Summer 2024 Events at Magazzino Italian Art

Magazzino Italian Art Announces Summer 2024 Events, Featuring Lectures, Films, Culinary Art, and an Evening Concert with the World Fusion All-Star Band Jog Blues

Cold Spring, New York – A deep dive into the political currents swirling around Italian art in the 1960s and 1970s, a meal-by-meal journey through the glories of Italian regional cuisine, evenings on the piazza enjoying extraordinary films, and the heady mix of jazz, blues, and Indian classical music played by Jog Blues: these are the events that Magazzino Italian Art announced today as its schedule of programs for summer 2024.

Rolling out through August, with a special concentration in mid-July to celebrate the fifth annual Upstate Art Weekend, Magazzino’s summer events are both popular occasions for relaxed gathering and thoughtfully curated programs amplifying the museum’s perspective on postwar and contemporary Italian art.

“Ever since we opened Magazzino in 2017, we have wanted the excitement of this art to resonate beyond the walls of the galleries,” said Magazzino Co-Founders Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu. “We’re thrilled by the schedule that the Magazzino team has put together this year and look forward to welcoming our neighbors, colleagues, artists, and friends from the Hudson Valley and throughout the region.”

“This summer’s events add layer upon layer of meaning and engagement to our exhibitions and installations at Magazzino,” Nancy and Giorgio added. “Audiences who have come to look forward to our summer events year after year, and visitors who may be discovering Magazzino for the first time, will both find that these programs offer new avenues into exploring and enjoying contemporary Italian art, Cinema and Food.”

Lecture Series
Evoluzioni: Playing with Form and Tradition in Postwar Italian Culture
Sunday, June 9 & 23, and Saturday, June 29, 12:00 p.m.

The latest edition of Magazzino’s popular summer lecture series will be devoted to issues in contemporary Italian art and culture, exploring the innovative contributions of artists and intellectuals in postwar Italy and their efforts to wrest tradition away from conformism. The series of four talks by noted scholars was organized by Margaret Scarborough, 2023–24 Scholar-in-Residence at Magazzino Italian Art.

The program, began June 2 with an online talk by Claudio Crescentini, curator and art historian at Capitoline Superintendence of Cultural Heritage in Rome, and continued on June 9, with Ara Merjian of New York University presenting an in-person lecture titled A Totality of Fragments: Postwar Italian Sculpture from Design to Dematerialization.

On June 23, Margaret Scarborough will deliver an in-person lecture about feminist art critic Carla Lonzi. In The Poor Art of Patriarchy: Carla Lonzi on Creativity and Recognition, Scarborough will discuss how Lonzi’s rejection of patriarchal models of creativity played a role in the evolution of her feminist theory of recognition.

On June 29, Emily Antenucci of Vassar College will present an in-person lecture titled Amore come Rivoluzione: Love and Revolution in Teatro La Maddalena’s Nonostante Gramsci. In her talk, Antenucci will explore the experimental theater projects of Adele Cambria—one of the key figures of Italy’s neofemminismo—and the feminist theater collective Teatro La Maddalena, whose members revisited the archives of Antonio Gramsci to reclaim women’s voices and their role in radical history.

Concert
Jog Blues
Saturday, June 15, 6:00 p.m.

An ensemble named for Jog, the Indian midnight raga, and the blues, the most American of musical genres, the all-star band Jog Blues will return to Magazzino for its third annual open-air performance on the piazza. Drawing on deep traditions while also swinging toward the future, Jog Blues blends Indian classics, American roots music, structured compositions and exhilarating improvisation in celebration of the human experience.

Jog Blues features Abhik Bhai on sitar; Andy Biskin on clarinet and bass clarinet; Jake Charkey on cello; Joel Bluestein on electric guitar; Jonathan Rose on bass and harmonica; Naran Budhkar on tabla; Pheeroan akLaff on drums; and Siddhartha Mukherjee on vocals.

There will be a BBQ in the garden offering hamburgers, veggie burgers, corn, salad, beer, prosecco, and red wine. Hamburgers are provided by Marbled Meat Shop in Cold Spring, New York, who work with small family-owned farms that pasture-raise beef. No antibiotics or growth hormones are ever used. $25 BBQ cover fee (drinks not included).

Doors open at 6:00 p.m., with the concert scheduled to begin at 7:00 p.m. Tickets range from $5 to $25 and are available here.

Film
Cinema in Piazza
Saturday, July 20, Sunday, July 21, and Saturday August 17; dusk (around 8:30 p.m.)

Once more, Magazzino will open its central outdoor gathering space to the stars—and to the visions of Italian filmmakers—for its annual Cinema in Piazza series. This year’s program will present four films across two weekends, focusing on a group of renown Italian post-war painters and their enormous contributions to the history of art.

All events take place in the piazza in the courtyard of Magazzino’s Main Building.

Saturday, July 20
Marinella Senatore, The School of Narrative Dance Napoli
By Domenico Palma (2020, 12min)
This short film focuses on The School of Narrative Dance, which provides an educational system based on emancipation, inclusion, and self-cultivation. The school has worked in more than 15 countries and involved some five million people, including activists, amateur and professional workers, dancers, choreographers, actors, and poets in an atmosphere of shared knowledge. The film is narrated by the school’s founder, Marinella Senatore.

