Brooklyn Rail: Maria Lai: A Journey to America by Benjamin Paul

In 1968, the Italian artist Maria Lai visited the United States, which Magazzino Italian Art is referencing in the title of what is effectively her first retrospective in this country. But much more than that trip, it was the local traditions of Sardinia, where Lai was born in 1919, that had an impact on her artistic production. The discovery of Lai, who died in 2013, gained momentum in 2017 when works were shown at both Documenta and the Venice Biennale. In Kassel and Venice, Lai was somewhat relegated to the arts and crafts corner with her carpets, collages of layered fabrics, and ensembles of painted popsicle sticks, wooden spoons, and feathers, in line with the conceptual orientations of the two mega-exhibitions, in which seemingly anachronistic outsider art played an important role. What’s more, as a female artist who had only recently become known to a wider public, Lai was well suited to the feminism associated with the nascent #MeToo movement. Both approaches are somehow accurate, but so reductionist that they did Lai a disservice. For the significance of Lai’s art lies not least in her contemporaneity and her engagement with Italian Arte Povera, to which she lent a feminine, and above all, Sardinian touch.