📅 June 15 h. 6.00 PM | Adrienne Jones
📅 June 22 h. 6.00 PM | Laurel Sparks
📅 June 29 h. 5.30 PM | Suneil Sanzgiri
📍 Palazzo delle Papesse – Via di Città 126, Siena
✍️For more information visit our website
🎟️ Free entry, no reservation required
The Siena Art Institute has long been a home for artists, writers, and creative thinkers from around the world. Through its residency programs, the Institute offers professional artists, writers, musicians, and sustainability practitioners the opportunity to live and work in Siena. We welcome artists and creative professionals from a wide range of disciplines.
Since 2018, SART has collaborated in a residency partnership co-sponsored by Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (NY).
During these three Monday talks, the artists will present their ideas, creative practices, and approaches to art-making. Working across a wide range of artistic disciplines, they will offer insights into their research, inspirations, and creative processes through a series of public conversations.
All events will take place at Palazzo delle Papesse.
- June 15, h. 6.00 PM, Palazzo delle Papesse | Adrienne Jones – Fashion Design: Professor Adrienne Jones has taught in the Fashion Department of Pratt Institute for over 30 years. Professor Jones also teaches in the School of Professional Studies, where she developed fashion curricula for the Adult Education and Pre College programs. For over 20 years, she served as Faculty Advisor for Fashion Society, and received the Outstanding Organization Advisor award twice. Professor Jones was also selected to represent the School of Design as one of five scholars for the Inclusive Pedagogy Scholars Program, which investigated and reported on the challenges of diversity and inclusion on the Pratt Campus. In 2014, Adrienne conceived and co-curated the landmark exhibition, Black Dress, which honored Black designers and addressed the lack of diversity in the fashion industry. It was an unprecedented endeavor that coalesced a diverse array of creatives that informed and educated the New York fashion community, as well as new audiences, on the commemorative work of Blacks in the field of fashion.
- 22 June, h. 6.00 PM, Palazzo delle Papesse | Laurel Sparks – Fine Arts: Laurel Sparks is a painter based in Brooklyn and Hudson Valley whose work intersects queer craft, textile, occult and abstract histories. Esoteric correspondence systems are encoded in patterns and glyphs that materialize cosmological mysteries. In tandem, elements of decoration and artifice pay homage to queer and feminist countercultural expressions. Her awards and residencies include a Chiaro Award Residency at Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship. Recent solo projects include Time Machines at Kate Werble Gallery NYC and Settler Seance at Tinworks Art, Bozeman MT. Sparks holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University. She is 2026 Artist-in-Residence at the Siena Art Institute, Italy and is Associate Professor in Painting at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.
- 29 June, h. 5.30, Palazzo delle Papesse | Suneil Sanzgiri – Film & Video: Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. His award-winning work has been screened and exhibited extensively at festivals and arts venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the 18th Istanbul Biennial, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Doclisboa, Viennale, Lo Schermo dell’Arte, De Appel, Jameel Arts Centre, ICA London, Whitechapel Gallery, MASS MoCA, e-Flux, Hessel Museum, Criterion Collection, and many more. His first institutional solo exhibition, “Here the Earth Grows Gold,” opened at the Brooklyn Museum in the fall of 2023. Other solo exhibitions include “An Impossible Address” at Mercer Union in Toronto, Canada (2025), and at EMPAC in Troy, NY (2025). His work has been written about in BOMB Magazine, MOUSSE, e-flux, Art in America, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Film Quarterly, SEEN Journal, Dissent, November Magazine, and more.
