Maria Lai

Maria Lai draws upon the rich histories, folktales, and craft traditions of Sardinia —as well as poetry and literature —to create multimedia works that speak to time-honored customs and communal relationships on the Italian island. Four years after her death, she was featured in the 2017 editions of Documenta and the Venice Biennale, and in 2019 MAXXI mounted an exhibition in Rome marking the centenary of her birth. Lai’s interest in domestic materials —like thread, textiles, and books —and her use of expressive, gestural mediums like weaving borrow from the vocabulary of Art Informel and Arte Povera, while nodding to women’s work. For her best-known work, Legarsi Alla Montagna (Bind to the Mountain, 1981), she asked all the inhabitants of her hometown of Ulassai to tie their houses together with ribbon in a relational performance that revealed the friendships and animosities among the villagers.