INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM 

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents the international colloquium, The Lives and Afterlives of Teaching Collections: Art Academies as Laboratories of Cultural Heritage, brings together historians, conservators, and artists to reflect on the material, institutional, and intellectual legacies of academic teaching collections.

From their establishment, and especially during the eighteenth and From their establishment, and particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European art academies assembled extensive collections of paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, plaster casts, drawings, prints, and a wide range of instruments. Conceived as institutions for the training of artists and artisans, they developed complex pedagogical ecosystems in which making, copying, and observing were profoundly intertwined. In many cases, these holdings were closely connected to – or even constituted the nucleus of – newly founded museums of decorative and industrial arts, transforming the academy itself into a laboratory where teaching, research, and exhibition converged.

Over the course of the twentieth century, however, many of these collections suffered neglect, dispersal, or even destruction, particularly following modernist and neo-avant-garde critiques of academic tradition. Once central pedagogical and research devices and powerful instruments of cultural and ideological transmission, they gradually became marginal both within artistic practice and within art-historical scholarship.

The colloquium reconsiders academic teaching collections not as obsolete remnants, but as critical witnesses to the evolving relationships between pedagogy, heritage, and cultural identity. Established within the universalist paradigms of the Western canon, these collections now invite renewed interpretation through contemporary historiographic perspectives. Viewed in this light, they reveal complex material and epistemic histories shaped by fragmentation, displacement, reinterpretation, and institutional transformation.

Adopting a comparative and transnational perspective, the colloquium examines shared dynamics and local specificities across central European contexts, with particular attention to the gendered, colonial, and national frameworks that shaped the production, circulation, and interpretation of didactic models and copies. It also addresses the intertwined lives and afterlives of teaching materials, tracing their transformation from tools of artistic formation into cultural artefacts and heritage assets. At the same time, it considers how study collections illuminate broader questions of absence, power, and representation, while emerging fields of inquiry open new perspectives on these materials, situating them within contemporary cultural debates.

A central focus will be the historical moments through which these collections were produced, transformed, or damaged. Events, conservation histories, and institutional trajectories mark each collection as a distinct material sedimentation of time, while processes of loss and destabilisation provide a crucial interpretive lens through which their meanings and uses can be reconsidered.

By fostering dialogue among historians, conservators, and artists, The Lives and Afterlives of Teaching Collections: Art Academies as Laboratories of Cultural Heritage seeks to reactivate the legacy of art academies as living laboratories of knowledge and creativity. The colloquium will examine how these collections may be studied, preserved, and reimagined today—linking historical pedagogies with contemporary artistic practices while opening new perspectives for research, documentation, and critical reflection within higher arts education.

The initiative is part of the PNRR project INTAFAM IartNET – an international platform for artistic research and cultural heritage at Italian higher arts education institutions funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, Mission 4, led by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and coordinated by Nicoletta Leonardi. 

For information: iartnet.ricerca@fadbrera.edu.it

WORKSHOP

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents A Photographer, an Art Collector, and the Exciting Discovery of Color Reproductions: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Freer, and the Autochrome in 1909, led by Anne McCauley, Visiting Scholar and David H. McAlpin Professor emerita at Princeton University.

On January 25, 1909, the New York art critic Charles Caffin approached Charles Freer with a proposal to have the celebrated photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, come to Detroit to make color slides of about forty Whistlers in Freer’s collection for a planned lecture. What began as an experiment in the use of the new autochrome process, only marketed in 1907, ended up as a twelve-day marathon during which the two men–vastly different in age and wealth–shared an obsession with Asian art, the technical problems of producing accurate reproductions, and their shared belief in a ‘spiritual unity’ of Eastern and Western cultures, a concept rooted in early twentieth-century cross-cultural discourse. This talk will center on the surviving autochromes, as well as other photographs that Coburn produced on this occasion, and why their creation inspired such outpourings of mutual excitement and friendship. 

