Tag: Exhibition

New Exhibition: New Practices in Italian American and Italian Diasporic Contemporary Art March 26–August 14, 2026

Posted on by Andrew Checchia

(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

Exhibition: New Practices in Italian American and Italian Diasporic Contemporary Art March 26–August 14, 2026

(Photo above: 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

Explore a 3D Model of the Exhibition: Creativity and World War II Italian POWs in the United States

Posted on by Andrew Checchia
Non-collaborating POWs built this presepio—an Italian nativity scene—near Schofield Barracks, Hawai’i, January 5, 1945. The Islamic architecture suggests a North African setting. Courtesy National Archives.

The Calandra Institute’s current exhibition Creativity and World War II Italian POWs in the United States, curated by Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra, can now be explored via a digital 3D model. View it here. To learn more about the exhibition click here, view the catalog, or read a brief description:

The exhibition presents creative work made by Italian soldiers who were imprisoned by the Allied forces during World War II, focusing on those held in the United States. These objects, often made from salvaged materials, ranged in size from a small inlaid ring to a large Catholic chapel with a 65-foot bell tower. There is no archive or collective depository about World War II Italian prisoners of war in Allied hands. To document this creative work, the exhibit pulls from research completed by co-curator Laura E. Ruberto (Berkeley City College), including historical photographs, rare remaining artifacts, oral testimonies, written accounts, family memories, and private collections. The exhibition, designed by Polly Franchini, brings together a selection of these objects, images, and stories to present this little-known history. Highlighting the artistry of incarcerated Italian servicemen (some of whom maintained allegiance to Fascism) is not meant to trivialize the atrocities of war or to minimize the resistance of those who fought at great sacrifice. Rather, it offers an opportunity to reflect on the myriad ways that identity and imagination are shaped materially during the adverse conditions of war.

The public can also view the gallery in person at the Calandra Institute’s Midtown Manhattan location. It will be on view from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, until November 26.

Calandra Institute Summer Office Hours

Posted on by Sian Gibby

The Calandra Italian American Institute’s offices at 25 West 43rd Street, Floor 17, will be closed on the following Fridays, observing CUNY’s summer hours:

August 1, August 8, August 15

The office hours Monday through Thursday for the summer, and Monday through Friday after August 15, are 9:00am to 5:00pm.

Nota bene: The Institute’s Gallery, hosting the current exhibition Creativity and World War II Italian POWs in the United States, will be closed on Fridays until after August 15.

Rocco Scotellaro’s Transnational Basilicata

Isabella Livorni, New York University

The name Rocco Scotellaro has become synonymous with Basilicata. In his work, however, the young writer, poet, and politician was interested in situating his home region within a transnational framework. In this talk, Isabella Livorni will analyze how Scotellaro conceived of the connections between Basilicata and other parts of the world in his poetry and creative writing—not only his analysis of his compatriots’ emigration, but also the potentially fruitful solidarity between Lucanian contadini and oppressed peoples elsewhere in the world.

In conjunction with the exhibition BASILICATË: A Celebration of Lucanian Culture in the World

Exhibition Extended through April 2024: “A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists”

Posted on by Sian Gibby
“A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists” currently on view at the John D Calandra Italian American Institute in Midtown Manhattan, will run until the end of April, 2024. Curated by Joseph Sciorra and Joanne Mattera, the exhibition features the work of artists based in New York City who are Italian American, or Italian born and and now living here, whose immigrant experience has informed them personally and artistically.
On Wednesday, December 13, artists in the exhibition will be present to speak informally in the gallery about their work, 6:00-7:30. You are invited. Come and see the show and engage with the artists.
Info:
. The Calandra Institute is at 25 W. 43 Street, 17th floor, New York City.
. Read a conversation between John Avelluto and Joanne Mattera in Two Coats of Paint: https://twocoatsofpaint.com/…/an-italian-american…
. See a walk-through of the show on Mattera’s blog: https://joannematteraartblog.blogspot.com/…/a-legacy-of…
. Artists were selected from the newly published book Italianità: Contemporary Art Inspired by the Italian Immigrant Experience: https://store.bookbaby.com/book/italianit%c3%a0

Exhibition Presentation Basilicate: A Celebration of Lucanian Culture in the World

Join us for a public presentation of the inspiration and preparation for the upcoming international exhibition Basilicate: A Celebration of Lucanian Culture in the World.

Tuesday, November 7, 2023, 6:00pm

Speakers about the scope and meaning of this multinational exhibition will include

Mimì Coviello
Centro dei Lucani nel Mondo Nino Calice

Joseph Rinaldi
Federazione Lucana d’America

Anthony Julian Tamburri, PhD
Dean and Distinguished Professor, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

The exhibition will open in August 2024 in Genoa, Buenos Aires, New York, and Montevideo.

Architecture of Shame, the cultural organization curating the exhibition, is developing a variety of creative groups and events to bring increased awareness to the influence of Lucanians across the globe. Projects include: engaging communities to restore, through Rocco Scotellaro’s poems, their still-vital language; cooking workshops to highlight the transmission of Lucanian culinary traditions to new generations; the filming of rituals native to Lucania that are preserved and practiced in their adopted cities, rituals that have survived emigration and been perpetuated for dozens of years; and demonstrating, via photos of diasporic homes, the search for the Lucanity preserved in them.

The project, implemented by the Federation of Lucanians in Piedmont, is coordinated by the Nino Calice, of the Center of Lucanians in the World of the Basilicata Region. This exhibition will be presented across the globe with the help of the presidents and activists of the Associations of Lucanians in the World and, in the case of New York, with the support of the Craco Society and the Federation of Lucanians of America.

Exhibition Opening A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists

Curated by Joanne Mattera and Joseph Sciorra

Exhibition opening takes place on Wednesday, September 27, 2023, at 6pm.

The work of the twenty-one artists featured in this exhibit offers a richness of form, medium, subject matter, color, and style that is a delight and a revelation to behold. Connections to a discernable Italian art tradition—or for that matter to Italian American aesthetic practices more specifically—vary across the exhibition, ranging from the explicit to the suggestive to the nonexistent.

After the opening on September 27, the exhibition will be accessible during business hours, 9:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday, and is located in the Galleria of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute.

Image: Claudia DeMonte, Il Corno, 2013