The Maria Lai Symposium at Magazzino Italian Art Museum brought together scholars and artists to explore the career and enduring legacy of one of the most remarkable figures in postwar and contemporary Italian Art. Organized as the culminating moment of Maria Lai: A Journey to America, the first major retrospective of the artist in the United States—curated by Magazzino’s Artistic Director, Paola Mura—the symposium highlighted the breadth and continued resonance of Lai’s work, which developed a radically poetic language that speaks across media and disciplines. Rooted in the landscape, culture and craft of her native Sardinia, Lai’s work is open to relations with the other, with the world, and ultimately with the universe.
Program
Doors opened at 9:50AM, coffee was available to all participants
Morning Session—Main Building, Gallery 1
10:00AM Greetings from Adam Sheffer, Director, Magazzino Italian Art Museum
10:10AM Introduction by Paola Mura, Artistic Director, Magazzino Italian Art Museum
10:30AM Keynote Address: Michela Murgia & Maria Lai: Legarsi
Alessandro Giammei, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies, Department of Italian Studies, Yale University
Followed by Q&A
11:20AM Coffee Break
11:30AM A Day in Sardinia: Maria Lai’s Telai and the Times of Craft
Michele D’Aurizio, PhD Candidate, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley
11:55AM “L’arte è indicibile” [Art is unspeakable]: Maria Lai’s Asemic Writing
Saskia Verlaan, PhD candidate in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Followed by Q&A
12:30PM Lunch break
Afternoon Session—Robert Olnick Pavilion
2:00PM Presentation of the new installation, Llencols de aigua
Elisabetta Masala, Curator, Magazzino Italian Art Museum
2:15PM Reflections on Maria Lai, conversation with Mila Dau
2:35PM A tour of Maria Lai: A Journey to America, led by Melissa McGill
Main Building, Gallery 1
3:00 Coffee Break
3:15PM Martha Tuttle in conversation with Adam Sheffer
3:40PM Marcello Maloberti: CUORE MIO
About Alessandro Giammei
Alessandro Giammei is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. His latest book is Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2024), winner of two awards: the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association and the Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies from the American Association for Italian Studies. He is also the author of several books in Italian, including Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja (edizioni del verri, 2014), winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize; Cose da maschi (Einaudi, 2023), shortlisted for the Bridge Literary Award; Gioventù degli antenati: Il Rinascimento è uno zombie (Einaudi, 2024); and, most recently, Parlare fra maschi (Einaudi, 2025). With Ara H. Merjian he co-wrote and edited Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso, 2023), with Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri he co-edited Giulia Niccolai (Quodlibet, 2023), and with Chiara Valerio he co-translated the letters between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (nottetempo, 2021). He also translated Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Case for Spirit Photography (Marsilio, 2022), edited Dario Villa’s complete poems (Crocetti, 2025), and curates all of Michela Murgia’s posthumous books.
About Michele D’Aurizio
Michele D’Aurizio is a scholar and curator of contemporary art. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, where he researches the intersecting histories of art, craft, and design in postwar Italy. He has been a fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. His writings have appeared in publications such as Abitare, Flash Art, and Mousse, as well as in exhibition catalogs by the Fondazione Prada (Milan), Centro Pecci (Prato), and MADRE (Naples). In 2016, he was one of the curators of the 16th Quadriennale d’Arte.
About Saskia Verlaan
Saskia Verlaan is a PhD candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York where she specializes in modern Italian art and issues related to the practice and culture of drawing. Under the advisement of Prof. Emily Braun, she is writing a dissertation examining the use of asemic [wordless] writing in the work of the artists Betty Dannon, Irma Blank, Dadamaino, and Maria Lai during the 1960s and 1970s. She previously completed her M.A. at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Verlaan’s research has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas, where she also curated the 2021 exhibition, Spatial Awareness: Drawings from the Permanent Collection. She is currently the Collections Associate at the Grey Art Museum at NYU and has previously held staff positions at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
About Elisabetta Masala
Elisabetta Masala is a contemporary art curator specializing in the visual arts of the twentieth and twenty-first century. She has been the curator of MAN museum in Nuoro since 2021, where she has acquired great expertise in researching, exhibiting, and interpreting contemporary art. At MAN, she has curated several exhibitions, including Giorgio Andreotta Calò: in girum imus nocte, Maria Lai and Jorge Eielson: 100 Thousand Stars, and the group show DIORAMA, featuring international artists such as Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Thomas Grünfeld, and Massimo Bartolini. From 2018 to 2020, she served as assistant curator at the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Vatican Museums, where she contributed to a wide range of curatorial functions, including exhibition loans, research, and publications. She is the author of various articles and book chapters, and a monograph, Salvatore Fiume e i giochi della memoria (2015), with an introduction by the then director of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci.
About Mila Dau
Mila Dau is an artist, architect and educator. As a young woman she lived with Maria Lai at her home in Monte Mario for several years and developed a strong personal relationship with the artist. Maria shared insights, knowledge and experiences with her and initiated her to a life in art. Mila holds a B.A. in Philosophy, a degree in Architecture from La Sapienza, and an MA in Education. She moved to New York in the early Nineties. Mila taught Art in the public schools of New York City for twenty years. She currently lives and works in New York and in Rome. Her art can be found in numerous private collections and has been exhibited in venues around the world. Maria Lai’s influence and her philosophy of art has been a constant presence in Mila’s life through the years as she developed her own work, focused on architecture and portraiture.
About Melissa McGill
Melissa McGill is a New York based interdisciplinary artist known for ambitious, collaborative public art projects and a vibrant studio practice. Her work is site-responsive, exploring nuanced conversations between land, water, sustainable traditions, and interconnectedness between all living things. At the heart of her work is a focus on community, meaningful shared experiences and lasting positive impact. Spanning a variety of media including performance, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, light, video and immersive installation, McGill has presented both independent public art projects and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally since 1991. Constellation (2015-2017) on Pollelpel Island in the Hudson River, New York and Red Regatta in Venice, Italy are among her celebrated large-scale environmental works. She is a graduate of The Rhode Island School of Design and a National Endowment of the Arts ArtWorks Grant recipient.
About Martha Tuttle
Martha Tuttle is an artist working between painting, textile, and sculpture. She is interested in the intimacies and discourses possible between entities of varying scales and time frames, such as the human and the mineral, or the pebble and the interplanetary. She received her BA from Bard College in 2011, and her MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2015. Fellowships and residencies have included The Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S. and internationally, and is in the collections of, among others, The National Gallery, MoMA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. It has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. She is based in Livingston, Montana.
About Marcello Maloberti
Marcello Maloberti is a visual artist living in Milan. His artistic research draws inspiration from trivial events and urban contexts, paying attention to shapeless and precarious states of life. His observations, however, go beyond the ordinary evidence of everyday life experience thanks to an often estranged and visionary neorealistic approach. Maloberti’s performances and multimedia installations take place in both private and public spaces having a strong interactive impact for the audience. Maloberti also emphasizes the relationship between art and life researching new approaches to photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and drawing. Maloberti has exhibited in numerous institutions, including: PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; MAXXI, Rome; Triennale Milano; Bangkok Art Biennale; MACRO, Rome; Manifesta 12, Palermo; Italian Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale; Kunstverein of Frankfurt; Copenhagen Art Festival; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Performa, New York. In 2019, in collaboration with Fondazione di Sardegna, Stazione dell’Arte (Ulassai) and the MAXXI museum (Rome) he realized the CUORE MIO project, a long journey dedicated to the artist Maria Lai.
