EVENT: Lecture and slide presentation by noted Italian sculptor Franca Ghitti

Noted Italian sculptor Franca Ghitti will discuss and present slides about her work at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 5, in the auditorium of the Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave., Rochester. The event, which includes a reception in the gallery’s Vanden Brul Pavilion, is free and open to the public.

Ghitti creates installations of wood, iron, glass, and cement that seek to define an image of space that also has a dimension of time and history. Her large-scale works are currently on display in the Cooper Union in New York City in an exhibition titled “Maps/Mapping: A Voyage with the Invisible Wayfarer of Italo Calvino. Sculptures and Installations by Franca Ghitti.” Calvino was a 20th century Italian writer known for his whimsical and imaginative fables.

Ghitti produced her first sculptures in the 1960s. She has worked and exhibited in Kenya and throughout Europe for four decades. Her works range from glass church windows to public commissions such as “The Sign of Water,” an iron structure cascading into Lake Iseo in the province of Brescia in Italy.

Born in Brescia, Ghitti studied art at Milan’s Brera Academy and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and Oskar Kokoschka’s school of carving in Salzburg. She was a visiting professor at Vienna’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste, where she produced five installations titled “Other Alphabets,” using materials such as earth, mortar, iron netting, and ropes to suggest the key turning points in her work.

Ghitti’s talk is sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester and co-sponsored by the Memorial Art Gallery; Italian American Community Center; University of Rochester Alumni Association; Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester; the Department of Foreign Languages at Rochester Institute of Technology; the Department of Art and Art History, the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, and the Sage Arts Center at the University of Rochester; Casa Italiana at Nazareth College of Rochester, and the Department of Art History at Roberts Wesleyan College. For more information, call (585) 275-4251.