Starting on February 1, 2017 and continuing throughout the spring semester, NYU Florence’s La Pietra Dialogues will host an array of events as part of the program Picturing Women – Constructions of Gender in the Action Collection and Contemporary Society. The program opens with a poetry talk and then a poetry workshop for students and concludes with a student exhibition to open on May 2, 2017

The images of women within the Acton Collection of Villa La Pietra are numerous and richly varied. From a predominance of religious iconography in fine and decorative arts, to mythological and allegorical depictions, portraiture and scenes of domesticity, every room in the collection of some 6000 objects provides documentation through which to explore the symbolic function of gender roles and relationships across centuries. While we can enjoy the Acton Collection on the level of an aesthetic experience, a display of collecting taste, or an archive of historic art, as active viewers we become aware of a crucial tension between the gender constructions these images represented when created and their meaning and resonance in contemporary social and political contexts today.

Using the Acton Collection as both a productive and discursive site, this project examines the depiction of women with a transhistorical perspective, adding into the Villa’s collection contemporary responses by artists and poets in an effort to investigate, challenge and expand upon received art historical categories of iconography, patronage, material and function. With the undergraduate population of NYU Florence and La Pietra Dialogues, this project will explore the issues of gender, power and representation evident in the collection and search for reverberations of this visual history in contemporary artistic, social and political contexts.

The program details are available here via the La Pietra Dialogues website.