In Parma, has recently started the exhibition “Higher Learning”, a collection of 120 black and white images taken by the poetess of rock Patti Smith with her inseparable Polaroid. Fragments of life immortalized by the artist during her travels around the world. The title of the exhibition is the same of a song from Patti’s latest album “Land”, and refers to the knowledge that comes from the study, but also from experience and from life. “Higher Learning” is a kind of reflection on the act of creating a piece of art and on the passing of time. The photos portray beds, statues, artistic instruments, gravestones, which have belonged to persons who have contributed with their work to the development of the culture.
Patti Smith Auto Portrait
Slippers of Pope Benedict XV - New-York
Hermann Hesse's typewriter - Lugano
Gabriele D'Annunzio's bed - Brescia
David of Michelangelo - Florence
Virgil's tomd - Naples
Winged Cherubim - San Severino Marche
Columns ofGabriele D'Annunzio's garden - Brescia
At “Palazzo del Governatore”, togheter with “Higher Learning” , there is another exbition of photographic works entitled The NY Scene, dedicated to the New York art scenery during the Seventies andEighties, with works by Nan Goldin, Robert Mappletorphe and Andy Warhol.
PATTI SMITH ICON OF STYLE
Patti Smith has many ties with the fashion world. She has a long-term collaboration with the Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester (Smith had even walked down her Parisian catwalk for the AW’06 collection), and she has also been a source of inspiration for brands like Balmain, Yohji Yamamoto and Saint Laurent. She approaches clothes with the same punk attitude she has been approaching her writing and music. Choosing a personal androgynous style, she started to dress like no other woman of the time. She was really one of the first female musicians to wear skinny jeans, tight white t-shirt, leather jackets, boyfriend jackets, combat style boots and oversized white shirts. With her hats and uncombed hair she adopted a look that is now the uniform of so many women rockers. She managed to be unequivocally sexy embodying an androgynous aesthetic, trasforming her clothes in an extension of herself, a perfect reflection of the artist herself.