Contributor
Cecilia Alemani
Cecilia Alemani is a curator based in New York. Since 2011 she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public-art program presented by the High Line, New York. In 2022 she curated The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale; in 2018 Alemani served as artistic director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities, in Buenos Aires; and in 2017 she curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Over the past ten years Alemani has developed an expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for public and unusual spaces. Photo: Liz Ligon, courtesy The High Line
Nostalgia and Apocalypse
In conjunction with My Anxious Self, the most comprehensive survey of paintings by the late Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) to have been staged outside of Japan and the first-ever exhibition of his work in New York, Gagosian hosted a panel discussion. Here, Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, delve into the societal context in which Ishida developed his work, in a conversation moderated by exhibition curator Cecilia Alemani.
Tetsuya Ishida: My Weak Self, My Pitiful Self, My Anxious Self
The largest exhibition of the Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida’s work ever mounted in the United States will open at Gagosian, New York, in September 2023. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the show tracks the full scope of Ishida’s career. In this excerpt from Alemani’s essay in the exhibition catalogue, she contextualizes Ishida’s paintings against the background of a fraught era in Japan’s history and investigates the work’s enduring relevance in our own time.