This past spring, International Arts & Artists (IA&A) had the opportunity to travel to Rome through a Sister Cities Grant funded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. While in Italy, we met with artists, galleries, nonprofits, and universities with the aim of promoting artistic collaboration and exchange between Rome and Washington, DC.
This week, Allison Nance from IA&A at Hillyer shares her experience in Rome and highlights how this trip helped advance her program’s goals and projects.
Visiting Italy has been a life-long goal of mine, as my great-grandparents immigrated to the United States several generations ago. To visit Rome in the context of promoting the importance of artistic exchange, well, I can certainly check off this bucket list item and then some! There is an idealized view of Italy that many of us American’s have (“la dolce vita”, Under the Tuscan Sun, pasta, wine, etc). Of course, there was delicious food and wine – thank you Imen for cooking that incredible fresh seafood pasta dish! – but as a country with a deep history that is contemporary and dynamic, there was much to take in and learn. Several months after returning home, I think I’m still absorbing it all.
As Director of IA&A at Hillyer, a contemporary exhibition space in Washington, DC, I have had the privilege to work with the Italian Cultural Institute and the Embassy of Italy to develop and present programs that bring Italian language and culture to our local audience. This trip was a unique opportunity to strengthen these relationships. The Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Emanuele Amendola, as well as Renato Mirraco, former Cultural Attaché at the Embassy of Italy, introduced me to several artists, gallery owners, and nonprofit leaders living in Rome. Having these contacts made for a robust and fulfilling trip that has resulted in new, ongoing projects reaching into the next year. This project gave myself and two DC-based artists the opportunity to not only learn about the contemporary art scene in Rome but also to introduce DC’s rich artistic community to our counterparts in Rome.
As mentioned in previous blog posts from Stephanie, Rex, and IA&A’s Cultural Exchange Programs, we were able to present at a conference on the importance of international cultural exchange and how these exchanges have a lasting, positive impact on our local and international creative communities. We partnered with Sala 1, a nonprofit research center for contemporary art, architecture, performance, and music, to present this conference. Through this collaboration, we were able to meet four artists who were exhibiting at Sala 1, and this then led to presenting their work at Hillyer this past August. In addition, this coming spring I will be curating an exhibition in Rome at Sala 1 featuring the work of one of the artists who traveled with us in May, Stephanie Williams, along with two other DC-based artists, interdisciplinary artist Naoko Wowsugi and poet Elizabeth Acevedo. The exhibition will bring together different mediums to share work on gender, race, ethnicity, and the immigrant experience in America.
While we in Rome this May, one of the artists I conducted a studio visit with was Pietro Ruffo. Pietro has an incredible studio at Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, a former pasta factory that was built in 1905 and later converted into artist studios in 2004. It was great to see him at work, introduce him and other artists to our DC artists, and to make this connection. Through a new Sister Cities Grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, we are partnering with the Italian Cultural Institute to bring Pietro to the United States in May of 2019 for a solo exhibition at Hillyer.
Visiting Rome was exciting, and it’s hard to put into words how surreal it feels to turn a corner and be faced with the Colosseum or the Pantheon, or any number of ruins that are casually interspersed with daily life of a modern city. And while all of that was wonderful, my best memories, those that will stay with me, are meeting so many artists, curators, and new friends, who welcomed us into their homes to share a meal. While I speak little Italian, and sometimes language can seem to be an insurmountable barrier, coming together with these people to talk about art over a glass of wine or a quick espresso is the only language we needed to connect.
I look forward to see how all of these connections will come together and play out in the years to come. Ciao!
This blog post was produced as part of a grant funded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.