February 18–October 1, 2016
www.mappingthecity.org
www.iicsanfrancisco.esteri.it
Mapping the City, a collaborative project promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) of San Francisco and curated by Marina Pugliese, was conceived to further exchanges among Italian contemporary visual artists and their Bay Area counterparts. Its inherent goal is to broaden the compass of cultural initiatives—which are perhaps too often subject to the limits of organizations’ specific communities. This project was therefore conceived as an extension outside the physical limits of the Italian Cultural Institute and as an ideal exploration into different realities.
Part one:
Fragile. Marta Dell’Angelo and Summer Lee
A collaboration between the IIC and the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) of San Francisco
February 18, 6pm
Opening at IIC
601 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco 94102
March 10, 6pm
Finissage at CCC
750 Kearny St #3
San Francisco 94108
Marina Pugliese and Abby Chen, Curator of the CCC, have paired a Milan-based artist with a San Francisco Bay Area native whose respective visual practices have enough similarities and differences to build an engaging dialogue and question the nature of artistic collaboration.
Marta Dell’Angelo is an Italian artist who focuses her research on the relationships between the brain and the body.
Bay Area-native Summer Mei Ling Lee explores images of her family as a prefiguring of the unknown.
The project kicks off with an exhibition jointly created by the two artists. The opening, which takes place in the IIC gallery space, will initiate a constellation of collaborative art actions throughout San Francisco’s urban setting, thus launching an ephemeral archive to document their month-long collaboration. The project will culminate in a concluding exhibition in Chinatown.
Part two:
High Up. Graphic Design Around Town
A collaboration between the IIC and the California College of the Arts (CCA), in partnership with SF Design Week
May 16–June 12
Various venues
San Francisco
June 2–9
CCA Hooper Graduate Center
1111 Eighth Street
San Francisco 94107
In partnership with San Francisco Design Week, a dematerialized initiative will spread around the city between the end of May and the beginning of June. Images jointly created by a group of Italian and Bay Area graphic designers will be printed as posters and bill-posted in strategic urban locations. Geoff Kaplan (CCA Senior Adjunct Professor of Graduate Design) and Marina Pugliese selected the designers and matched them in pairs, each team producing two images in a spirit of the broadest freedom.
Alizarina, LeftLoft, Megan Lynch, Geoff Kaplan, Brett MacFadden/Scott Thorpe, Massimo Pitis, Jon Sueda, Studio FM, Martin Venezky and Zetalab are the designers invited to create the images. During SF Design Week (June 2–9), a smaller-scale version of the posters will be on view in the atrium gallery of the CCA Hooper Graduate Center.
Part three:
Neon Afterwords. Fiamma Montezemolo
A collaboration between the IIC and Kadist Art Foundation
September 21–October 1
Kadist Art Foundation
3295 20th St
San Francisco 94110
Neon Afterwords is an immersive installation in which sentences written in fluorescent light tubes float at multiple heights in a dark exhibition space. The sentences were selected by the artist, Fiamma Montezemolo, from a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1969, “The Ethnographer.”
The viewer, surrounded by luminous words hanging in darkness with no suggested hierarchy of interpretation, negotiates layered meanings via his/her perception and experience. Trained as both artist and anthropologist, Fiamma Montezemolo reflects on the central moment of the anthropologist’s formation: fieldwork.
The use of neon light in environmental pieces is a reference to the Italian artistic experiments in the post-war era from Lucio Fontana’s famous neon arabesque for the 1951 Milan Triennale to Mario Merz’s igloos.
About the curator:
Marina Pugliese is an Italian art historian who lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts. In September 2017 she will co-curate with Vincente Todoli the exhibition Lucio Fontana. Environments at HangarBicocca in Milan.
For more information: T 415 788 7142
