From 14 June 2024 to 8 January 2025
Burano, Lace Museum

Works by Mandy Bonnell and Déirdre Kelly

From 14 June 2024 to 8 January 2025, for the 4th Lace Biennial, the Museum will be hosting the exhibition Fragile Stories, with works by Mandy Bonnell and Déirdre Kelly consisting of beautiful tracery cut out of fine papers and maps using the aesthetic language of lace.

Fragile Stories expresses the desire to embrace and participate in the rich creativity of women’s hands, always attuned to the delicate rhythms of nature, often – like lace itself – much stronger than it seems. In engaging with the traditions of the Burano lacemakers, Mandy Bonnell and Déirdre Kelly have found a way to recount interlacing stories and evoke journeys by superimposing new techniques on ancient crafts.

Bonnell and Kelly are united in the joy of making and the collective energy of women’s work through translations, interpretations and reiterations of the rich collection of lace drawings preserved in the archives of the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo and the collection
of the Museo del Merletto in Burano.

Fragile Stories presents a series of works embodied in the detailed complexity derived from nature, prints, drawings and artist’s books evoking absences and presences, alluding to the perfection of interlacing threads. A conversation with the lace makers of the past, touching on issues of fragility and durability, results in a beautiful tracery cut out of fine papers and geographical maps using the aesthetic language of lace.

Venetian lacemaking as a traditional female craft and economic activity has become the embodiment of the social and cultural heritage of the islands of Venice. The artists Mandy Bonnell and Déirdre Kelly pay homage to this in Fragile Stories, seeking to give an enduring voice to this cultural memory.

Admission to the exhibition from 14 June 2024 to 08 January 2025, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

Mandy Bonnell’s biography >>>

Déirdre Kelly’s biography >>>

L'articolo Exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

From 6 April 2019 to 28 February 2021
Burano, Lace Museum

Curated by Chiara Squarcina and Elisabetta Barisoni

In the last century, Burano, the most ‘island-like’ of all the islands in the Venetian lagoon, became a highly inspirational setting for artists such as Gino Rossi, Umberto Moggioli and Pio Semeghini. The exhibition will present works by these painters and others, in which nature and landscapes take on a particular intensity as the brushstrokes physically dissolve to become the equivalent of light.

Based on the works from the collection atthe Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – Ca’ Pesaro, the exhibition focuses on art that took Burano and its painting prize to the centre of an important and lively post-World War II debate on modern art. It all began between 1900 and 1910, when the island became closely connected with the Ca’ Pesaro avant-garde movement. It was the era of Gino Rossi, Arturo Martini, Ugo Valeri, Luigi Scopinich, Umberto Moggioli, Felice Casorati, and in subsequent years, Pio Semeghini.

The significance of the island to these Burano artists is what the exhibition Painting Light. Burano and its Painters intends to illustrate. It was a time like no other for the island as it assumed a reputation as an idyllic place where an intense desire took hold to paint the poetic vision of nature solely en plein air. In order to transpose these dreamlike influences, Burano became imprisoned in this vision of spiritual refuge, a paradise captured in its ethereal state, immersed in a ‘bubble of light’ as a means of reaffirming its unwitting beauty: a tenuous, profound and intimately reflective vision.

L'articolo Exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

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The exhibition is designed to narrate the founding, crisis and relaunch of the Burano Lace School. At the end of the nineteenth century, enlightened aristocracy and government policies under the patronage of Queen Margherita of Savoy initiated  a project for the revival of Venetian lace by opening schools: the first in Burano in 1872, assisted by an elderly teacher, Cencia Scarpariola, and others  in Venice, on the coast and on the mainland. The lace patterns used were taken from established collections. All the various styles were reproduced, often with a technical precision superior to the original, but decorative innovation inspired by art nouveau and art deco designs remained limited. The activity continued for decades, thanks to generous commissions from the royal house and financial support from the Marcello family, but changing fashions and diminished financial resources in general, together with the tumultuous effect of the First World War, the tendency to produce only traditional designs, the high cost of handmade items and competition from other Italian lacemaking centres, frustrated every effort to prosper. In the 1970s the last schools and workshops began to close until, in 1981, an initiative by a consortium of public and private entities, together with the Adriana Marcello Foundation, opened the School Museum. This led to a series of successful themed exhibitions and, to prevent its extinction, the organisation of theoretical and practical courses on the art of Venetian and Burano lacemaking.

