EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
MDR (Maria D. Rapicavoli)
Maria D. Rapicavoli was born in Catania (Italy) and lives and works in New York.
She has been working primarily with site-specific installations where different media can coexist in time and space. Having a background in both classical sculpture and digital media, her challenge has always been to combine the two and englobe them in the current contemporary artistic discourse. Her work explores conditions and experiences of power, gender violence, migration, alienation, invisibility, and displacement through a critique of global socio-economic and political systems. Her works call into question dominant historical narratives, disrupting perceived notions of the post-war era with an investigations into the materiality of evidence and the status of knowledge. She seeks to make tangible how social, economic, political, and military structures of power, taking place out of sight, impact our everyday lives. Drawing on her native Sicily as a place of departure and arrival, she explores the sea and the sky as sites of transit where individual narratives intersect with international politics. she explores conditions of mobility through a range of topics: an intimate family lore, the Mediterranean Sea and the tragedy of migratory flows and political refugees, military drone operations, and airspace delineation.
Rapicavoli was a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012 and received her MFA from Goldsmiths University of London (2005) and a BA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania (2001).
She has exhibited in several international venues, including on The High Line, New York; at Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Westfaelischer Kunstverein, Muenster; Magazzino Italian Art, a Cold Spring, NY; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco; Museo di Villa Croce, Genoa; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Museo di Villa Croce, Genova (Italy); Palazzo Reale, Milan; Guest Projects, London; Riso, Museum for Contemporary Art, Palermo, Italy; Strozzina, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Sala Rekalde Bilbao; Italian Cultural Institute London and New York.
She is the recipient of many awards and grants including the Italian Council VI edition Award (2019); the nctm e l’arte award (2013); DE.MO/Movin’UP grant, Italy (2011); the Renaissance Prize Award at the Italian Cultural Institute, London (2008); and a Postgraduate award in Arts and Humanities by AHRB, London (2004).
