Coltivare l'arte: New book explores art, nature, and agriculture

The recently published volume 'Coltivare l'arte. Educazione Natura Agricoltura' by Antonella Marino and Maria Vinella (Franco Angeli, Milan 2018) traces the evolving relationship between contemporary art and nature. Moving beyond Romantic landscape sensibility, the book focuses on artistic practices that cultivate and care for the environment, from urban gardens to community-led interventions. Key archetypes include Joseph Beuys and Gianfranco Baruchello, whose pioneering work informs later generations. The analysis covers the third millennium, when art intersects with social claims, urban planning, and territorial interventions producing economic alternatives and city management models. The book features interviews with artists Nico Angiuli, Emanuela Ascari, Leone Contini, Luigi Coppola, and Ettore Favini, who detail their participatory and didactic practices. A final section maps sculpture parks and artist gardens in Italy, where pedagogical utopia materializes in the encounter between natural space and viewer. The authors argue for an agro-artistic dimension emerging from Beuysian utopia, offering operative proposals to regenerate the compromised environment.