CIMA Roundtable: Identities in Motion

421 Broome Street,New York NY 10013

23 September, 2021

Description

Professors Pamela Ballinger, Rhiannon Noel Welch, and Eleanor Paynter discuss the histories and narratives of Mediterranean crossings. This roundtable discussion takes cue from Mario Schifano's biographic experience: born in colonial Libya in 1934 , the artist and his family were displaced to the Cinecittà refugee camp during World War II. Movements across the Mediterranean such as the one that Schifano undertook—whether as a result of wartime resettlement or as part of the post-WW2 decolonization process—play a pivotal role in the construction of the modern Italian identity. Professors Pamela Ballinger (Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Rhiannon Welch (Univ. of California, Berkeley) and Eleanor Paynter (Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center, Cornelly University) will join CIMA Research Fellow Aja Martin for a conversation on these subjects, which inform the art, literature, and cinema of the postwar era, and can provide useful insights in today's migratory phenomena and negotiations of Italian identity. CIMA, the Center for Italian Modern Art is a 501c3 public nonprofit exhibition and research center established in 2013 in New York City to promote public appreciation and advance the study of modern and contemporary Italian art in the United States and internationally. Each academic year CIMA presents in its spacious loft in SoHo an installation examining the work of modern Italian artists rarely exhibited in the U.S. The exhibitions serve as the theme for CIMA’s fellowship program, which aims to promote new scholarship and dialogue in the field through the support of emerging young scholars from around the world.   CIMA's next exhibition Facing America: Mario Schifano, 1960–1965 will be on view  through November 13, 2021.