(Photo: Vincent Stracquadanio, Crane Your Neck, 2025, courtesy of the artist)
An exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photography, prints, video, and site-specific work by contemporary artists of the Italian diaspora opens March 26, 2026, at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute’s gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Curated by art historian Rosa Berland, the exhibition brings together work by thirty artists from around the world and presents a sweeping portrait of Italian American and Italian diasporic artistic practice today.
Rooted in traditional and material-based media, the exhibition demonstrates a diverse commitment to craft and technique from the vast geographic extent of the Italian diaspora, with artists hailing from Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Argentina, Italy, and across the United States. New Practices in Italian American and Italian Diasporic Contemporary Art features contributions from acclaimed figures including Paul Corio, Paul Fabozzi, Cianne Fragione, and Bernardo Siciliano, mid-career and emerging artists whose practices are redefining the field. Central to the exhibition are three ambitious site-specific commissions by artists Alessandra Pozzuoli, Maria Moltani, and Stephanie Rebonati-Cannizzo. Together these works anchor the exhibition in the present while incorporating the long history of Italian diasporic artists whose contributions have profoundly shaped the development of American art.
“The exhibition’s theme is a call to home and discovery along the edge: the revealing of artistic transformation of memory, identity, and reclaimed atelier practice as well as craft,” says Berland. “It’s a place of the enigmatic and the liminal: installations that pay homage to the handicraft of women’s invisible labor and voices, the ghostly traces of land as drawings, paintings as aqueous portals, imaginary topographies constructed of textiles, the geometric discipline of abstraction, gestural poetics, the tradition of linear illustration, memories of the botanical and natural world, and studies of the human figure as well as classical sculpture. We also find here the work of teaching artists who continue the centuries-long tradition of foundational studio practice, a way of working that began in sixteenth-century Italy.”
ON VIEW March 26–August 14, 2026
Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm
EXHIBITION OPENING March 26, 2026, 6pm
This study examines the changing dynamics of the “Italian” writer and how we, as cultural critics, need to re-think our definitions of the new Italian writer. In so doing, we must also re-consider the notion of the geo-cultural zones that we characterize as “Italian.” Namely, how do we categorize that writer who, having left Italy and now living beyond its geo-cartographic boundaries, writes in Italian? Similarly, who is that other writer who, originating from another country that is both culturally and linguistically different from Italy, writes in Italian? Finally, where within these two groups do we position the writer of Italian origin who also lives in another country and, different from the previous two types of writers, composes his/her work in the language of his/her host country?
Thursday, April 11, Luisa Del Giudice, author and independent scholar, presented her new book In Search of Abundance: Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine, and Other Gastronomic Utopias (2023 Bordighera Press), in which she outlines the fascinating and complex journey of ideas about plenty and scarcity in the history of Italian diasporic cultures. 
SCOPE OF THE FELLOWSHIP