Siena, an exhibition on Vivian Maier at Santa Maria della Scala, featuring 93 photographs

From Dec. 16, 2022 to March 16, 2023, the Magazzini della Corticella at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena will host an exhibition dedicated to Vivian Maier (New York, 1926 - Chicago, 2009). Entitled Vivian Maier . The Self-Portrait and its Double and curated by Anne Morin and Loredana De Pace, the exhibition consists of 93 self-portraits spanning the life of the American artist. The exhibition traces the work of the famous nanny-photographer who, through the Rolleiflex camera and later also with the Leica, transports visitors through the streets of New York and Chicago, where the continuous play of shadows and reflections show the presence-absence of the artist who, with her self-portraits, tries to relate to the world around her.

The installation at Santa Maria della Scala accompanies the visitor along three sections: the first is dedicated to "The Shadow," understood as self-representation: a theme that runs through Vivian Maier’s work from her beginnings in the early 1950s to the 1990s. “Miss Viv” continued to develop a compositional register of great richness and extreme complexity, combining these aesthetic discoveries together with the key categories of shadow, reflection and mirror. And it is with "The Reflection," to which the second section is devoted, that Vivian Maier reinterprets the lexical field of photography through the idea of self-representation. The author uses a thousand stratagems to place herself on the boundary between the visible and the invisible, the recognizable and the unrecognizable. Her features are blurred, something interposes itself in front of them or sends them elsewhere, opens on an off-screen or transforms before our eyes. Her face escapes us but not the certainty of her presence at the moment the image is captured. Every photograph is a game of hide-and-seek. Each photograph is itself an act of resistance to its invisibility. Finally, the section and dedicated to "TheMirror,“ an object that often appears in Vivian Maier’s images. It is fragmented or placed in front of another mirror or positioned in such a way that her face is projected onto other mirrors, in an endless cascade. It is the instrument through which she faces her own gaze, this ”I“ in front of ”Me."

The aim of the exhibition is thus to tell the many different facets of an author who remains shrouded in mystery to this day. Vivian Maier worked as a nanny, from the early 1950s and for over forty years, in New York and then in Chicago. Her entire life was spent in anonymity, until 2007 when her photographic corpus came to light. It is a huge and impressive body of work, consisting of more than 120,000 negatives, super 8 and 16mm film, various sound recordings, some photographs and hundreds of undeveloped rolls of film. Her devouring hobby ended up making her one of the most acclaimed advocates of street photography to the point that she appears in the History of Photography alongside the likes of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand.

“The belated discovery of Vivian Maier’s work, which could easily have disappeared or even been destroyed,” says Anne Morin, “was almost a contradiction. It involved a complete reversal of her fate, because thanks to that discovery, a ’simple’ Vivian Maier, the nanny, managed to become, posthumously, Vivian Maier the photographer.”

“With this exhibition,” says Mayor of Siena Luigi De Mossi, “we not only open the doors of Santa Maria della Scala to an artist of international standing, but we open the new spaces of the Corticella, for the conclusion of a second part, after the fire-fighting part, of the recovery, redevelopment and revitalization of Santa Maria della Scala. Another goal achieved by this administration, with a construction site completed and a space already usable and used with this exhibition. A careful work of recovery and restoration that we have taken care of with great dedication of our employees and that gives back to the community what was a real junction of the routes inside the Old Hospital, known as the ’cistern court’: I like to think that what was a point of convergence of men and goods, arriving of the covered road and from the overhanging ’porta dei vetturali,’ is now a real cultural junction of Santa Maria della Scala. A renovated and modern environment. Incidentally, precisely in continuity with this construction site, the one related to the internal road, another very important project for the Old Hospital and another space that we will give back to the city, is also continuing at a rapid pace.”

The exhibition goes to enrich the calendar of events of Christmas in Siena in which the administration has decided to focus on art: “The Vivian Maier exhibition,” argues Culture Councillor Pasquale Colella, “completes a path of events for the Christmas holidays and for the Santa Maria della Scala’s programming, which includes the recently opened Lodola exhibition and the beautiful ’Sienese Art’ co-designed by the Mps Foundation, Paint Projects and Opera. Hosting the images of the world icon of street photography is for Siena pride and satisfaction: we add another piece of absolute value, which moreover remained unknown until 2007. The use of photography as self-knowledge, for a history, that of this artist, full of curiosities and yet to be discovered. I am thinking, for example, of the self-portraits, which communicate much about Vivian Maier and testify to her ability to look to the future, between simplicity and depth of expression, where her photographic art lies.”

For all information you can visit the website www.santamariadellascala.com

Image: Vivian Maier, Untitled, Chicago, 1974

Siena, an exhibition on Vivian Maier at Santa Maria della Scala, featuring 93 photographs

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