Dr. Tenley Bick’s Recent and Forthcoming Publications
Dr. Tenley Bick with Michelangelo Pistoletto
Professor Tenley Bick has an article on Michelangelo Pistoletto forthcoming in the journal Word & Image. “Where There’s Everything: Pistoletto, the Gruppo d’Arte ‘l’Arlecchino,’ and Localist Internationalism in Presenze” will be the first study to address Presenze (1957–1960), a multidisciplinary journal dedicated to contemporary art and culture formed by Michelangelo Pistoletto and other young creative practitioners who would be formative to the Italian avant-garde of the 1960s. It relates to Dr. Bick’s book project, Where There’s Everything: Michelangelo Pistoletto and Arte Povera’s Global Vision, which examines the work of the contemporary Italian artist within the politicized cultural contexts of post-WWII Italy and Europe, and against the broader geopolitical horizon for art of the 1960s.
Dr. Bick also wrote the essay “Bochner’s Italian Picture” in the catalog for the exhibition Bochner Boetti Fontana (Oct. 2, 2020–April 5, 2021), curated by Mel Bochner for Magazzino Italian Art Foundation—the first show that Bochner curated since his now canonical Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966, Visual Arts Gallery, School of the Visual Arts, New York), often cited as the first Conceptual Art exhibition. The 2020 exhibition at Magazzino explored what Bochner calls the “odd resonances” between his work and art in Italy and South America, explored in the show through juxtapositions of Bochner’s works with those of Alighiero Boetti and Lucio Fontana.
With special attention to Bochner’s work Minimal Art—The Movie (1966), a “working drawing” that casts several Italian and Italian-American actors as American Minimalists and their associates, Dr. Bick’s essay outlines a new early history of Bochner’s engagement with Italian art and culture that became a long-term interest for the artist. She argues that Bochner’s broader engagements with Italy recasts some of our thinking about the global re-imagining of pictorial form that happened in the decades after World War II. The catalog is available online at https://www.magazzino.art/publications/bochner-boetti-fontana. Hard copies are available in Strozier Library and in the Department of Art History’s Rose Library in the William Johnston Building.