Ulassai, Maria Lai Open Air Museum

The Maria Lai Open Air Museum was created with the intention of protecting, promoting and enhancing the heritage that Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 - Cardedu, 2013) bequeathed to Ulassai, her native country.
“Great art is what comes to people walking on the street,” said Antonio Gramsci, and Maria, who fully shared this position, will work throughout her journey to bring art closer to people, convinced that it was necessary, from an early age, to educate them to follow its 'rhythm'. Therefore, it should not be surprising that one of the first occasions on which the artist had the opportunity to try his hand at creating a public art intervention was the aesthetic redevelopment of the Ulassai washbasin. The funds, made available by the municipal administration to Bind Yourself to the Mountains (1981), a famous choral operation universally considered his masterpiece, had not been spent at the explicit will of the artist and, so, after a series of consultations with the community, it was decided to intervene in the washroom, the symbolic place of the small town. Once the work was finished, Maria Lai decided to create a large ceiling frame (1982). The work was only the first of a series of interventions carried out specifically for those spaces, such as the Fountain of the Source (1984) by Luigi Veronesi, the Sound Fountain (1987) by Costantino Nivola and the Wheat Fountain (1989) by Guido Strazza.
From that moment on, Maria Lai began to dedicate herself with ever greater commitment to the public sphere and, from the early nineties, she gave shape to a series of environmental interventions with a great visual impact, such as The Sewn Goats (1992), The Road of Rite (1992) and The Scarpata (1993). Interventions that will resume with newfound interest in 2003 when Maria Lai performs The Flight of the Goose Game, freely inspired by the traditional “goose game”, on the facade of the kindergarten in Piazza Barigau, where she also reproduces, in acrylic, the thirteen boxes that make up the game path. In the same year, near the elementary school square, he placed a large square blackboard that shows in beautiful handwriting the inscription Art Takes Us by the Hand (2003). Along one of the oldest streets in the town of Ulassai, Via Venezia, the artist also creates thirteen glazed terracotta books, entitled Murati Booklets (2003), in which aphorisms and thoughts on art are reported, as is the case for The Tangle Wall (2004), near which he will return the following year for the creation of The House of Concerns (2005) in which he paints a series of big and small dragons with the intention of aesthetically reconverting an old restaurant located next to The Escarpment. But it was in 2006 that Maria Lai's most ambitious project ever took place, namely the birth of the Art Station, a contemporary art museum dedicated to her that houses the most important public collection of her work and which, ideally, represents the starting point of the “open-air” journey. (D. Mariani)

Why it is important to visit it
The visit to Maria Lai's works, scattered in the Ulassese territory, allows us to grasp how deep and profitable the link between the artist and his territory of origin was. A bond that began in 1981 with the participatory performance Legarsi alla Montagna, in which the artist involved the entire population of Ulassai in a suggestive collective operation, now recognized as the first work of “Relational Art” in Italy. From that moment on, Maria Lai began to intervene more and more frequently in her native country, creating a unique project that reveals how, for the artist Ulassai, she represented her creative universe, a privileged lens on the world in which to move from the microcosm to the macrocosm through the use of metaphor: “the landslides of Ulassai - declared the artist - are the landslides of the world, art is born from restlessness and aspires to infinity.” (Mr. Mariani)

Tag

Structure category: museum, gallery and/or collection

Content type: Arts

Usability: Open

Province: Nuoro

Common: Ulassai

Macro Territorial Area: Central Sardinia

POSTAL CODE: 08040

Address: SP 11 - località ex Stazione Ferroviaria - centro accoglienza Museo Stazione dell'Arte

Telephone: +39 0782 787055

E-mail: stazionedellarte@tiscali.it

Website: www.stazionedellarte.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/MuseoMariaLai

January - December

Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

9:30 AM - 7:30 PM

Information on tickets and access: The times indicated are those of the reception center of the Stazione dell'Arte museum, for information. The Maria Lai open-air museum, variously scattered throughout the municipality, can also be visited freely and independently, given the preparation of a route with signs and information panels on the works in Italian and English; it is advisable to contact the Museum of Art Station for information and a map relating to the location of the works in the territory of the municipality of Ulassai. In the museum's bookshop there is also an illustrated guide, in Italian and English, of the open-air museum “Maria Lai”.

Access mode: Free

Services information: If you choose to visit the open-air museum with the support of the museum staff, you must book the guided tour by contacting the museum; the ticket for the guided tour also includes a view of the Stazione dell'Arte museum, the reservation can also be made by e-mail. Other services are available at the reception center of the Stazione dell'Arte Museum, open every day from 09:30 to 19:30.

Update

19/9/2023 - 12:10

Services

Bookshop