Featuring the Photography of Marina Ballo Charmet / Olivo Barbieri / Gabriele Basilico / Gianni Berengo Gardin / Mario Carrieri / Vincenzo Castella / Cesare Colombo / Mario Cresci / Paola Di Bello / Luigi Ghirri / Guidi Guidi / Alessandro Imbriaco / Francesco Jodice / Mimmo Jodice / Armin Linke / Maurizio Montagna / Paolo Monti / Ugo Mulas / Walter Niedermayr / Franco Vaccari / Massimo Vitali

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present. This landmark exhibition, on view from February 3-April 28, 2012, showcases, for the first time in the United States, the works of major Italian photographers who have explored an alternative image of the country: a landscape bound to urban edges, focused on the discarded and the marginal, and deeply connected to a new identity which has developed side by side to the industrial and global transformation of Italian cities. The Hunter College Art Galleries are proud to share these innovative works with the Hunter Community and the City of New York. This group exhibition retraces the history back to the fifties, when photographers like Paolo Monti and Mario Carrieri focused on the blight and the beauty of a city like Milan, where an increasing urban sprawl was creating new social peripheries. The conceptual practices of Franco Vaccari and Ugo Mulas reveal the dynamic dialogue between photography and the overall artistic culture, leading up to Luigi Ghirri’s photography of a new Italian landscape that he treated with a particular color palette. Ghirri’s emphasis on the evocative power of the everyday recurs throughout the show and informs more recent and contemporary visions by artists such as Vincenzo Castella, Massimo Vitali, Francesco Jodice, and Paola Di Bello, among others. The installation also includes film-clips from well-known Italian movies, books and magazines where these photographs have been circulated, and a digital project built to illustrate pages from architectural magazines like Casabella.

The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, has been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since its inception over a quarter-century ago. This exhibition, curated by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Professor of Art History at Hunter College, is the result of an educational process developed with graduate students, who have been engaged in the curatorial process at every level. This project underscores the galleries’ unique ability to share the highest levels of academic scholarship and curatorial connoisseurship with the student community and the general public, thus facilitating a dynamic cultural exchange.

Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Maria Antonella Pelizzari with writing by graduate students, and published by Charta Editions, Milan. An inter-disciplinary panel is being organized in conjunction with the exhibition on April 20 to discuss issues surrounding this topic. Please contact the gallery for further details.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of GAD – Gusto, Arte, Design – Italian Excellence by Renato Niselli, ASLC – Associazione Culturale la Citta’, progetti per l’Arte, Isabella del Frate Rayburn and Maurice Kanbar, the Hunter College Art Galleries Fund in collaboration with YoungArts, the core program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and the Foundation To-Life.