NarrativeThey left Italy at the beginning of the 2000s, and a contemporary art milieu then exhausted, to try their luck in the United States. Successful bet. These expatriates now run the most prestigious New York museums. Even their native country calls on them, like Cecilia Alemani, at the helm of the 59th Venice Biennale, which opens its doors to the public on April 23.
“Look, a real closet! », launches Cecilia Alemani, with a big smile, pointing with one hand to her small office, set up in her apartment in the East Village, in New York. Yet it is in this cubicle that the 45-year-old curator imagined the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, of which she is, this year, the artistic director. The event, which opens its doors to the general public this Saturday, April 23, is the biggest event in the art world, one to which gallerists, institution directors, critics and collectors flock. Everyone comes to the lagoon to take the pulse of the environment.
Cecilia Alemani, who curated the Italian pavilion in 2017, knows she is expected at the turn. The Milanese, who is also responsible for the artistic commissions of the High Line, the famous planted promenade in western Manhattan, was responsible for preparing a huge exhibition on the two main sites of the Biennale: the brick building of the Arsenal and the foliage of the Giardini (public gardens). The event imagined by Cecilia Alemani, who designed it largely behind her computer, by Zoom, has a particularity of size: 80% of the 213 artists presented are women.
“It was not planned”, assures the commissioner, who is also the first Italian – and one of the rare women – to have been entrusted with the reins of the prestigious event. “The issue of parity is a hot topic in America, and sweeping changes are underway in museums, she explains, but, in Italy, we are still very far from it! »
Cecilia Alemani knows both countries well, Italy, where she grew up and whose critical spirit she likes, and the United States, where she settled in the early 2000s. Like many of her compatriots. Italians are very numerous in the world of American art. These are not people from the Italian-American communitysettled there for decades, but many personalities who left their native country after their studies.
Like Cecilia Alemani’s own husband, Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the prestigious New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York – he was at the helm of the Venice Biennale in 2013 and is certainly the curator of his generation who organized the more biennials in the world.
Or their friend, curator and critic Francesco Bonami, a naturalized American Florentine, as well as the artist Maurizio Cattelan, a bad boy from Padua who became a world star less than ten years after emigrating to the United States at the beginning of the 1990s. Not to mention so many other personalities – gallery directors, curators, project managers… – who arrived in the early 2000s, carrying a “Italian Touch” who never ceases to be successful.
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