Biancalucia Maglione is Research Fellow at the University for Foreigners, Siena, where she works on the reception of non-European arts and cultures in Italy (1945-2000). In 2023 she received her PhD in Art History from the University of Florence; her dissertation focuses on Italian collector Carlo Frua De Angeli (1885-1969) within the context of international art market between 1920 and 1960. In 2017 Maglione obtained a MA (cum laude) in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Pisa, with a dissertation on the Italian painter Osvaldo Licini (1894-1958), and a BA (cum laude) with a thesis on the Italian contemporary artist Loris Cecchini (published in 2017: Loris Cecchini. Testing effects, dancing reactions, Pacini Editore). In 2021 she was Research Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art, NYC. Her recent publications include essays on sculpture, Surrealism and the inter-war Italian art. Maglione is currently working on a book about the American sculptress Mary Callery (Editions FAGE – Fondation Giacometti, Paris).

Abstract
For Barbara Chase-Riboud, a sculptor born in Philadelphia in 1939, the inclination to travel has always been an essential element, almost a necessity: “the need to define, explore, and encounter those I have never dreamed existed”. At just eighteen years old, thanks to the contribution of the John Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship, she spent a year at the American Academy in Rome, “when everything began”, as the artist herself stated. It was indeed in Rome that Chase-Riboud began her career in earnest, exhibiting in both solo and group shows and defining her creative language. In the capital, the artist created her first bronze sculpture, thanks to the support and collaboration with local foundries, and began to dedicate herself increasingly exclusively to abstract production. It is also from Rome that, at the end of 1957, the sculptor embarked on a trip to Egypt, which exposed her, for the first time and with fruitful consequences, to non-Western art.
The aim of my paper is to thoroughly investigate that ‘Roman’ year, crucial for the sculptor’s formation, by systematically analyzing the contacts she established in the capital, the first exhibitions she took part in (at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, at the Galleria l’Obelisco, and at the American Academy itself) to better contextualize the significance that the Roman experience—often cited almost anecdotally—had on her creative and artistic journey.

Image: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Adam & Eve, bronze, 1958, © Barbara Chase-Riboud. Photo: Riccardo Molino [from: https://www.hauserwirth.com/news/41333-welcoming-barbara-chase-riboud-to-hauser-wirth/ ]