Italian feminist artist Cloti Ricciardi dies at 86

Cloti Ricciardi (Rome, 1939–2025), a key figure in Italian art of the 1970s and a pioneering feminist activist, has died. She began her career with the Gruppo di Piazza del Popolo around Plinio De Martiis's gallery. In the early 1960s, she shifted from painting to sculpture, working with materials like iron, concrete, glass, and steel, becoming one of the few female sculptors of the era. She co-founded the Italian feminist movement with Carla Lonzi and Carla Accardi, participated in public demonstrations, collaborated with the magazine Effe, and was among the founders of the Casa delle Donne in Rome. In 1972, at the Mappa '72 exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at Palazzo Taverna in Rome, she invited her feminist collective to hold a meeting in the exhibition space, barring men—an early act of political and social intervention. Later, she reworked the Bufalini Map, the first modern cartographic representation of Rome, into large glass panels, creating the work 'Forma urbis' (early 1980s), which introduced the concept of 'anomia' that guided her subsequent work. In 2023, her last solo exhibition, curated by Claudia Zanfi at the Festival Filosofia in Modena, featured a new reading of her 1975 work 'Alfabeta', a collage of images and words dedicated to women. Claudia Zanfi, who collaborated with Ricciardi for over 25 years, remembered her as a multifaceted, committed artist.