Paola Mura, artistic director of Magazzino Italian Art.” width=”970″ height=”970″ data-caption=’Paola Mura, artistic director of Magazzino Italian Art. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Marco Anelli</span>’>
The New York museum Magazzino Italian Art has just opened a show of work by artist Maria Lai (1919-2013), “A Journey to America,” which represents the recently rediscovered artist’s first retrospective in the United States. Early impressions have been strong, with The Brooklyn Rail running two reviews (a rarity)—the first concluding that “her art is more topical than ever” while the other said the exhibition was “comprehensive and speaks to an idiosyncratic artist and ritualist who, in remaining tethered to the line, both culled and advanced Sardinia’s folkloric social history.” This is one not to miss if you find yourself spending some time upstate this summer. We caught up with Paola Mura, Magazzino’s artistic director and the show’s curator, to hear more about it.
Can you explain the significance of Maria Lai’s work for our readers who may not be aware of it?
Maria Lai is one of the most singular and resonant voices in Italian art of the 20th Century. Deeply rooted in the traditions and landscapes of her native Sardinia, she developed a profoundly original artistic language that combines storytelling, symbolism and a deep connection to memory, identity and place.
Working with humble materials—threads, fabric, paper, stones—Lai created works that transcend boundaries between drawing, sculpture and poetry. Her art speaks of relationships: between individuals, between communities and between humanity and the cosmos. In 1981, she realized Legarsi alla montagna (Tying Yourself to the Mountain), widely considered the first example of relational art in Italy, involving the entire population of her hometown in a poetic act of connection and reconciliation.
SEE ALSO: In New York, Rosana Paulino Celebrates Black Female Power in Science and Symbols
Lai’s work, though profoundly local in its references, touches on universal themes: belonging, transformation and the invisible threads that bind us all. Her poetic vision and quiet radicalism have only recently begun to receive the international recognition they deserve. This retrospective not only marks her American debut on this scale but also highlights her enduring relevance in today’s conversations around art, community and care. I think her voice is both timeless and incredibly relevant right now.
This is probably a big question, but could you talk about the symbolic significance of sewing in her work?
Sewing holds a central place in Maria Lai’s artistic language, not only as a method but as a gesture laden with meaning. For Lai, stitching was a way of writing without words, a tactile and intimate form of inscription. The thread became a line, a form of drawing, but also a way of narrating—of binding together memory, silence and emotion.
Her Libri cuciti (Sewn Books) are emblematic of this approach: pages of fabric are pierced and joined by delicate threads that trace marks resembling script, yet without any decipherable text. This asemic writing invites the viewer to read not through language but through intuition, sensation and rhythm. It’s a book that speaks through absence—through what is felt rather than said—drawing us into a space of contemplation.
Sewing, in Lai’s hands, becomes both a solitary and a connective act. It is about repair, relation and transmission. She elevates what is traditionally seen as a domestic or ‘feminine’ gesture into a tool of philosophical inquiry, collapsing the boundaries between craft and art, between the intimate and the conceptual.
Ultimately, sewing for Lai is a metaphor for human connection—for how we are bound to one another, how we carry memory and how meaning is always provisional, always in the process of being stitched together.
This show features around 100 works made from the 1950s to the 2000s. That must have been difficult to coordinate! From where did these works travel to New York? Private collections? Museums?
Yes, it was a complex and incredibly rewarding process. The exhibition brings together works from a wide range of sources, reflecting both the breadth of Maria Lai’s career and the richness of her legacy. A significant portion of the show is drawn from the collection of Magazzino Italian Art itself—a testament to the longstanding vision of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, who began collecting Lai’s work over thirty years ago.
We’ve also included a rare group of works that Lai brought with her during her 1968 trip to Canada and New York. Many of these are now part of private American collections and are being shown publicly for the first time in decades—if ever.
Beyond that, the exhibition is enriched by extraordinary loans from major institutions in Sardinia and across Italy, including the MAN in Nuoro, the Museo di Aggius, the Musei Civici di Cagliari, the MUSMA in Matera, the Fondazione Maria Lai, the Fondazione di Sardegna and, last but not least, the Consiglio Regionale della Sardegna. It’s been a collaborative effort across continents, made possible by the generosity and enthusiasm of institutions and collectors who deeply believe in the importance of sharing Lai’s work with a wider audience.
What are some of the standout pieces that visitors should be sure not to miss?
It’s difficult to choose from such a rich and multifaceted body of work, but several pieces across the galleries offer key insights into Lai’s evolving practice. From the earliest section, Gregge di pecore (1959) is particularly significant: here, the flock dissolves into the stony terrain, an early example of Lai’s lyrical synthesis of figure and landscape and of her lifelong dialogue with Sardinia. Terre bianche (1968), made for her pivotal journey to America, exemplifies her transition into abstraction, merging texture, gesture and cosmic reference.
