MAON, 19th and 20th century art museum in Rende (CS)
20 July 2017, 7pm
NEW ENTRY
Recent acquisitions
edited by Tonino Sicoli and Gregorio Raspa
MANIFEST YOURSELF
Activities and communication of a museum
edited by Tonino Sicoli and Silvia Pujia
MAONSTORY
Slideshow
edited by Carmelina Cosenza and Roberto Principe (Cultural Strategies)
The Capizzano Center - MAON turns twenty. This also brings to fruition a unique project of a museum of modern and contemporary art in Calabria, which collects and documents the art linked to this region, by the birth of the artists or by their frequentation, by long-lasting relationships or by occasional but important ones, above all by the contextualization within the contemporary supra-local culture.
On July 20th at 7 pm the first three events will be inaugurated (until September 16th), which will kick off the celebrations for the twentieth anniversary: “NEW ENTRY - Recent acquisitions”, an exhibition curated by Tonino Sicoli and Gregorio Raspa; “MANIFESTARSI - Activities and communication of a museum”, an exhibition curated by Tonino Sicoli and Silvia Pujia; “MAONSTORY - Slideshow” curated by Carmelina Cosenza and Roberto Principe (Strategiaculturali).
These are three proposals that document the activity of the Museum.
The first exhibition presents about thirty new acquisitions of works that expand the already substantial collection of Art in Calabria that makes MAON unique in its kind. It is also one of the few southern cultural institutions dedicated to modern and contemporary art, and has the recognition, among the Places of the Contemporary, of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities. Among the new works, works by Pippo Altomare, Giuseppe Amadio, Maria Luisa Belcastro, Francesco Antonio Caporale, Nicola Carrino, Antonio Cilurzo, Francesco Correggia, Rino Cosentino, Maria Credidio, Salvatore Dominelli, Francesca Ferraiuolo, Francomà, Tonina Garofalo, Antonio Gatto, Francesco Guerrieri, Hector & Hector, Bruno La Vergata, Elda Longo, Luigi Magli, Domenico Mendicino, Assunta Mollo, Mario Parentela, Antonio Pujia Veneziano, Antonella Rocca, Angelo Savelli, Nicola Spezzano, Camilla Thompson De Martino, Fiorenzo Zaffina. Many of these artists are already present with other works in the Museum's collection. There are many artists of Calabrian origin who live outside or in the region, but there are also some "outsiders" who nevertheless have a relationship of frequentation or operation with Calabria.
The second is, instead, an exhibition of the posters of these twenty years of activity, documentary of important exhibitions and events, which have accredited the museum in the artistic community, such as "Caro Novecento", "Moderno Estremo", "Zang Sud Sud", "Omaggio a Umberto Boccioni", "Around Rotella", "Ottonovecento", "Dal Secondo Futurismo all’Arte concreta e dintorni", "Alberto Burri e i poeti", "Nadar, "In ricordo di Jannis Kounellis": all exhibitions with a wide-ranging historical-critical slant, doubly qualifying as they are proposed by a museum institution in Southern Italy.
The third initiative is a slideshow, which presents in a video the photographic images of the activity of these twenty years, from the installations in the rooms, to the inaugural evenings, to the visitors of all kinds and to the cultural figures, who have frequented the MAON. The MAON, Museum of 19th and 20th Century Art, was born on the initiative of the Center for Art and Culture "A. Capizzano" of Rende in 1997, an association founded by Sandro Principe. After seven years of intense exhibition activity, the Center has acquired permanent collections and has established the Museum, which was born from a project by the art critic Tonino Sicoli. It is located in Palazzo Vitari, in the Historic Center of Rende, granted on loan for use by the Municipal Administration.
“Even though making a speech or area, which also captures the so-called genius loci, we did not want to do conventional cultural anthropology but took into consideration the connections with the general climate, with current trends, with research lines and historical-linguistic references of a broader scope. Documentation is certainly a requirement of written and museum historiography, which must often refer to areas and territorial situations but it is also necessary to be able to grasp the most important aspects, the relationships with external cultural environments, the opening on the national scene of the artists who remained in their territory of origin, as well as the operational insertion in the art world of those who left.
The Eighties and Nineties gave rise to a new situation, which allowed cultural battles to be carried forward and something stable to be created. Even certain situations today are in some way children of that period. It is no coincidence that many young artists today implement the ideas of that post-Southernism, of which two of the greatest art critics of the second half of the twentieth century, Filiberto Menna and Enrico Crispolti, were the godfathers. Then in 1997 the opportunity arose in Rende to have Palazzo Vitari, an eighteenth-century building, recently restored by the Municipality, which welcomed the idea of establishing a museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art there. The palace was entrusted to the cultural association Centro per l’arte e la cultura “Achille Capizzano” to manage it, precisely to streamline and make its operation easier through programming removed from the bureaucratic and paralyzing machine of local authorities.” (Tonino Sicoli)
After twenty years of activity, the Museo dell'Otto e Novecento, and with it the Centro “A. Capizzano” that preceded it, still stands today as an excellence of the Calabrian cultural offer on a par with the great national museums. With its intense and constant exhibition and editorial proposal, since its foundation it has established itself as the first Calabrian cultural institution equipped with a permanent collection of modern and contemporary art as well as an adequate documentary and informative set thanks to the systematic publication of catalogues and monographic volumes. And it is this same collection, which represented its raison d’être at the time, that today constitutes the stronghold to the crisis of the cultural system of recent decades, confirming its role as an accredited museum of contemporary art with few other equivalents in the South. (Silvia Pujia)
“Conceived and organized according to macro-thematic criteria, the collection today appears as a coherent and articulated unicum because it is capable, at the same time, of welcoming within it a body of works with a common historical-geographical matrix and of restoring the sense - conceptual and operational - of the wavering contemporary linguistic heterogeneity. As a tool for studying and documenting a well-defined cultural context, the MAON collection seems to suggest taxonomic structures that are indispensable for understanding the theoretical-critical apparatus of reference. In this perspective, the possibility offered by the collection itself to its users to appreciate monographic nuclei structured in such a way as to tell the story of an artist and/or specific aspects of his work also appears valuable. A collection similar to the one in question - by its nature in continuous and constant construction - bears within itself the decisive sign of even courageous choices, often made in contrast. The permanent activity of documentation of the contemporary requires, in fact, the cyclical effort of pondering the selection policies and of placing specific accents capable of conferring a full and recognizable autonomy to the collection.” (Gregorio Raspa)
