The collection of the Contemporary Arts Archive is divided in series of thematic sections.
The Visual Arts section collects monographs and catalogues of seminal shows in the Usa and in Europe, from “Art of Assemblage” (Seitz, MOMA 1961) to “Cybernetic Serendipity” (Reichardt 1969) to “This is tomorrow” (ICA, London 1958) up to our days.
The photography’s section contains a lot of monographs, anthological histories and critical studies all over the world, with a particular attention for the Italian situation and the search on the territory.
The architecture’s section includes monographs, documents and historical texts that concern the most remarkable architects activity of XXth century, such as Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, up to more recent texts about Italian and international contemporary architecture.
The urban planning’s section includes essays and a wide selection of texts on the focus ‘Art and Territory’, with a specialization in urbanism and contemporary sociology. There are a lot of texts about economic analysis, sociology and social geography, focusing on the ongoing transformations on the territory in the globalization era.
The essays writing’s section includes writings of the maximum critics and theorists of XXth century, from Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Georges Didi-Huberman, Hans Belting, Harald Szeemann, Rosalind Krauss, Meyer Schapiro, up to the most recent thinkers, such as Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Sarat Maharaj, as well as a lot of anthologies of writings that document the most remarkable aspects of the philosophical, aesthetical, sociological, post-colonial debate, from the Second World War up today.
The Archive documents, with particular interest, the projects of artists and Italian collectives involved in the public sphere.
There are also Italian and foreigners magazines and specialized periodicals: Abitare, Artforum, Art Monthly, Art & Critica, Domus, Il Giornale dell’Arte, Third Text, the cultural supplement of the Il Sole 24Ore and some publishing experiments.
