Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/130754
It's shaping up to be a monumental year for New York artworld dynamos Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni. Their day jobs are impressive enough: Alemani, 36, is curator and director of the expansive public art program at the High Line, the elevated park along Manhattan's West Side. Gioni, 39, is associate director and director of exhibitions at the New Museum, as well as artistic director of Milan's Fondazione Nicola Trussardi (of fashion-house repute). But this summer, the transplanted Italians, married since 2011, are stepping into an even brighter spotlight. Alemani just reprised her role as curator of the Frieze Projects, a program of commissioned artworks at the Frieze New York fair on Randall's Island in May. And in June, Gioni makes his debut as the youngest director in the 118-year history of the Venice Biennale (through November 24). "There are so many expectations, from the outside as well as from myself," admits Gioni of the microscope that will surely focus on his leadership of the granddaddy of all biennial art shows. "Everyone is looking at it with different eyes." Art is a family business for Gioni and Alemani, who prefer visiting museums and galleries as a team and engage in constant dialogue about their respective projects during off-hours. "When we're home, we talk about work all the time, which is also a pleasure," says Alemani, "because it's art; it's what we love." (Although they have collaborated professionally in the past, they've decided it's healthier for the relationship to keep their projects separate.) In fact, they are so fully in tune with each other's work that they elect to switch roles during an interview—letting one spouse introduce the other's curatorial ideas for a journalist visiting the couple's new apartment on St. Mark's Place, in Manhattan's East Village. It's evidence of a tangible playfulness between the partners, both of whom are easygoing, energetic and quick to laugh—perhaps not what one might expect from a pair of accomplished art-world wunderkinds. They seem perfectly compatible in temperament and appearance: Alemani, pixieish and sparkly with bouncy brown curls, wears silver-studded black wingtips, a variation on the plain black wingtips worn by Gioni, who has expressive brown eyes and a distinguished, if premature, touch of gray at the temples. Their playful personalities aside, Gioni and Alemani are serious about work and rigorous in their research. Gioni's ambitious concept for the Venice Biennale, titled "The Encyclopedic Palace," was inspired by the vision of Italian-born, Pennsylvania-based outsider artist Marino Auriti for an imaginary museum that would house the entirety of worldly knowledge and human discovery. Executed in the 1950s as a massive architectural model, Auriti's theoretical "Encyclopedic Palace of the World" was a colossal structure, with a tiered, 136-story skyscraper rising above a neoclassical base that would cover 16 blocks in Washington, D.C. "It's a show about obsessions and the transformative power of the imagination," says Gioni, "and about artists or individuals who somehow have tried to describe or get to know everything." Indeed, flights of fancy fill the show—from Athens-based 88 CULTURED Renée Green's Early Videos, 1991-96.