This book is published by Magazzino Italian Art Foundation on the occasion of the exhibition Nivola:Sandscapes curated by Teresa Kittler with assistant curator Chiara Mannarino at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York, May 8, 2021–January 10, 2022.
© 2022 MIA–Magazzino Italian Art
About the Artist
Costantino Nivola (1911–1988) was a sculptor, painter, designer, and teacher, and he was known for his large-scale architectural reliefs. Born in Orani, a village in the Italian island of Sardinia, he worked with his mason father before taking up an apprenticeship with the artist Mario Delitala. In 1931, he won a scholarship to attend the Higher Institute for Artistic Industries at Monza (ISIA), where he studied under the tutelage of Marino Marini and Giuseppe Pagano, among others, and contributed to the Milan Triennale in 1936 and the Italian Pavilion at the Paris Exposition in 1937.
Nivola began his career in 1936 working as a graphic designer for the Olivetti company in Milan. In 1938, he and his wife, Ruth Guggenheim, a fellow student at ISIA, fled fascist Italy for Paris before emigrating to New York City in 1939, where they set up a home in Greenwich Village. Supporting himself as he could, Nivola eventually became art director for several architectural magazines. In 1948, he bought a farmhouse in Springs. Nivola’s first major commission was for the Olivetti showroom on 5th Avenue, and this was quickly followed by a series of large-scale commissions for architectural projects. Throughout his life, Nivola was also committed to art and design education, and held posts at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, Dartmouth, and Berkeley. He exhibited his non-commissioned work regularly in both the U.S. and Italy.
About the Contributors
Adrian Forty is Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and Honorary Curator of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. He is the author of Objects of Desire, Design and Society Since 1750 (1986); Words and Buildings, a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (2000); Concrete and Culture, a Material History (2012). His most recent publication is, with Barbara Penner, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley, Extinct. A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (2021). From 2010 to 2014 he was President of the European Architectural History Network.
Lindsay Caplan is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Brown University. She holds a PhD in Art History from The CUNY Graduate Center, where she also studied sociology (MA, 2009). Before joining Brown, she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eugene Lang College, School of Visual Arts, Parsons, City University of New York, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. From 2010 to 2011, she was a Critical Studies participant at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
She has received fellowships from The Center of the Humanities at The CUNY Graduate Center (2010–14) and the American Council for Learned Societies (2015–16). Her writing has appeared in edited collections, exhibition catalogues, magazines, and journals such as Grey Room, ARTMargins, e-flux, The Scholar and Feminist Online, and Art in America. Her book on the computer art and experimental design of Arte Programmata in 1960s Italy received a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association and is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press (Fall 2022).
Teresa Kittler is a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of York, UK. Her research focuses on artistic practices since 1945 with a special interest in Italian postwar art. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the British Academy, Leverhulme, the British School at Rome, and the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA).
Her work has been published by Oxford Art Journal, Bloomsbury, and Peter Lang, amongst others. She has written on Marisa Merz for catalogues accompanying the exhibitions Marisa Merz: The Sky is a Great Place (Los Angeles Hammer Museum & Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017) and Entrare Nell’Opera (Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2019), and on Carla Accardi for the catalogue accompanying senzamargine. at the MAXXI (2021). She also worked as Assistant Curator for the 10 Gwangju Biennale (2014).
Chiara Mannarino is a curator, writer, and art historian. She holds an MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2020) and earned her BA in Media Studies with concentrations in contemporary art and photography from Vassar College (2018).
She was the Assistant Curator of Nivola: Sandscapes (2021) and Homemade (2020), both at Magazzino Italian Art; the co-curator of A Fractured Sigh at BravinLee Gallery (2020); and the Assistant Curator of Non-places and the Spaces in Between at the Italian Cultural Institute, New York (2019). She has completed internships in the curatorial departments of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and the International Center of Photography (ICP). She was also an assistant on the Red Regatta project and an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Chiara was a speaker at the 2020 CHASE Feminist Network Conference (Foundling Museum, London) and a moderator of Reflections on Homemade: Artist Conversations, hosted by Magazzino Italian Art (2020). She has published exhibition reviews and articles in Burlington Contemporary, Femme Art Review, and Flaunt Magazine.