CIMA Travel Fellow Silvia Bottinelli at the MART Museum

The Archive of the 20th century (Archivio del ’900) at the Mart Museum (Rovereto) offers insight into a range of subjects related to modern and contemporary Italian art. In addition to Futurism, Architecture, and Critical History, the collections include an impressive selection of materials related to Visual Poetry. During my research sessions at the Mart archives, I explored the latter topic in particular, by viewing sources by or about Enrico Baj, Mirella Bentivoglio, Maria Lai, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Stelio Maria Martini, Lamberto Pignotti and others. The aforementioned artists paid attention to the domestic realm, which is the subject of my book manuscript in progress.

Francis Picabia Reconsidered at MoMA

The protean nature of Francis Picabia’s art is well explored in MoMA’s impressive survey, which is organized chronologically and includes all the major bodies of work that Picabia produced in his career: Impressionist, Cubist, Dadaist, Surrealist, kitschy Figurative, Abstract. The subtitle of the show, “our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction,” hints at the circularity and the extraordinary creativity of Picabia’s oeuvre.