Opening Lecture: Mariel Capanna—Giornata
Saturday, February 15, 2025
2:00 PM–3:00 PM
Auditorium
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Artist Mariel Capanna introduces her painting practice on the opening day of her new installation at the Clark.
Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, where she lives and works) plays what she calls “games of remembering” as a way of reckoning with loss. Working from home videos and family slideshows, whose runtime is her constraint, the artist races to record fleeting memory images in oil paint. She scatters these flat, pastel forms like confetti across deep, atmospheric surfaces, creating compositions that are at once jubilant and wistful. For the Clark, Capanna presents two new, site-specific oil paintings as well as a monumental, two-sided fresco. The fresco process is also defined by time constraints: the term giornata has referred, since the Italian Renaissance, to the area of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day.
Mariel Capanna is visiting assistant professor of art at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She is a former Mellon fellow in studio art at Williams College and has served as fresco instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Mariel Capanna: Giornata marks the artist’s first museum solo exhibition.
Free. For accessibility questions, call 413 458 0524.
Image: Mariel Capanna, Red Light, Bucket, Candles, Sails (detail), 2023
Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, where she lives and works) plays what she calls “games of remembering” as a way of reckoning with loss. Working from home videos and family slideshows, whose runtime is her constraint, the artist races to record fleeting memory images in oil paint. She scatters these flat, pastel forms like confetti across deep, atmospheric surfaces, creating compositions that are at once jubilant and wistful. For the Clark, Capanna presents two new, site-specific oil paintings as well as a monumental, two-sided fresco. The fresco process is also defined by time constraints: the term giornata has referred, since the Italian Renaissance, to the area of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day.
Mariel Capanna is visiting assistant professor of art at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She is a former Mellon fellow in studio art at Williams College and has served as fresco instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Mariel Capanna: Giornata marks the artist’s first museum solo exhibition.
Free. For accessibility questions, call 413 458 0524.
Image: Mariel Capanna, Red Light, Bucket, Candles, Sails (detail), 2023