Arte Povera. Notes for History
By Andrea Bettinetti (2023, 1h 28min)
The documentary sheds light on how Arte Povera has profoundly influenced the development of contemporary art and how its values continue to be as relevant and inspirational to modern society as at its inception.

Sunday, July 21
Carlo Scarpa
By Domenico Palma (2024, 8 min)
This short film, produced by Magazzino Italian Art and narrated by Marino Barovier, highlights the exceptional journey of Carlo Scarpo in Murano over nearly twenty years of collaboration, between 1926 and 1942, with the two most prestigiouis glass makers of the period. The film was made on the occasion of the current exhibition at Magazzino’s Robert Olnick Pavilion, Carlo Scarpa: Timeless Masterpieces, which presents 56 glassworks from The Olnick Spanu Collection of 20th Century Murano glass.

Pino
By Walter Fasano (2020, 60min)
This film tells the story of how the Pascali Museum in Polignano a Mare bought and exhibited Five silkworms and a cocoon, a work by Pascali—who was local to the town—made before he died at the pinnacle of his career.

Luciano Fabro
By Giampaolo Penco (1997, 57min)
This 1997 documentary about Luciano Fabro is interwoven with archival footage from the artist’s childhood, visits to his studio, and conversations between Fabro and his students. Also included is footage of the artist installing his work at the Venice Biennale and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, ending with a walkthrough of Fabro’s restrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1996–97.

Saturday, August 17
ABOrismi. RITTRATTI e AUTORITRATTO (Aborisms: Portraits and Self-Portraits)
By Nunzio Massimo Nifosì (2022, 7min)
This short film is a brief, brilliant and dadaist tribute to one of the most renowned historians, curators and art critics of the past fifty years, Achille Bonito Oliva.

Mimmo Paladino: Il linguaggio dei segni (Mimmo Paladino: The Language of Signs)
By Nunzio Massimo Nifosì (2021, 60min)
This film follows the course of Italian sculptor and painter Mimmo Paladino’s career, looking at his works from engraving to collages and his interests in cinema and theater.

Sunday, August 18
Renzo Piano, Il potere dell’archivio
By Francesca Molteni (2018, 35min)
This film is a plunge into the Fondazione Renzo Piano archives in Genoa, looking at the genesis of several major Renzo Piano projects, including the Palais de Justice and the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Manhattanville campus at Columbia University; and the Morgan Library and the New York Times Building in New York.

Ettore Spalletti
By Alessandra Galletta (2019, 90min)
A day in the life of the artist Ettore Spalletti is the focus of this film, which looks at the places he lived in and what inspired him.

Upstate Art Weekend
Thursday, July 18 – Sunday, July 21
Magazzino will also participate in the fifth annual Upstate Art Weekend, which welcomes the public to enjoy the cultural vibrancy across ten counties in the Catskills Mountains and Hudson Valley. The public visiting Magazzino during gallery hours throughout Upstate Art Weekend will have the opportunity to view the museum’s unparalleled permanent installation of works by Arte Povera masters and the temporary exhibition Mario Schifano: Germinal, a survey of a decade’s worth of breakthrough paintings by the restlessly inventive artist, filmmaker, photographer, and musician.

Cuisine Viaggio con Luca: The History of Regional Italian Cuisine
Fridays, June 14, July 5, July 26, August 2, & September 6, 1:00 p.m.
Ongoing through the summer will be Viaggio con Luca: The History of Regional Italian Cuisine, a new series of culinary events organized by Chef Luca Galli, the force behind the Museum’s Café Silvia. Every third Friday throughout the summer, Chef Luca will invite museum visitors to experience regional Italian specialties as a window into the evolution of Italian culture as a whole. The menus feature cuisine from Lombardia, Veneto, Campania, Sardegna, Sicilia, Toscana, and Lazio.

Tickets are $25 for children between the ages of 6 and 10 and $50 for adults. See the full schedule here.

About Magazzino Italian Art
Magazzino Italian Art is a museum and research center dedicated to advancing scholarship and public appreciation of postwar and contemporary Italian art in the United States. Located in Cold Spring, New York, the museum was founded by Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu.

In 2017, the main building, designed by architect Miguel Quismondo and set within 9 landscaped acres of the Hudson Highlands, was inaugurated with an exhibition drawn from the Olnick Spanu Collection and dedicated to Margherita Stein, founder of the historic Galleria Christian Stein in Milan and a key advocate and supporter of the artists associated with Arte Povera.

In 2023, Magazzino inaugurated its Research Center, named for the art critic and historian who gave Arte Povera its name. Created as an educational nonprofit museum, Magazzino Italian Art increased its indoor space by two-thirds in September 2023 by opening the additional freestanding Robert Olnick Pavilion designed by architects Alberto Campo Baeza and Miguel Quismondo and named in memory of Nancy Olnick’s father. This new building provides a multipurpose room with auditorium capabilities, a store, and Café Silvia serving Italian cuisine by Italian Chef Luca Galli.