The Real Casa Italiana Awards Premio New York

A vibrant and startling photograph of a skinned horse’s head, a large canvas depicting multiple Christs in soft pastel tones, and snapshots of moonlit, deserted playgrounds across the city are just a few of the images that have adorned the walls of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. Better known as Casa Italiana (and not to be confused with Columbia’s Italian department located on the fifth floor of Hamilton), the classic six-story building is not only home to winners of the Premio New York grant but also hosts various other artists’ exhibitions throughout the year.

The Premio New York originated in 18th-century Rome, but moved in 2002 to the new global art capital—New York. Umberto Vittani, the secretary general of the Italian Foreign Ministry, approached the director of the Italian Academy, professor David Freedberg, with a proposal to bring the Premio to Columbia. The prize is awarded to two young and promising Italian artists selected by a jury composed of Italian art critics, art historians, and two representatives from Columbia. The Academy provides the winning artists with office and studio space and is responsible for half of the funding necessary to support the artists during their time at the Academy. It also sponsors the exhibitions that are erected as the culmination of the artists’ artistic endeavors.

When asked to reflect on the evolution of the program over the past six years, professor Freedberg admitted that “integration of academic research and artistic life is difficult.” The Italian Academy’s Fellowship Program, founded in 1991, is reserved for post-doctorate level scholars whose work is academically and professionally focused, so some adjustments have been necessary to accommodate the winning artists. “The scale of artistic work has grown,” Freedberg said, “so it’s difficult to provide space.”
But current Premio winner Andrea Mastrovito has molded his own work to fit the Academy space. As described in a press release, his exhibition is “a site specific piece in the Italian Academy Library.” Entitled “Libraries Are Not Made; They Grow,” the exhibit, according to Mastrovito, “comments on both contemporary culture and art.”
“Today you can discover this exhibition through all these books,” Mastrovito said, “and you don’t have to read them even once!” The library undergoes a transformation as a result of the exhibition’s colorful, two-dimensional representations of the books, which is achieved by hanging paper images over the shelves that line the walls. As Mastrovito explained, “They’re just images of themselves, like in Plato’s cavern, they’ve got only two dimensions, so you can just take a look at their spines, that’s all they’ve got, with their title, the ultimate summary.”

Silvia Vendramel, the second Premio artist, explores the relationship between the internal and external in her installation, entitled “Here Exactly.” Emphasizing the intense personal connection she has to her work, Vendramel said that “Above all, it’s about the journey.” Somewhat more abstract than her fellow Premio artist’s vision, Vendramel’s exhibition is composed of objects that suggest everyday life, such as musical instruments, beds, or pottery. Through a process of fragmentation and rearrangement, the artist evokes a sense of movement that communicates her understanding of “sculpture as an action of transformation.”

But it isn’t just the Premio New York artists who exhibit their work at the Academy—artists from all over New York display their work there, often lending pieces from other exhibitions in different locations around the city. Allison Jeffery, the assistant director of the Academy, said that the manner in which the Academy connects with artists varies. “Sometimes people come to us and sometimes we go to them,” she said. “In the past year we’ve had three Italian artists’ exhibitions from New York.”

In October, for example, a downtown gallery lent the Academy photographs by Alessandra Sanguinetti. Drawing from her experience living on a farm in Argentina, Sanguinetti’s photos represent the intensity of the relationships that develop between humans and domestic animals. While Sanguinetti’s work can be seen as part of the collections of the Museums of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco, and Buenos Aires and the Museums of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston, Columbia students had merely to cross Amsterdam Avenue to see photographs that Art Review described as “transcend[ing] animal voyeurism to summon the intensity and interdependence of man’s relationship with nature on a philosophical, as well as an emotional, level.”

Despite the Academy’s efforts to reach out to the Columbia community via flyers and frequent ads in the Spectator, many—if not most—Columbians remain oblivious to their proximity to the innovative exhibitions it houses. The Italian Academy allows Columbia students to feed two impulses that are usually mutually exclusive—it offers the unique opportunity to be both cultured and lazy at the same time.