Magazzino Italian Art presented a four-part lecture series Arte Povera: Artistic Tradition and Transatlantic Dialogue curated by 2022-23 Magazzino Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Roberta Minnucci.
In the fourth lecture, Between Cultural Diplomacy and Counterculture: Eugenio Battisti, Alan Solomon, and the Exhibition Young Italians in 1968, Dr. Raffaele Bedarida, Associate Professor of Art History at the Cooper Union, New York, provided a historical context for Young Italians: the exhibition held in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston and the Jewish Museum in New York.
The exhibition was the first overview of trends in Italian art from the 1960s in an American museum, covering movements ranging from Nuova Figurazione to Optical Art, from Pop Art to Arte Povera. Bedarida investigated how the exhibition was influenced by the compounding factors of cultural diplomacy surrounding the mid-century economic boom, the Cold War emphasis on transatlantic exchange, and anti-imperialist initiatives emerging in the wake of the Vietnam War.
After mapping the sociopolitical climate, Dr. Bedarida reflected on how the scholar and activist Eugenio Battisti conceived of the exhibition and why it came to be curated by Alan Solomon, the curator of the 1964 Venice Biennale.
The lecture was concluded with a consideration of Young Italians’ legacy, which served both as a formative experience and a cautionary tale for Germano Celant and Kynaston McShine, two curators who shaped the art discourse on Arte Povera and Conceptual Art in this period.
About Dr. Raffaele Bedarida
Dr. Raffaele Bedarida is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. His research has focused on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. He has also worked on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War. An associate professor at Cooper Union, he holds a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center as well as a BA and MA from the University of Siena. His academic articles and essays have been published extensively in periodicals, such as Oxford Art Journal, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, and Artforum. Dr. Bedarida’s most recent books are the monograph Exhibiting Italian Art in the US. Futurism to Arte Povera (Routledge, 2022) and the edited volume Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, co-edited with Sharon Hecker (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is currently curating an exhibition on Italian artist Corrado Cagli to be held at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York in the Fall 2023.
