September 2019 Newsletter
Ciao from the Siena Art Institute! After a busy spring and summer, our Fall 2019 Semester is now in full swing and our latest newsletter is here with some updates about recent & upcoming activities:
Upcoming Deadlines for Residencies and Study Abroad
September 30 is the upcoming deadline to apply for our 2020 residency season. Professional artists and writers are encouraged to apply. See the Residencies section on our website for more information.
November 1 is the upcoming deadline for undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students to apply for our Spring 2020 semester at the Siena Art Institute and our partner program the Siena School for Liberal Arts. For more information about our semester programs and our online application process, visit the "Programs" section of our website. If you know of interested students, please encourage them to contact us!
Enjoying our new location
We are enjoying our new location here in Siena since our move in June! Our new building Il Punto / The Point is located right alongside Siena's historic city gate of Porta Romana (street address via Enea Silvio Piccolomini 2, Siena). Our adjacent neighbors are the University of Siena's San Niccolò Complex, connecting to the Orto de' Pecci community garden, in the valley behind Siena's city hall.
Il Punto / The Point is the new home of our 3 organizations: The Siena Art Institute, The Siena School for Liberal Arts, and the Mason Perkins Deafness Fund. Together, our organizations offer a wide array of cultural programs to serve local and international communities, including study-abroad programs, intensive courses, workshops, conferences, residencies, and special events. Our areas of focus include creative arts, interdisciplinary studies, sign language, and sustainability.
The Preview event of our new building on June 8 began with an Open Studio featuring work by our current artists-in-residence and video footage of our recent activities. The evening continued with a talk at the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena (Palazzo Sansedoni) "Art, at what price?", with presentations by Nathaniel Kahn (director of "The Price of Everything") Zhanna Kadyrova (artist, Venice Biennale 2019) Kuralai Abdukhalikova (vice-director of Les Moulins, Galleria Continua, Paris) and moderated by artist Jane South (Advisory Board of the Siena Art Institute and Chair of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute, NY).
Recent & Upcoming Resident Artists
We have many resident artists at the Siena Art Institute for the Fall 2019 semester, including Carlos Estévez (visual artist, Cuba-USA) Julie Wyman (film-maker and performer, USA), Marina Mangubi (visual artist, Russia-USA), and Honey Jones-Hughes, (UK-Netherlands).
John Kenneth Melvin came to the Siena Art Institute as a resident artist in the Spring of 2018 and was invited back as a Project Fellow for the Fall of 2019, with a proposed project to nurture community dialogue on themes of nature and culture. Key parameters guiding the design of the project are public art, community involvement, iconic place making, ecologically sensitive practices, and cradle to cradle design methodology.
We are also very much looking forward to hosting our Fall 2019 Project Fellows Bik Van Der Pol (Liesbeth Bik & Jos van der Pol) conceptual artists & installation artists based in the Netherlands. Through their practice they aim to articulate and understand how art can produce a public sphere and space for speculation and imagination through which ‘publicness’ is not only defined but also created.
The Siena Art Institute is very happy to be continuing our residency partnership with Pratt Fine Arts, co-sponsored by Pratt Institute’s School of Art and School of Design. Having hosted Pratt artists Susan Ciancolo and Nat Meade as our partnership's inaugural artists-in-residence last year, we hosted Curtis Mitchell and Robin Mollicone for special residencies in June 2019.
We are hosting Fulbright Scholar Pamela Lawton for the Fall 2019 semester. During her tenure here she is making art while forging new connections between her own creative process, her engagement with museums, and the city of Siena. In addition to art-making in response to the medieval built environment, she will engage through research and teaching with the community of people with low or no vision and/or hearing loss and the art and educational institutions that serve them.
Special Projects, Partnerships, and Regional Initiatives
The Siena Art Institute is participating in several special projects and regional initiatives. Through the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi we are coordinating the Space to Make project, supporting creative discovery of specific locations as gathering points of our local communities of artists and artisans. With support of the Region of Tuscany, we are pursuing a collaborative storytelling project Racconti dal Margine (tales from the margin) sharing our experiences and reflections on the micro-communities in our region from the points of view of our students and resident artists.
The Siena Art Institute is very happy to be starting a new 2-year program with Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and we have two Greek students from Athens and Thessaloniki participating in our Fall 2019 semester thanks to special SNF-SART Scholarships.
Brandeis-in-Siena 2019
For the fifth year in a row, from mid-July to mid-August 2019, the Siena Art Institute hosted a group of students from Brandeis University for an intensive summer program combining coursework in Art History and Studio Art. This summer's activities included a visit to the Venice Biennale, which was an amazing opportunity to see an impressive array of contemporary art from around the globe. The Brandeis-in-Siena program is run through Brandeis University but is open for students of other institutions to participate. We are already looking forward to our 2020 Brandeis-in-Siena program!
Summer festival POLICROMIA: Poetry&Co.
For the second year in a row, the Siena Art Institute organized Policromia - Poetry & Co, a weekend of poetry bringing to Siena great Italian and international guests for a series of readings, music, and sign language. Numerous poets and translators participated in the event, curated by poets Mairéad Byrne & Will Schutt. We are already looking forward to Policromia 2020!
Incoming and Recent Semester Participants
Visit our Art & Society Class Blog for updates on our students' recent activities! We were delighted to be able to offer special scholarships in the fall 2019 semester for students from Greece and Albania. Our recent and current participants at the Siena Art Institute and partner program the Siena School for Liberal Arts also have included students from many of our affiliated institutions including Mount Holyoke College, Oberlin College, College of the Holy Cross, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Wellesley College, Swarthmore College, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and more.
Winter Intensive Course with SAIC
In January 2020, for the sixth year in a row, we will be hosting a group of students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for their intensive winter course "Living the Past in the Present: the Art of the Archive." Students develop insight into how historical study may spark their growth as contemporary artists, designers, and visual scholars.
Friends of SART
As a non-profit organization, the Siena Art Institute appreciates the support of our program partners and sponsors in making it possible for us to continue in our mission to encourage creativity, ingenuity and resourcefulness as active tools that can have a practical and meaningful impact on society, combining high-level training with many opportunities for dialogue with the most interesting voices of the international art scene.
We welcome the support of individual donors as "Friends of SART."
To contribute, please visit our webpage.
Siena Art Institute Onlus
Via Enea Silvio Piccolomini 2 - 53100 Siena (Italy) -(+39) 0577 573086
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