Surface Magazine: From Upstate New York, Magazzino Charts a Future for Italian Art

Over the past seven years, Magazzino Italian Art and its co-founders, Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, have transformed the upstate New York village of Cold Spring into a national destination for post-war and contemporary Italian art. As life partners with a considerable art collection, the duo laid the groundwork more than a decade before Magazzino opened its Miguel Quismondo–designed building in 2017.

From 2005 to 2015, the Olnick Spanu Art Program and its residency invited Italian artists to find inspiration in the grounds of the couple’s upstate residence designed by Baeza and overlooking the Hudson River. The only caveat? That the work embody the spirit of Arte Povera, a radical art movement that swept across Italy in the 1960s on the basis of using rocks, twigs, and scrap textiles instead of canvas, paint, and marble. Every September, the works were unveiled and celebrated on the property.