Magazzino hosts first U.S. retrospective for Maria Lai
Like many female artists living in Italy after World War II, Maria Lai masked her gender by signing paintings with an initial instead of her first name. At a 2004 lecture, she recalled one influential teacher provoking her by saying, “The world of art is a great loom, and women make the warp, but the weaver is man.”
Yet he knew talent when he saw it and kept Lai as his only female student. Then, she became renowned. In 2011, officials at the national Parliament installed one of her works to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the country’s unification.
In Sardinia, her birthplace, Lai is a superstar who in 1981 tethered every dwelling in her hometown of Ulassai to the nearby mountain with a 16-mile blue denim ribbon. (The initial commission solicited a war memorial.)
A looping film and wall of photos documenting this large-scale community project are included in Maria Lai: A Journey to America, which opened Nov. 15 in the Robert Olnick Pavilion at Magazzino Italian Art in Philipstown. Curated by Paola Mura, it is the first retrospective of Lai’s work to be mounted in the U.S. and includes pieces from private collections exhibited for the first time.
Lai kept creating until her death in 2013 at age 93. Her focus seemed to shift about every 10 years, from paintings, sculptures, sewn books, loom-based wall art and slogans scrawled on 8-foot-high canvases for a participatory event in the Sardinian village of Aggius.
She exhibited her talent for drawing and sculpture at a young age, moved to Rome in 1956 and enjoyed success with landscape paintings. Two of these pieces, included in the show, capture the directive of her misogynist mentor, Arturo Martini, to turn away from living things and “build stones.”
In “Ovile” (1959), a whitish mass on the crest of a hill in the distance could be a herd of sheep or a stone wall. “Gregge di pecore” (1959) executes the concept with an arc of grazing sheep heads set against a dark background that morph into rocks as the viewer’s eye sweeps to the right.
Then, Lai began experimenting with abstracts and brought along several examples during a pivotal visit to Montreal and New York City in 1968, where she gained an appreciation for Native American art, but met with little success launching a stateside career.
Culled from a private collection, several works from this period are on display. Two include chunks of cork embedded in the paint. Another looks like Lai sculpted the surface with a trowel.
After returning to Italy, Lai stopped painting and started sewing. Drawing inspiration from her native island’s folkways, she made wall art with looms, situated photos of bread against aluminum foil and sewed books with knots of yarn that look legible from afar. Her new vocabulary mashed myriad materials: “Senza titolo, Telaio” (1971-75) consists of wool, wood, acrylic, leather, fur and cloth on canvas.
Tidy loom works reflect Native American color patterns dominated by reds, oranges and yellows. Plastic spoons become ersatz flowers or feathers and dozens of popsicle sticks are included. Other creations in the informal series resemble the result of an autoharp or piano innards being dropped from 10,000 feet.
Like Mario Schifano, the subject of the last exhibition to occupy this space (who also made a pivotal journey to the U.S. in the 1960s), it’s hard to believe that one artist produced such a diverse body of work, although Lai’s through-line is more cohesive.
One interesting creation is a collection of hand-drawn cards that grapple with the philosophical underpinnings of creativity and maintain a dialogue between statements like “A child could do this” or “I don’t understand art” with simple yet profound responses on a level that anyone who reads Italian can comprehend.
“What does art represent?” asks one. “Art does not represent, it builds interpretations” is the response.
Lai emerged from humble roots to lecture in universities and contemplate profound issues about art and society. Melding formal training with a folkloric sensibility, she created challenging modern work that appealed to a broad audience.
And she advocated for communal and individual creativity. In a banner created for the 2008 event in Aggius, showcased at the exhibition, she states that “art is the daily bread of human existence that nourishes and expands consciousness.”
Magazzino Italian Art, at 2700 Route 9 in Philipstown, is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday to Monday. Admission to the museum is $20 ($10 for seniors, students and visitors with disabilities, $5 for children ages 5 to 10, and free for younger children and Philipstown residents). See magazzino.art. The exhibit continues through July 28.