L'articolo The Exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

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extended until 4 February 2018

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Maria Bissacco began making bobbin lace in 1994, gaining her diploma as a master lacemaker from the Gorizia Scuola Corsi Merletti in 2000-2001.

The Museo del Merletto has chosen to present an anthology exhibition to showcase the creativity and modernity Bissacco has incorporated into the art of bobbin lace. Maria Bissacco employs a unique, personal approach in designing and making lace in order to convert it into an expressive art form without compromising its true nature; indeed, she ensures it remains recognisable and anchored to tradition.

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Curated by Chiara Squarcina

L'articolo Exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

UN MERLETTO PER VENEZIA
Needle and bobbin lace competition

From September 12th, 2015 to January 31st, 2016
Burano, Lace Museum

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The almost 100 works produced for the first edition of the Needle and bobbin lace competition. Lace for Venice will be put on show in a special exhibition at the museum in Burano.

The use solely of needles for making lace is typical of Burano; the original lace of the island stands out for the great complexity of the patterns and techniques employed, for the use of very slender threads (of cotton, silk, gold or silver gilt) and long work processes, for which study and experience lasting decades were necessary.

Bobbin lace is faster to make and technically less demanding; within the lagoon of Venice, this form of production became typical of Pellestrina. The idea promoted by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia appears alongside other activities whose aims are to maintain a lively executive or artistic interest in a medium that presents an original face with regard to contemporary models too.

What emerges from these initiatives is a new role for lace which, as autonomous work,abandons its role in clothing and furnishing in favour of a fresh expressiveness.

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Curated by Chiara Squarcina

L'articolo Exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

from May 30 to August 1st
Burano, Lace Museum

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Situated between writing and picture-making, the work of US artist Leslie Hirst subtly challenges the ways that we read marks as language. As a skilled draftsperson, painter, and type designer, she works with a variety of media and found objects, then deconstructs, reconfigures, and embellishes these elements to reflect the complexity of our interconnected world.

Following her first visit to Burano in 2005, Hirst was inspired to create compositions that fuse words with lace designs. As a formal metaphor for verbal expression, she calls upon the attributes of lace to describe content (material fabric) and context (open spaces) through the movement of writing (the stitch). Hirst’s visual language is built from fragments, discorde shapes, and accidental forms excavated from her vast personal archive of antique handwritten letters and photographs of graffiti.

These resources represent a vital link to lace making since they depict a process of time through movement along a continuous line. For the works in the gallery, Hirst presents four collage drawings in tandem with four floating lace and paper fragments. Inspired by literary sources, the collage drawings pose as encrypted systems of language through the shared characteristics of handwriting, mark-making, and abstract form. These visual devices are echoed in small, textile objects woven onto steel frames and suspended within the gallery. Hirst pushes the technique of collage by incorporating fine lacemaking stitches that behave like script or printed text.

Her use of common telephone directories and designs inspired by graffiti tags offer an unsettling contrast to the careful labor demanded from hand-stitched lace. Ultimately, the cultural diffusions suggest an enduring urgency to create meaning in written form through the gesture and signature of the hand. While these works remind us that needlework played a historically significant role in the development of writing, they also allude to a parallel narrative located in contemporary language and data sharing systems.

Hirst’s facility to mix and bend techniques suggests the spliced and looped qualities of current media transmission and information overload. The flattening and distortion of language that proliferates with technologically driven communication systems provide a way of thinking about lace. Sampled data, binary codes, abbreviation, image recognition, glitches, automation, and artificial intelligence mask legibility to create a unique visual vocabulary that transcends words.

The exhibition, curated by Chiara Squarcina, with the scientific coordination of Gabriella Belli, is combined with a issue of the book series Trame (Fondazione Musei CIvici di Venezia, 2015). This project was realized with the help of some of the world’s most skilled and exploratory experts in Venetian lace making, With support from The Rhode Island Foundation and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; The Emily Harvey Foundation New York and Venezia; AIR Krems Krems Austria.

Admission is allowed with times and tickets of the museum >>>
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Curated by Chiara Squarcina
Scientific coordination: Gabriella Belli

L'articolo Exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

Sala del Portale
Centro Servizi di San Lorenzo, Venice

After the course of needle lace, which was held from May 11 to May 27 at the Centro Servizi di San Lorenzo (IRE), the Foundation Civic Museums of Venice in collaboration with Comune di Venezia – Municipalità di Venezia, Murano, Burano, IRE Venezia and Associazione Culturale Olivolo-Auser Venezia, presents the exhibition of laces.

