Emi Fontana

Emi Fontana is a cultural producer, art curator and writer. She was born in Milano; she studied art history at the University La Sapienza in Rome, with a focus on the Venetian Renaissance. Growing up in Italy in years of political turmoil, Emi got involved at a young age in the so-called ‘creative wing’ of the student movement that was blooming in Italy at the end of the seventies, participating in that exceptional and dramatic season of Italian counterculture. She was part of a highly creative and provocative circle of artists, musicians and writers, involved publication of several alternative Italian magazines, like “Il Male”, “Cannibale”, “and Frigidaire”. This group of young people constituted what has been lately defined as the ‘last Italian avant-garde”.

Emi worked for public radio and advertising. In the late eighties she started to be actively involved in contemporary art, as independ curator for galleries and public institutions. With Laura Ruggeri and Gianni Romano she created a unique survey of the work of women artists in Italy at the moment of the survey (1989–92); the results of the research are available for consultation at the Via Farini archive in Milano. At the dawn of the nineties she curated, supported by the British Council, the first show in Italy of YBA (Young British Art), that was about to become a world wide recognized trend that reshaped the notion of contemporary art.

In 1992, Emi opened Emi Fontana Gallery in Milano (closed in 2009), which soon proved to be a pivotal force in the European Contemporary art scene. After Mike Kelley’s first Italian solo show opened in Milano in her gallery in June 2000, Emi Fontana started to periodically travel to Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles in 2005, she initiated a series of nomadic art projects under the name of West of Rome, a pioneer organization in finding alternative strategies of exhibition for contemporary art, She curated the breakthrough show “Women in the City ” (2008), where works by Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Louise Lawler and lately Marnie Weber and Jennifer Bolande, were disseminated in more 300 locations all over greater Los Angeles. as best public art project of the year by. In 2009 she curated and produced with Mike Kelley ‘A Voyage of Growth and Discovery” an ambitious multichannel video and sculptural installation by Kelley and Michael Smith. In 2011, Emi curated “Trespass” parade with Rirkrit Tiravanija and Arto Lindsay, an utopian project that involved more than 200 artists and over 2000 participants, who took over the streets of downtown Los Angeles in celebration, happenings, street theater, performance and pacific protest. More recently, she curated a series of new performances for the "Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival " and West of Rome, with Vaginal Davis and Andrea Fraser; Andrea Fraser’s "Men on the Line," has been since then presented in prominent art institutions, from MoMA to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, as well as becoming the object of major academic discussions on the issue of performance, feminism and so called post-feminism.

In May 2013 for the Hangar Bicocca and Pirelli Foundation in Milano she curated a break through major exhibition of Mike Kelley, “Eternity is a long time”, that challenges the pre given format exhibition of a retrospective, to open up to new avenues of interpretation and contextualization for Kelley work.

Emi, occasionally, publishes her writings on Flash Art International, Rolling Stones (Italian edition) and Mousse. She collaborates and has close ties with the major artists of her generation and beyond.