As the 2021-2022 Scholar-in-Residence, Dr. Katie Larson was the fourth scholar in the museum’s history to be appointed to this position. In this role, Larson supported the museum’s mission to further public understanding of 20th and 21st century avant-garde Italian art.
During her residency, Larson led tours of the permanent collection and special exhibitions, organized the annual spring lecture series, and contribute to the museum’s curatorial and public programming. As part of its spring season, Magazzino Italian Art Foundation presented a four-part lecture series, The Politics of Labor in Postwar Italian Art, curated by Scholar-in-Residence Katie Larson which examined the idea of artistic labor as it was (re)conceived by the members of Arte Povera during the 1960s and ’70s. The series considered how artists of the period challenged traditional methods of production and systems of value, framing their experimentation within the broader socio-political unrest of the period as protests against industrialization, consumerism, and class inequality swept across Italy.
Drawing on the Olnick Spanu Collection and Magazzino’s Research Center, Larson expanded on her research into the proliferation of multimedia artistic strategies in postwar Italy. This research informed her most recent book project, entitled Alberto Burri and the Generation of Arti Visive, which will advance a fundamentally new understanding of the prominent mixed media artist and his circle in Rome. The project reframes his early artistic development within the context of the arts journal Arti Visive (Visual Arts) (1952- 1958), a publication whose editors actively engaged with questions about the social, cultural, and political dimensions of abstract art.
About Dr. Katie Larson
Katie Larson is an Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art and Art History at Baylor University. Prior to joining the faculty at Baylor, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. from the University of Michigan. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Larson has presented her research at the College Art Association Annual Conference, the American Academy in Rome, and the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica and has published in Art Journal, Art Inquiries, and CAA reviews.