The exhibition hosts a selection of needle artifacts of the 20th century, with needle and bobbin works produced by aspiring lacemakers of the course, directed by lace teachers Cristina Brunello and Graziella Ghezzo.

The exhibition is open daily (10 am -17 pm), from the 10th to the 20th of June 2014, with free admission.

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INFORMATION:

Centro Servizi San Lorenzo (IRE)
Tel: 0412404925
kpolloni@irevenezia.it
rpandolfo@irevenezia.it

Segreteria di Palazzo Mocenigo, San Stae, Venezia
Dal lunedì al venerdì, dalle ore 10 alle 12
Tel: 041 721798

Associazione Olivolo-Auser Venezia
Tel: 345 3791333
circolo.olivolo@auser.ve.it

L'articolo Exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

From May 9th to November 23rd, 2014
Museo del Merletto, Burano

extended until April 30th, 2015

The haunting landscape of the “barene”, the characteristic squared-off areas characterising the Venetian lagoon, has inspired artist Maria Grazia Rosin, a Venetian by adoption who has seen an interesting similarity between their grid-like patternand specific naturalistic expression and the skilled lacework typicalof Burano.

Through this work, the artist offers a fresh reflection drawing inspiration from the possible aesthetic comparisons possible between two “situations” – one creative, the other environmental – which share the same structural fragility, which forms the focal point of this artistic analysis.
The result is a work-in progress installation appearing as a texture with fractal motifs, or forms that develop with constant graphic characters towards infinity, creating ever-new volumes.

This environmental art project was presented at the Beyond mystical landscape exhibition (June – August 2013) on the island and mudflats to the west of San Francesco del Deserto (curated by Simonetta Gorreri, art director of ARTLIFE for the World), as part of the institutional initiatives of the MiBACT and promoted by the Architecture and contemporary arts service of the Direzione Generale PaBAAC, on the occasion of the 55th Venice art Biennale of 2013.

Realised in collaboration with master lace-worker Sandra Mavaracchio, the Merletto Frattale – Fractal Lace now arrives at the Museo del Merletto at Burano. Here, in an organic context examining the work of Maria Grazia Rosin, visitors will be able to explore the complexity of the analogies and interactions between art and environment that inspired the piece.

Curated by Chiara Squarcina
In collaboration with Artlife for the World
Artisan lacemaker Sandra Mavaracchio

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Admission is allowed with museum hours and tickets >>>

L'articolo The exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

From May 18th 2013 to January 5th 2014
Museo del Merletto, Burano

The antique art of lace, almost exclusively a feminine one and still closely tied today to the customs and history of the island of Burano, continues to fascinate and influence artists.

One such is Flore Viale, an Italo-American artist who, elaborating the problems posed by her sensitivity and perception, produces a series of “fragments” charged with meanings and queries for which she seeks answers. It is what these fragments represent that is perhaps the fulcrum of her creative work, counterbalanced by a process of ‘problem-solving’ stimulating an intense flow of intuitions, proposals and scenarios. Are they perhaps “relics” of use, experience or creations – from which emerges a sense of beauty, but also of suffering, slavery, refinement, preciousness, devotion or decoration – or are they simply “art” to be worn, as was the case in the past? A cura di Flora Viale Coordinamento Chiara Squarcina

L'articolo The exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

2nd February – 28th April 2013
Lace Museum, Burano

The group of works from the “Adele Fornoni Bisacco collection” constitutes one of the most important series in the Lace Museum.

It contains 50 examples of lace showing different types of technique and decoration, recovered and conserved with skill and love during the life of the aristocratic Adele Fornoni Bisacco Palazzi (1869 – 1968), a Venetian by adoption.

The precious articles make it possible to reconstruct the general outline of the history of this antique and extraordinary art and, through fine examples from every every corner of Europe, to describe the various chronological developments of lace in a coherent manner.

L'articolo The exhibition proviene da Museo del Merletto.

L'articolo TICKETS ONLINE proviene da Museo del Merletto.

L'articolo Lacemakers proviene da Museo del Merletto.

L'articolo Lace art history proviene da Museo del Merletto.

L'articolo The Lace Museum proviene da Museo del Merletto.