INSTALLATION, EXHIBITION HONOR FEMALE POETS OF THE RENAISSANCE; APRIL 3 OPENING FEATURES TWO LECTURES

This spring, Bryn Mawr College will be the site of a new interactive installation by Philadelphia artist Carol Moore: Lost & Found: Rediscovering Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance. The installation will introduce the work of seven important 16th-century female poets through handkerchiefs imprinted with the poets' sonnets and scattered throughout the campus. The handkerchiefs will also serve as an invitation to view contemporary printings of the poets' works on display in the lobby of Mariam Coffin Canaday Library. The installation will begin Sunday, March 26, and run through mid-April.

The high point of this celebration of Italian poets will be a public program on Monday, April 3, featuring Carol Moore and Valeria Finucci of Duke University, one of the leading scholars of women writers of the Renaissance. The program will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Carpenter Library Room 21. Finucci's lecture is titled "The Epic Romance in the Hands of Women Writers: The Case of Moderata Fonte;" Moore's is "Dialogue with Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance."

Moore is director of the MFA Programs in Ceramics, Painting and Sculpture at the University of the Arts, and has exhibited her work in China, Italy and Brazil, as well as the United States. She did a version of this installation at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice in the fall of 2005. As she explains the project:

"Renaissance Venetians re-introduced the use of the handkerchief as a signifier of social status that led to elaborate production, embellishment and then affectation throughout Europe. Each poet had in some way used a handkerchief, as a catcher of tears and sorrow, or as an object of attraction and seduction, perhaps left somewhere as forgotten evidence of their presence. The printed handkerchief became the object in this context that appeared lost until the moment it would be found by a passerby as a memento and an invitation to look further."

The handkerchiefs will be distributed throughout the campus by teams of students from Bryn Mawr's Italian Department and the University of the Arts, under the direction of Moore and Roberta Ricci, assistant professor of Italian. The distributions will take place on several occasions during the three weeks of the show, and people will be encouraged to pick them up and keep them.

The handkerchiefs will direct people to an exhibition of 16th- and 17th-century editions of the poets' works in the lobby of Canaday. The book exhibition was curated by Rima Girnius, graduate student in the history of art.

The installation and lecture are being sponsored by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library and the Department of Italian.

For additional information, call the Special Collections Department: 610-526-5272.

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