The Brooklyn Rail: Maria Lai: A Journey to America

March 7, 2025

Maria Lai, "Veduta di Cagliari," 1952. China acquarellata, 13 3/8 x 40 1/8 in. (34 x 102 cm). Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli, ©2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.

The first United States retrospective dedicated to the titular artist, Magazzino Italian Art’s Maria Lai: A Journey to America is exceptional. Born in 1919 in Ulassai, Italy, and passing at the age of ninety-three in the nearby Nuoro commune of Cardedu, Lai bore witness to decades of art history and its myriad constituent avant-garde movements. Despite occasionally making contact with some of these—chiefly, Arte Povera, which Lai was not a proper member of, but with whose integrant artists she showed and influenced—Lai pursued a singular ambit defined by the thread. Italian art historian Giorgio Di Genova characterized Lai’s artistic enterprise as the “poetic amanuensis of sewing.” However, more than “sewing,” Lai’s thoroughgoing leitmotif, that of the line, manifests in multifarious modes throughout her oeuvre.