Her publications include Get There and Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art (which received the Sotheby’s Prize for a Distinguished Publication in the History of Collecting in America, awarded by The Frick Collection); The History and Legacy of Samuel M. Kootz and the Kootz Gallery; Lucian Freud: Etchings; Suzanne McClelland, STrAY: Found Poems from a Lost Time, World War I and the Visual Arts, and Modern Times: British Prints, 1913-1939. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the University of Virginia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and taught at schools that include Yale University, the School of Visual Arts, and the American University of Paris. She earned a B.A. from Smith College and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Light refreshments will be offered
Nanni Balestrini Study Day
June 12, 2024, 10:00 AM - 06:00 PM
General admission: $15. Members and Students: Free
Keynote speaker: Prof. Gian Maria Annovi, University of Southern California.
The exhibition Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action – One Thousand and One Voices, curated by Marco Scotini and on view in New York at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) through June 22, 2024, is dedicated to Nanni Balestrini (1935-2019), an Italian experimental visual artist, poet, and novelist known for his revolutionary artistic practice and passionate involvement in the social-political movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
With this Nanni Balestrini 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.
Program to be announced