How Textile Artist Maria Lai Turned ‘Women’s Work’ Into Avant-Garde Art
Maria Lai (1919–2013) once said, “I wasn’t born in Sardinia—I am Sardinia.” This declaration captures the essence of an artist who fused the ancient traditions of her native island with radical experimentation. During the 20th century, Lai developed a singular visual language that combined abstraction, Arte Povera, and craft. Though celebrated in Italy as a key figure of 20th-century art, her name remained relatively unknown abroad during her lifetime. Now, more than a decade after her death, Lai is finally receiving her first North American museum show at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, N.Y.
The retrospective offers a sweeping reappraisal of a singular artist who wove together abstraction, Arte Povera, and craft into something wholly her own. Curated by artistic director Paola Mura, the show is the brainchild of Magazzino founders Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, who have known and collected Lai’s work for over three decades. The nearly 100 works are drawn from their personal holdings, as well as the artist’s foundation and the collections of various Italian museums. Magazzino also just installed Lai’s 1992 cement sculpture Colombe di Cemento as a permanent addition to its grounds.
“It was through a chance encounter that I met Maria Lai’s niece Maria Sofia Pisu, president of the Maria Lai archive, which began my investigation and education in her work,” Olnick told me, adding that from the outset she was captivated by its uniqueness, complexity and variety. The more she learned about her personal life and indomitable nature, the more she wanted to know about her.
“Why it took so long for her to be recognized is beyond me,” she said. “But I hope that all the work that went into mounting this exhibition will signal others to explore her work and her genius.”
Olnick and Spanu have long been dedicated to the promotion of Postwar and contemporary Italian art, and they have been instrumental in helping raise Lai’s profile. In 2017, Magazzino loaned works by Lai to Documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale, exhibitions that gave Lai a major international boost after a seven-decade career spent in relative obscurity. The following year, Lai hit a record high at auction that still stands, with a £150,000 ($195,236) sale of the seven-and-a-half-foot wide embroidered 1989 piece Lenzuolo (Bed Sheet) at Christie’s London, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Installation view of “Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian Art. Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art. Photo by Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by SIAE 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Who Was Maria Lai?
Lai was born in 1919 in Ulassai, a remote village in the mountainous interior of Sardinia.
“Maria Lai was an anomaly for a woman at that time and place, as she rejected the expected role of wife and homemaker,” Olnick said. “She expressed that she would always be grateful to her father for letting her go to study in Rome to pursue her art and live as an independent woman.”
In the 1940s, she studied in Rome under sculptor Renato Marino Mazzacurati and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, where she was the only woman in her class. But it was back home in relatively isolated Sardinia that she truly developed as an artist. She showed during her lifetime, but only intermittently, opting not to exhibit, for instance, in the 1960s.
Maria Lai, Composizione Polimaterica (1964). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
She began her career painting the rugged local landscape, but by the 1960s, Lai began moving away from figuration and eventually abandoned traditional painting altogether. Instead, she turned to humble materials like stone, cork, fabric, and thread—transforming them into complex, richly textured works that evoked memory, mythology, and the handmade traditions of her homeland.
Among the most captivating works in the Magazzino exhibition are Lai’s hand-bound “Libri cuciti” (sewn books), which she created between 1975 and 2011. These sculptural books are filled not with the written word but dense lines of thread—sewn symbols and marks that speak in a language of their own. As a child, before she learned to read, Lai believed her grandmother was stitching stories into bedsheets as she mended them.
This belief sparked Lai’s lifelong exploration of thread as a form of writing and storytelling. That also included sewn geographies, abstract works in which she literally stitched the landscape, lines of thread standing in for the horizon.
Maria Lai, Voce di infinite letture (1992). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
“There’s a poetry in all her art—the sewn books, the geografia, the ceramics and stones… I could go on and on,” Olnick said.
Lai even dabbled in the fashion world. In May, Magazzino opened a supplemental exhibition featuring a collaboration with Lai and designer Antonio Marras, a fellow Sardinian. The 2003 piece, Llèncols de Aigua (Sheets of Water), is a circular structure formed by a hanging white sheet on which the artists have stitched antique nightgowns and embroidered quotes from children in red script.
Installation view of “Antonio Marras and Maria Lai: Llèncols de Aigua.” Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo: by Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2025/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
A Long History of Craft
Indeed, local craft of hand weaving—a traditional form of women’s work—was a touchstone for Lai, who drew on millennia of craft history. In the early 1970s, she began making what she dubbed “Sewn Canvases,” and three-dimensional “Telai” works, which is the Italian word for loom.
“The loom is the oldest tool, tied to patience and the ability to weave and hold things together. It is not just a work tool; it is a tool for relationships,” Lai said, as quoted in an exhibition gallery text.
“Behind me, I have thousands of years of silences, of attempts at poetry, of loom threads,” she added.
Maria Lai, Telaio in sole e mare (1971). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo: Marco Anelli. Courtesy ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
And Lai was a pioneer of what is now known as relational art, creating interactive performance art pieces that highlighted the intricate web of relationships between people, animals, and the environment.
In 1980, Lai’s hometown of Ulassai asked her to create a monument to the fallen. Instead, she paid tribute to the living, inviting the remote mountain village’s roughly 1,000 inhabitants to participate in the first relational art piece in Italian art history. Titled, Legarsi alla montagna (To Tie Oneself to the Mountain), it was a collective performative piece that literally tied them all together. The Magazzino exhibition presents photos and a video of the ambitious project, which Lai considered her masterpiece.
“By fostering this connection of people, she provided a platform for a shared experience through creative expression, ultimately promoting social coherence and a sense of belonging,” Olnick said.
Maria Lai, Legarsi alla montagna, intervention on a photograph by Piero Berengo Gardin (1981–82). Courtesy ©Archivio Maria Lai. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2025 1981–82.
The 1981 work, carried out over a period of three days, was inspired by a local legend of a young girl who narrowly escaped a deadly rockslide when she spotted a ribbon blowing in the wind and followed it to safety. Overcoming longstanding feuds to work together on the artwork, villagers wove a 16-mile-long blue denim ribbon through the municipality, connecting each and every home.
“Art should… make us feel more united,” Lai said in 2009. “Otherwise we’re not human beings.”
“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” is on view November 15, 2024–July 21, 2025 and “Antonio Marras and Maria Lai: Llèncols de Aigua” is on view May 17, 2025–January 27, 2026 at Magazzino Italian Art, 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, New York. The exhibitions are part of Upstate Art Weekend, taking place at 158 art organizations across the Catskills Mountains and Hudson Valley, July 17–21, 2025. More