Current Fellows
Giorgio Di Domenico
WINTER-SPRING 2023
Giorgio Di Domenico is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. His doctoral research focuses on the reception of Surrealism in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. He aims to demonstrate how central Surrealism has been to postwar Italian artists, including those without official or overt ties to the movement. He bases his research on visual analysis, framed within a broader context of cultural studies and archival-based research.
He attended the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa for his BA and MA, defending theses on Jannis Kounellis’s Rose Paintings and the Italian artists’ magazine La Città di Riga, to which he also devoted a forthcoming monograph. He interned at La Galleria Nazionale in Rome and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. In spring 2022, he was a visiting student at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University. His publications include essays on the work of Jannis Kounellis (Studi di Memofonte, 2018; Paragone, 2022), the practice of Alberto Burri in the 1970s (Annali della Scuola Normale, 2021), and the relationship between Burri and Robert Rauschenberg in 1950s New York (Prospettiva, 2022). More recently, Giorgio started to engage in contemporary art criticism: he occasionally writes in Antinomie and Flash Art.
His research project as a CIMA fellow will combine various approaches to the relationships between Surrealism and advertising, analyzed from an Italian perspective. His focus will be the reception of Surrealist imagery by Italian advertising graphics from the 1930s to the 1970s. A second research theme will be the circulation of the advertising production of Surrealist artists in Italy, with specific insights into the activity of Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico. Finally, the last part of his research will focus on the Surrealist influence on Mimmo Rotella’s oeuvre.
Marcella Martin
WINTER-SPRING 2023
Marcella Martin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Italian Studies at New York University. She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Culture: Costume Studies also from New York University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies she was a Lecturer in the history of fashion and Curator of the Textile and Costume Collection at Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has published on the topics of museum studies and costume history, most recently in a co-authored essay entitled “Heritage narratives in the digital era: How digital technologies have improved approaches and tools for fashion know-how, traditions, and memories” in the Research Journal of Textile and Apparel. She is currently working on her dissertation project tentatively titled: “Fondazione Fashion: Contemporary Art, Brand Museums, and the Pursuit of Modern Italy” in which she uses four exhibitions of Italian art and fashion to trace the prehistory of brand museums and their unique relationship to contemporary art in Italy.
During her fellowship with the Center for Italian Modern Art, Marcella will be working on a project entitled “The Fashion of Advertising: Reference and Reproducibility, 1930-2018”. This project uses the art of commercial posters as a starting point to study the limits of reproducibility, from images to artworks to exhibitions. It takes the world of fashion and fashion advertising as its particular point of inquiry, attempting to understand the interplay between the visual language of fashion and the work of art, from Fortunato Depero’s failed Vogue covers in 1930 to the cultural backlash towards Dolce & Gabbana advertisements in the 2010s.