“Researching and Rewriting Contemporary Art History”. Call for Scholarship 2022

The 2022 edition of the scholarship “Researching and Rewriting Contemporary Art History” is titled Women’s Representation in Italian Art in the 20s and 30s: Iconographies, Meanings and Ways of Seeing. The theme invites the applicant to explore works and subjects recurring in the art history of such a significant period, during which confirmations, transformations, technical innovations, cultural, linguistic, and historic events have marked, transformed, or consolidated the artists’ consciousness and choices. Investigating this subject involves reconsidering, perhaps with new methodologies, both the individual artist’s iconography and his or her artistic research. This process aimed not so much to elaborate the question of the “representation of women” but rather to capture the work’s construction itself, through the points of view it requires, the ways of representation and interpretation that may emerge from the analysis, and the aspects that intertwine instances (and “counter-instances”, as Linda Nochlin pointed out in her book Representing Women, 1999) of social, cultural, and historical-artistic aesthetic.
The Call’s objective was to return old, new, or revived stereotypical images of women to the poetic, to the collective imagination, and to formal solutions. The “maternal womb”, for example, was the point of departure for much of Arturo Martini’s sculpture, meanwhile maternity is a subject that appears in several paintings, sculptures and even photographies of this period. The Call presented some issues that might be considered starting points for the research and the rereading of artworks or specific historical circumstances; this, in order to understand how the representation of women can rise questions in reiterations, social and cultural conformisms, innovation, and contradictions.

Applications for the Scholarship, aimed at students who have already graduated, postgraduates, or PhD students, were evaluated by the Commission formed by:
-Giovanna Coltelli, Art Historianat the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome;
-Sharon Hecker, Art Historian and Curator specialised in Modern and Contemporary Italian Art;
-Federica Muzzarelli, Professor of History and Ideas of Photographyat the Department of Arts, University of Bologna;
-Carla Subrizi, Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Sapienza University in Rome and President of Fondazione Baruchello.

For the year 2022, the scholarship was awarded to:

-Luciana Berti with the project L’immaginario femminile in epoca coloniale. La versione di Leda Rafanelli;

-Lara Demori with the project La rappresentazione della donna nell’opera di Arturo Martini.

Download here the Call for Scholarship 2022.