Dr. Roberta Minnucci is an art historian whose research focuses on Italian and American post-war art through the lenses of performative and feminist practices, artistic identity and international dialogue. After gaining her PhD from the University of Nottingham, she was a Rome Award holder at the British School at Rome and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. At Magazzino Italian Art (Cold Spring, New York), where she was the 2022-23 Scholar-in- Residence, she worked on a research project on the transatlantic artistic dialogue between Italy and the United States in

the post-war period for which she was also awarded a Library Research Grant by the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) and a Research Grant by the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities (New York). She recently published a study on the work of Italian abstract artist Carla Badiali entitled Ritagliare l’astrazione. I collage di Carla Badiali (Arbor, 2022).

Abstract
Mary Shaffer (b. 1947) and Edith Schloss (1919–2011) both arrived in Rome in the 1960s. In the Italian city the former, who had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, started to experiment with abstract painting and light, before devoting herself to glass sculpture in the early 1970s. Schloss began painting in New York during the 1940s in the Abstract Expressionist circle, and her experience of Italian landscape and light had an important influence in her works. From 1968 to 1986, she was the Art Editor for the International Herald Tribune, documenting the Roman artistic scene with a focus on American artists. Belonging to different generations and different circles of American expats in Rome, Shaffer and Schloss’ paths officially never crossed. Their experience of the artistic and social scene of Rome in the 1960s, however, provides an important case study in relation to the transnational artistic networks gravitating around two women abstract painters who negotiated their cultural and artistic identities between Europe – where they had both lived for a long time before arriving in Rome – and the United States – their main country of residence. In addition to reconstructing the context in which they operated through archival material and oral histories, my paper will examine the condition of women artists moving to Rome from the United States in relation to the challenges presented by professional and personal circumstances, the influence of the city in their works, and their role in the artistic
transnational networks.

Image: Mary Shaffer posing in front of one of her paintings realised in Rome, early 1970s. Courtesy the artist