Join the History of Art and Visual Culture program at CCA for our HAVC Writers Talk series: conversations between HAVC faculty members and invited guests about recent and ongoing research. 

Professors Elizabeth Mangini and Camilla Salvaneschi will discuss Magini's latest publication, Seeing through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture (University of Toronto Press) which considers: can a work of art help us know our world differently? Professor Elizabeth Mangini argues that Giuseppe Penone’s artworks constitute a new theory of sculpture as a means to connect with and know the phenomenal world. By reading the materials and forms of the Italian artist's work with in the social context of the late 1960s and connecting his work to theories of phenomenology and the anthropocene, this book offers a view to the artistic generation for whom sculpture was a means to probe the nature of experience itself at the dawn of postmodernism.

About the Author:

Elizabeth Mangini, Professor and former HAVC chair at CCA, is an art historian specializing in social and material histories of postwar and contemporary art. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, postwar Italian art, European art, theories of sculpture, art and labor, art and philosophy, global feminisms, artistic identity, and public art.  

About the Guest:

Camilla Salvaneschi is an art historian and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Università Iuav di Venezia and San Francisco State University. She earned a PhD from the University of Aberdeen with a dissertation on the magazines published by biennial exhibitions. Her research focuses on contemporary artists' publishing since the 1980s, particularly artist magazines, art criticism, and the expanded field of arts publishing.

Her research has been published in Italian and international journals and has recently co-edited the volume En plein air: Minimum Architecture, Maximum Sustainability (2024) with Sara Marini. In 2020, she was awarded a fellowship by e-flux journal, and in 2022, she co-published the Eastern European Art Periodicals Map with ARTMargins Online. Beyond academia, she has curated exhibitions, worked as an editor for art publishers and magazines, and co-founded OBOE Journal: On Biennials and Other Exhibitions.