Professor Tenley Bick’s Lectures and Panels around the Country this Spring
photo by Jessica Ingram
Art History Assistant Professor Tenley Bick, who is currently on research leave as Scholar in Residence at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, NY, will travel around the country this spring to present lectures and chair a conference panel, and is also hosting a lecture series on Arte Povera at Magazzino. She is featured this month as one of FSU’s extraordinary women for her outstanding research activity.
On Tuesday, March 3, Dr. Bick gave an invited guest lecture at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, as the Friends of the Humanities Distinguished Guest Speaker in the visual arts research colloquia series, Pulse. The event is sponsored by the Friends of the Humanities and the Department of Visual Arts. Dr. Bick’s lecture is entitled “The Value of Extremely Poor Work: Pistoletto for Today.”
On April 7, she will give a guest lecture hosted by the Department of Art and Art History at Carleton College in Minnesota. The title of the lecture is “Ghosts for the Present: Interventionist Art and Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy.”
At the end of March, Dr. Bick will co-chair a panel (with Joseph Perna and Jonathan Mullins) and participate in a paired round table at the American Association for Italian Studies Conference on visual culture in postwar Italy. This year’s AAIS conference is jointly convened between the AAIS and AATI (American Association of Teachers of Italian).
At the end of April, Dr. Bick will present a paper in the 2020 annual conference at the John D. Calandra Institute at Queens College, City University of New York. The conference, “Italian Borderlands: Restrictions, Breaches, Encounters,” is co-organized by Dr. Joseph Sciorra (Director, Calandra Institute) and Dr. Laura E. Ruberto (Professor of Humanities, Berkeley City College). The conference is peer-reviewed and convenes scholars from Italy, the U.S., and the UK. Dr. Bick’s paper is entitled “Porta d’Europa: Monuments, Interventions, and Migration on Lampedusa.”
Meanwhile, as part of her research residency Dr. Bick is also curating a lecture series on Arte Povera at Magazzino from March 21 to May 2, entitled “Una visione globale: Arte Povera’s Worlds.” In the four-part series, leading scholars in the field will explore the “global vision” of Arte Povera, the Italian avant-garde of the late 1960s and early 70s.
In February 1968, on the eve of May ’68 and the associated Italian “hot autumn” of 1969, in his catalog essay for an exhibition at the Galleriade’ Foscherari in Bologna, Italian art critic and curator Germano Celant wrote of “una visione globale” (a global vision) and “rapporto globale” (global relationship) as distinguishing characteristics of Arte Povera, the primarily Italian avant–garde of the late 1960s and early 1970s hefirst named in the fall of 1967. A largely forgotten element of Celant’s theorization of the movement, Arte Povera’s “global vision” is readilyapparent in the work of many its artists: Alighiero Boetti’s world maps, embroidered by Afghani and Pakistani women; Mario Merz’siconographic references to nomadism in his igloo structures; Michelangelo Pistoletto’s sculptural Mappamondo or globe, made of papier–mâché and wire; Jannis Kounellis’s assemblages of ship parts and materials associated with transit and migration; Giovanni Anselmo’sDirezione (Direction) stone sculptures embedded with compass elements; and Pino Pascali’s material and iconographic references to the seaand earth, among others. Arte Povera’s “global vision” was also evident in Celant’s curatorial agenda for the movement. From 1968 to 1970, Celant mounted large exhibitions and publications that included American and non–Italian European artists alongside Arte Povera’s Italiancontingency, internationalizing Arte Povera and positioning the movement in a global artistic context.
While this “global vision” was fundamental to the theorization of Arte Povera and many of its artists’ works, Arte Povera has for the most partbeen regarded as a national, Italian phenomenon. With an eye to these lesser–known “global” elements of Celant’s text, this lecture seriesrevisits Arte Povera’s “worlds,” and those of related Italian artists in the late 1960s and 1970s in Italy. With specific attention to culturalgeopolitics of the period, the lecture series addresses models of internationalism and globalism in and around Arte Povera, including but notlimited to: its engagement with trans–geographical sociopolitical movements such as terzomondismo, Marxism, and socialist humanism;models of artistic nomadism and migration; Arte Povera’s many natural, planetary, and cartographic references; and international exhibitionssuch as Arte Povera + Azioni Povere (Amalfi, 1968).
The lectures will take place on four Saturdays at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, NY. Long abstracts will be circulated online and in booklet form after the lectures. More details can be found on the program site, and the complete schedule of lectures is below:
“Ezio Gribaudo and Arte Povera: Parallel Tracks from Turin to the World (1966–1972)”
Victoria Surliuga, Associate Professor of Italian Studies, Italian Program Coordinator, and World Cinema Coordinator, Texas Tech University
March 21, 3:00-5:00 pm
“Pino Pascali: Between Arte Povera and the Mediterranean”
Valérie Da Costa, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History, University of Strasbourg
April 4, 3:00-5:00 pm
“Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Comizi (1965–1966): Pop, Protest, and Politics in Early Arte Povera”
Tenley Bick, 2019–20 Scholar in Residence, Magazzino Italian Art; Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art, Florida State University
April 18, 3:00-5:00 pm
“Salt and Copper: Stratified Questions and Replies from an Interview with Jannis Kounellis”
Chris Bennett, Assistant Professor of Art History/Contemporary Art, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
May 2, 3:00-5:00 pm
Alighiero Boetti, Mappa (Map), 1983, embroidery on fabric, on view in Gallery 1 at Magazzino Italian Art Foundation.