Visiting Scholar: Anne McCauley, David H. McAlpin Professor emerita at Princeton University, has published extensively on XIX and early XX century photography, including A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph; Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-71; The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz (co-authored); and Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (co-curated and co-authored). In 2017 she was the curator and primary author of Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. She is currently writing a book on Alvin Langdon Coburn and the evolution during World War I of the  vortographs, often described as the ‘world’s first abstract photographs’.

Participants: The seminar is open to doctoral candidates, as well as to students currently enrolled in second-level academic diploma programs, master’s degree programs, and second-level master’s programs. Non-doctoral students may attend as auditors.

For information and registration: iartnet.ricerca@fadbrera.edu.it

WORKSHOP

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents Disorienting the Gaze, Rewriting the Minor Archive, an intensive educational workshop led by Nicola Lo Calzo, Visiting Scholar and Italian photographer, curator, and researcher (CY-ENSAPC).

Building on Nicola Lo Calzo’s doctoral research, Une photographie queer et marronne. Représenter les mémoires de l’esclavage à l’ère postcoloniale (CY Cergy Paris Université / École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, 2025), the workshop mobilizes queer studies in order to develop a critical and denormative photographic practice. Its aim is to interrogate photography’s capacity to produce queer and denormative representations of the memories of subaltern groups and subjectivities, while also deconstructing the hegemonic imaginaries that shape them, thereby contributing to the construction of a minor archive.

The first day is structured around two distinct yet complementary case studies. Through an approach that intertwines aesthetics, ethics, and critical thought, the workshop presents fieldwork conducted in Brazil centered on the memorial practice of Nego Fugido. The exhibition of the same name is presented at the National Museum of the Republic in Brasília (2025) and subsequently at the Museu Afro-Brasileiro of the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador (2025–2026). Particular attention is devoted to the different stages involved in the development of the project, from research to production, from the use of archives to modes of dissemination.

The workshop then introduces the project Brigantinas, recently published by L’Artiere (2025), which, within a different geographical context marked by equally structural power relations, investigates the role of women in the (de)construction of Sardinian identity and memory. Particular attention is given to the reactivation and resignification of archival and museum collections as tools for a decolonial artistic practice.

The second day is devoted to the presentation and discussion of students’ work, building on the reflections developed during the workshop and the case studies introduced during the first day.

Visiting Scholar: Nicola Lo Calzo (Turin, 1979) is an Italian photographer, curator, and researcher (CY-ENSAPC). His work focuses on memory, identity, and marginality in postcolonial contexts. His long-term research explores the ways in which communities preserve or reactivate their cultural memory in the face of processes of marginalization and historical erasure. Since 2010, he has been developing Cham/Kam, a photographic investigation into the legacy of slavery and resistance across the Atlantic world, from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. Lo Calzo’s work is grounded in a participatory and field-based research practice developed in collaboration with local communities, historians, and institutions. His work is exhibited internationally and published in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Le Monde, Libération, Internazionale, and National Geographic. Alongside his photographic practice, he is active in academic and curatorial contexts, articulating visual storytelling, colonial history, memory politics, and queer and decolonial thought.

Participants: The workshop is open to doctoral candidates as well as students currently enrolled in second-level academic diploma programs, master’s degree programs, and second-level master’s programs.

For information and registration: iartnet.ricerca@fadbrera.edu.it

Venti anni di opere pubbliche tra creatività e formazione

PRESENTAZIONE DEL LIBRO

L’incontro, proposto e curato dalla cattedra del Biennio di Linguaggi e pratiche artistiche della Scuola di Decorazione del prof. Sergio Nannicola, in condivisione con la cattedra di Storia dell'Arte del prof. Fabio Zanzotto della Scuola di Progettazione per l'impresa di Brera, presenta la monografia di opere musive dal titolo "Marco Pellizzola - L'altro mosaico".

