From June 25 to September 21, 2026, the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee presents the exhibition "Maria Lai: Being is Weaving" at the Madre museum in Naples, curated by Monica Amor and Carlos Basualdo in collaboration with the Archivio and Fondazione Maria Lai. The show traces the artist's six-decade career, highlighting her experimentation with sewing, collage, textiles, and orality, and includes a catalogue with contributions from multiple scholars. Concurrently, the museum hosts "Living Collapse," the second exhibition of the Premio Meridiana, curated by Samuele Piazza, featuring artists Andrea Bolognino, Effe Minelli, and Raffaela Naldi Rossano, which reinterprets the nativity scene tradition through contemporary practices.
These exhibitions matter because they address historical and archival gaps in Maria Lai's work, reframing her practice beyond biographical or regional readings and situating it within broader debates on abstraction, feminism, and the crisis of the artistic object in post-war Italy. The pairing of Lai's retrospective with the Premio Meridiana's contemporary reinterpretation of tradition underscores the Madre museum's commitment to connecting historical art with current critical sensibilities, offering new research perspectives and a nuanced understanding of materiality and collective memory.