Tela cucita (1975) is a landmark work in which Lai “paints” with sewn bands of fabric, reimagining the loom as both symbol and structure. From the Telai series, Telaio in sole e mare (1971), reminiscent of Mondrian and Rauschenberg, reflects her engagement with spatial language, and La torre (1971-2002) in particular, created in response to the events of Sept. 11, is a profound meditation on fragility and resilience, with broader historical and emotional resonances.
Later works such as Fili di vela spaziale (2007) distill her interest in the cosmos into pure thread and velvet, while Lettere (2008), composed of sewn pages in the form of signed letters linked by thread, functions as a kind of self-portrait and a final message—an intimate culmination of Lai’s lifelong exploration of memory, language and interconnection.
Finally, Tenendo per mano l’ombra (1987) stands out as a deeply poetic sewn fairy tale: a meditation on the human capacity to embrace the shadow self and an invitation to move through the world with empathy and introspection.
Of course, this selection reflects only a small portion of what is on view—and, inevitably, it is shaped by personal affinity. But it’s a pleasure to highlight these particular works, especially given the extraordinary opportunity to bring so many of them together here in New York.
Lai is credited with bringing relational aesthetics to Italy. Why was that important?
Maria Lai’s Legarsi alla montagna (1981) is now widely recognized as the first work of relational aesthetics in Italy—remarkable not only for its timing but for how deeply it redefined the relationship between artist, audience and place. Rather than producing an autonomous object, Lai orchestrated a collective action that involved the entire village of Ulassai in tying their homes—and themselves—to the mountain with blue ribbon. The result was not merely symbolic; it was a lived gesture of community and collective ritual of reconnection through art.
This was profoundly important in the Italian context, especially during a period when much contemporary art remained centered on the object or on institutional critique. Lai proposed a different model: one rooted in empathy, shared authorship and the poetry of everyday life. She anticipated by decades what would become central tenets of socially engaged practice.
Her contribution was not just theoretical. Legarsi alla montagna continues to shape how artists, curators and institutions think about art’s role in civic life. It was a turning point that showed how deeply aesthetic experience could be embedded in local memory, social space and communal imagination.
Lai was not a part of the Arte Povera movement but is associated with it. There seems to be a vogue for that art, with the recent show at the Bourse de Commerce and talk of a Nobel Peace Prize for Michelangelo Pistoletto. Why do you think this kind of art resonates with people at this moment?
While Maria Lai was never formally part of Arte Povera, her affinities with the movement—through her use of humble materials and her anti-monumental sensibility—are unmistakable. What sets her apart, and perhaps makes her work so resonant today, is the deeply intimate and narrative quality she brought to those materials.
There’s a renewed attention to Arte Povera now, I think, because it offers a language of resistance against excess, spectacle and disposability. In an age of ecological crisis and social fragmentation, the idea that art can be made from what is already at hand—fabric scraps, stones, thread—feels not only sustainable but ethically grounded. These works speak to fragility and resilience in equal measure.
In Lai’s case, this resonates even more powerfully because her “poor materials” are never impersonal. They are sewn, tied, handled—infused with memory, myth and care. Her works, like those of Kounellis, remind us that art can be radically simple and profoundly human. They help us imagine forms of connection and creativity that are both ancient and urgently needed now. And her art offers a quiet but powerful reminder that transformation doesn’t always require grand gestures. Sometimes it begins with a single stitch.
Can you speak to the way she integrated Italian craft traditions with the trends being pioneered by her contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly?
Maria Lai’s practice is remarkable for the way it bridges two worlds: the deep-rooted traditions of Sardinian and Italian craft and the avant-garde currents shaping postwar art internationally.
While artists like Rauschenberg and Twombly were expanding the vocabulary of painting through assemblage, mark-making and text, Lai was arriving at similar formal experiments through a very different entry point—one that was not only academic but more personal, tactile and grounded in millenary traditions.
She was an excellent painter and sculptor, but from the 1960s on, instead of using paint or pencil, Lai “drew” with thread, sewed instead of writing and turned fabric into narrative space. Her sewn books and looms are in dialogue with the gestural abstraction of Twombly or the material poetics of Rauschenberg’s combines, but their language is unmistakably her own, inflected by the rhythms of weaving, the oral storytelling of Sardinian women and the ritual of making by hand.
What’s radical about Lai is how she internalized the conceptual innovations of her time but expressed them through textile, myth and silence rather than spectacle or theory. Her work challenges hierarchies—between art and craft, word and image, masculine and feminine—and insists on a kind of slowness and embodied knowledge that feels increasingly urgent today. She didn’t just adopt the visual idioms of the avant-garde; she translated them into a new language.