La presentazione avrà luogo mercoledì 20 maggio 2026 presso la Sala Aldo Bassetti, in via Brera, 28 Milano, a partire dalle ore 10:00. La pubblicazione, a cura di Massimo Bignardi, raccoglie venti anni di riflessioni e di interventi nel campo creativo dell’urbano, concentrandosi sulle esperienze di arte ambientale e di public art realizzate da Marco Pellizzola, artista che ha fatto sua la necessità di incidere, attraverso il linguaggio dell’arte, il senso di “nuova vita morale”, sondando e rinnovando l’idea di una inedita cultura della città e dei luoghi nei quali si cala l’esistenza umana. Nuova “vita morale” intesa come pratica costruttiva della comunità che trova piena sintesi in progetti in scala urbana, come ad esempio nelle grandi opere urbane, quali Piazza Costellazione, realizzata nel 2015 all'uscita della stazione della Metropolitana di Milano Rho-EXPO dieci anni dopo l’inaugurazione. Esperienze avviate a Cento, con il Giardino del Gigante, il suo primo intervento ambientale, che nella realizzazione ha visto coinvolti oltre 200 studenti di accademie di belle arti nazionali e internazionali.

OPEN DAY – Vieni a conoscere l’Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera

Sabato 16 maggio 2026, dalle ore 9:00 alle 13:00, l’Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera invita studentesse e studenti, appassionati e curiosi a vivere un’esperienza diretta all’interno dei propri spazi, per conoscere da vicino l’Offerta Formativa e i percorsi di studio.

L’Accademia si distingue per un approccio didattico dinamico e sperimentale, che integra le discipline artistiche tradizionali con le più recenti innovazioni. La formazione valorizza la ricerca sui linguaggi contemporanei, l’uso di nuovi materiali e tecnologie, e l’esplorazione delle tecniche audiovisive, promuovendo al tempo stesso la progettazione artistica, la comunicazione visiva e la valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale.

Durante l’Open Day sarà possibile incontrare docenti, studenti e tecnici di laboratorio, che guideranno i partecipanti alla scoperta delle diverse Scuole, dei corsi e dei possibili sbocchi professionali. Il personale amministrativo sarà inoltre a disposizione per fornire informazioni su iscrizioni, borse di studio, tasse e contributi.

L’iniziativa si svolgerà in presenza presso la sede centrale dell’Accademia, in via Brera 28 – Milano, e presso l’Ex Chiesa di San Carpoforo, in via Formentini 12, a pochi passi dalla sede principale.

L’ingresso è libero e senza prenotazione. Non sono previsti collegamenti online.

Il programma completo della mattinata è disponibile in fondo alla pagina.

CICLO DI CONFERENZE

In occasione delle celebrazioni per il 250° anniversario dell' Accademia di Brera, la Commissione Cultura presenta un primo ciclo di 5 conferenze dedicate all'Architettura e al Design. A partire dalla sua fondazione l'Accademia vede nell'insegnamento della progettazione uno dei suoi primi obiettivi. Ripercorreremo questo tragitto attraverso alcuni protagonisti dell'architettura contemporanea, e con il supporto di una ampia panoramica storica. A cura di Fabio Iannotta e Massimo Kaufmann. 

Mario Cucinella

Founder and Creative Director MCA – Mario Cucinella Architects

Venerdì 15 maggio 2026, ore 17.00

Sala Napoleonica

Stefano Boeri

Architetto e urbanista, Docente del Politecnico di Milano

Mercoledì 20 maggio 2026, ore 17.00

Sala Napoleonica

Maria Vittoria Capitanucci

Docente di teoria e storia dell’Architettura Contemporanea, Politecnico di Milano

Venerdì 22 maggio 2026, ore 15.00

Sala Napoleonica

Ugo La Pietra

Artista, Designer e Architetto

Fondatore della Scuola di Progettazione Artistica per l’Impresa, Accademia di Brera

Venerdì 29 maggio 2026, ore 15.30

Sala Napoleonica

Juan Josè Lahuerta

Docente presso la Scuola Tecnica Superiore di Architettura di Barcellona

Venerdì 5 giugno 2026, ore 17.00

Sala Napoleonica