The Mona Lisa Project is a visual art collaborative project which includes elements of performance, historical reflection and cultural commentary on art and the historical imagery of gender perception. It is based on an exchange between photographer Rino Pizzi and 16 women artists who specialize in different media and disciplines. The project involved the development of a series of works inspired by the image and cultural relevance of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa portrait, focusing primarily on the subject’s celebrated smile. The artists/sitters decided the setting and context of the portrait--clothing, environment, and more. The main objective of the project was that of providing a reflection on a wide range of topics in contemporary art production and representation, inviting women artists to embody an established icon about femininity, which is first produced as a portrait by a male photographer, and then re-appropriated through each artist’s own aesthetic vision and experience.

A catalogue of the project was recently published with an introduction by Dana Friis-Hansen, Director of the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, Michigan,  and  Prof. Janis Bergman-Carton, Chair of the Art History department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The project developed in three stages. The first stage was a rehearsal period, when the artists practiced the smile of Mona Lisa as closely as possible to the original image, and occasionally produced small documents (sketches, snapshots) of body postures, locations, imagery, and the like. In the second stage, the artists posed, enacting the Mona Lisa smile, for photographer Rino Pizzi. The images were printed on a variety of media which best suit each artist’s techniques. The prints were given to the participants who worked, with no restrictions, on the photographic portraits to produce the final artwork.

The complete project can now be viewed at this website:

http://www.rinopizziphotography.com/MLP/

A full catalog, including artist statements and essays by Dana Friis-Hansen and  Janis Bergman-Carton can be partially viewed and purchased from Blurb at

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2222863

                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                               

please click on each artist’s name for details