WOMEN ART DEALERS
One of her main research interests is the central role played by women art dealers in the creation and development of the modern art market. She curated the exhibition La Galleria dell’Ariete: una storia documentaria at ICA Foundation in Milan (March 24-June 2, 2019). In May 2016 she was granted a research fellowship by the Santa Maddalena Foundation for doing research on the Galleria dell’Ariete records at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Los Angeles, CA. Since 2019 she is Associate Director of the Santa Maddalena Foundation, where she is scientific supervisor of the photographic archive of the renowned Galleria dell’Ariete founded in 1955 by Beatrice Monti della Corte one of the first Italian art dealers who played a dynamic and influential role on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2019 Caterina Toschi organized with Véronique Chagnon-Burke the Christie’s Education Symposium Women Art Dealers (1940-1990), preceded by a panel of the same topic at the 2018 Christie’s Education Conference Celebrating Female Agency in the Arts. From these events was born the idea of founding a research lab to explore women art dealers’ contributions to contemporary art markets by mapping and examining their archives: WADDA | Women Art Dealers Digital Archives. She is co-editor (with Véronique Chagnon-Burke) of the scholarly monograph Women Art Dealers, Creating Markets for Modern Art, 1940-1990 (Bloomsbury Publishing, series Contextualizing Art Markets, 2024). She is working on a monograph entitled Beatrice Monti della Corte e la Galleria dell’Ariete di Milano (1955-1985). She has also worked on the archives of Matilde Giorgini and Fiamma Vigo, founders of the Galleria Quadrante and the Galleria Numero, respectively.
TUSCAN CONTEMPORARY ART ARCHIVES
Co-founder and co-director of Senzacornice | Research and Education Lab for Contemporary Art, mainly skilled on studying the Tuscan contemporary artistic culture. From 2016 to 2021 the Lab coordinated the census project Contemporary Art Archives in Tuscany (1960-2000) promoted by Regione Toscana and Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana in partnership with the Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci. She co-curated the exhibition Pistoia Novecento. An Overview of the Art of the Post World War II Period, (with A. Acocella and A. Iacuzzi) at Fondazione Pistoia Musei, Pistoia (September 19, 2020-April 19, 2021) and the documentaries Base Progetti per l’arte 1998/2018 (with A. Acocella, 2018) and Toscana ’900. La cultura artistica di un secolo (with A. Acocella and A. Mazzanti, 2015). As scientific coordinator of the project Landscape Archive of the International Center for the Study of the Tuscan Landscape PaTos of the University for Foreigners of Siena, she co-curated in 2022 the online exhibition La pelle della città: il paesaggio antropico toscano tra arte e fotografia (1950-1980), and in 2021 the online exhibition Il paesaggio toscano nei critofilm di Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. She co-edited (with A. Acocella) the book Arte a Firenze 1970-2015. Una città in prospettiva (Quodlibet, 2016).
Massimo Nannucci.
THE OLIVETTI IDIOM
She is currently working on Olivetti, the Italian manufacturer of typewriters, computers and calculators headquartered in Ivrea from its foundation in 1908 to 1998, when it sold its PC business and established the Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti, the historical archive. She wrote the books The Olivetti Idiom (1952-1979) and L’Idioma Olivetti (1952-1979 (Quodlibet, 2018) and curated the exhibition The Olivetti Idiom (1952-1979), produced by Ellyn Toscano, Villa Sassetti, NYU Florence (March 14-May 5, 2018) after one-year research fellowship at New York University Florence. Member of the scientific board of the project Identità Olivetti. Spazi e linguaggi 1933-1983/Olivetti Identities. Spaces and Languages 1933-1983 (curated by D. Turrini and D. Fornari, Università degli Studi di Ferrara and École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne). She published many essays on the Olivetti’s pioneering vision of design culture in particular focusing on trade and art exhibitions, history of photography and experimental publishing.LA STRANIERA
La Straniera | The Stranger is a collaborative project of the University for Foreigners of Siena aimed at examining and cataloguing the different visual, critical and exhibition readings in Italy of non-Western arts and cultures. The project Straniere: the reception of non-European arts and cultures in Italy (1945-2000) – presented by the University for Foreigners of Siena (PI: Caterina Toschi) together with the Universities of Parma (coordinator: Alessandra Acocella) and Udine (coordinator: Luca Pietro Nicoletti) – is the recipient of a PRIN PNRR 2022 grant awarded by the Ministry of University and Research and the European Union (NextGeneration EU). The project aims to offer an initial reconnaissance of the different visual, critical and exhibition readings that have been produced in Italy of non-Western arts, investigating some case studies inherent to the history of the market, exhibitions, publications, artistic and photographic research that have presented non-Western works and artifacts or have absorbed their characters, thus introducing in Italy new interpretative and representative paradigms of these “foreign” arts that differ from the current canons of national culture. In the twenty-four months of work, the main milestone, and thus the main goal of the project, is to create a digital archive, in collaboration with CNR ISTI and Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities (AIMH), in which visual and textual sources documenting forms of reading, interpretation, paraphrase or presentation in Italy of non-European arts and cultures from 1945 to 2000 will be investigated, digitized and annotated. A branch of the research was also among the winners of the PRIN 2022 funding awarded by the Ministry of University (Associated PI: C. Toschi, Siena research unit, project “BorderArt(E)Scapes. Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Borderscapes: from the late nineteenth century to the 2000s, reading contemporaneity and experimenting with new research practices”, PI: G. Bacci, Unifi). On March 2 and 3, 2023 the University for Foreigners of Siena hosted a two-days symposium, organized by A. Acocella, L. P. Nicoletti, C. Toschi, aimed at presenting a first survey focused on African, Oceanic and Central and South American arts from the post-World War II period to 2000.