SMoCA Retrospective Exhibit to Honor Paolo Soleri

Italian architect and Arcosanti creator, Paolo Soleri, will be memorialized in an exhibit entitled, Paolo Soleri: The City Is Nature, at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibit will run from October 14 until January 28, 2018.
This will be the first and only retrospective exhibition of Soleri’s work since his death in Paradise Valley in 2013. This exhibition will be SMoCA’s third and final exhibition exploring the Soleri’s art, architecture and philosophy. The first was Bridges: Spanning the Ideas of Paolo Soleri in 2011 and the second was Paolo Soleri: Mesa City to Arcosanti in 2013.
“The Museum is very excited about this retrospective,” said SMoCA Director and Chief Curator Sara Cochran. “It represents the culmination of SMoCA’s three exhibitions series with Paolo Soleri and the Cosanti Foundation, and almost a decade of engagement with, and study of, Soleri’s work, ideas, models and practices. It has been a joy to have the opportunity to work with Soleri during his lifetime and to publish this comprehensive catalog that we believe will add to the scholarship around this visionary thinker now that he has passed. We look forward to seeing ever more interest and study of this compelling figure who pioneered so many ideas, including the idea of high-density living, and who built some of the icons in the Arizona landscape.”
The 4,500-square-foot exhibit will largely focus on drawings, sculptures and models that Soleri created between 1947 and the mid-1970s. It will also explore his personal engagement with the art and architecture of his time, his recognition, his relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright and his cultural contributions.
The exhibit was organized by SMoCA Curator of Contemporary Art, Claire Carter, and will feature works gathered from Soleri’s archives, private collections and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“Throughout his career, Soleri’s designs changed radically,” Carter said, “but one constant remained: a concern for the how man should live among other humans, but also amid the natural splendor of the world around us — and the ways in which our built environment can serve that goal.”
Soleri pioneered the idea of “arcology,” the fusion of architecture and ecology and spent much of his career focused on sustainability and a city’s relationship to nature.
He was born in Italy in 1919 but came to the United States and apprenticed under Wright. However, he considered himself an American Artist and became an American citizen.
In 2000, he received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, in 2006 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and he was also awarded gold medals from the American Institute of Architects and the Union of International Architects.
The last major exhibition of his work in the United States, The Architectural Visions of Paolo Soleri, was organized from 1969 to 1970 by the Corcoran Museum of Art. The exhibit traveled to multiple museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Berkeley Art Museum.
Info: www.SMoCA.org