Rae Di Cicco

Travel Fellow 2016-17

Rae Di Cicco is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in the modern art, design, and cultural history of Central Europe. Her work investigates issues of identity and politics faced in the region during the transition from imperial to national organization after World War I. Her research explores the incorporation of signifiers of national artistic styles into South Tyorlian-born Austrian-Italian artist Erika Giovanna Klien’s artistic production as a kind of cosmopolitan imagination, visualizing – literally making visual – hybrid and shifting identity and multiple belonging.

For her CIMA travel fellowship, Rae will consider collaborations and communication between Klien and her colleagues and the Italian Futurists, primarily Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Enrico Prampolini. By investigating Klien’s active involvement with Italian Futurism, Rae’s dissertation aims to elucidate some of the ways in which cultural production has acted as a medium through which artists challenged exclusionary conceptions of belonging in Central Europe. This research forms part of a wider project that examines the navigation of certain subject positions in the avant grade.