Today, the exhibition and cultural program for 2025 at the Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Center in Prato was announced, in the presence of Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, President of the Pecci Center, Ilaria Bugetti, Mayor of Prato, and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, General Director of the institution, who has been reconfirmed by the Board of Directors for the 2025-2027 three-year period.
The programming planned for 2025 is titled “Building Communities” and includes three spring exhibitions (starting May 30): “SMISURATA. XXL Works from the Pecci Collection”, “Davide Stucchi. Light Lights,” and “Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. Man’s March,” as well as the autumn exhibition “They Live. Art and Emotions, HIV/AIDS in Italy. 1982-1996.”
Alongside the exhibitions, the Pecci Center offers a rich calendar of events designed for different audiences with the goal of increasing the accessibility of the Museum and making it a platform for meeting and open to all. The calendar involves the entire center, proposing screenings, literary meetings, and educational activities.
The Pecci Cinema, in addition to its regular program from Wednesday to Sunday featuring premieres and art house films, also plans two special series: the first dedicated to David Lynch, and the second marking the fourth edition of “Pezzi Unici,” focused on LGBT-themed films.
The Pecci Books presents “Reading the Present,” which includes various meetings with authors and insights into the most urgent contemporary topics.
The Educational Department continues its intensive workshop activities aimed at schools of all levels, as well as initiatives to combat school dropout with “Prato Educating Community,” or introduce children and their mothers to art with “First Thousand Days of Art at the Pecci,” and “Cinefilante,” which explores video art. Thanks to a solid network of local relationships and awareness that art and culture can contribute to mental well-being, the Pecci Center collaborates with various organizations on projects for people with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
Additionally, the Pecci Center opens its doors beyond regular visiting hours with the monthly “Pecci Night” event and the project “What if You Went Inside?” where workshops, performances, musical moments, and many other opportunities allow visitors to experience the exhibition spaces in innovative ways.
“Building Communities,” the theme around which the 2025 program of the Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Center revolves, reflects the institution’s particular vocation rooted in the Prato and Tuscany territories, as well as in national and international relationships, which serve as the lifeblood for its diverse activities. A cultural center that, through the arts, creates occasions for meeting, discovery, and reflection on the present.
“Building community means looking at everyone, regardless of age, target, or tastes,” states Mayor Ilaria Bugetti. “A contemporary art center must do this, opening itself to the territory, its realities, and its associations, including social ones. This space must be inclusive every day through art, its staff, conferences, cinema, and dedicated programs for music and books. This approach will allow us to enhance and improve the good results achieved since 2024, with increasing visitors and greater visibility worldwide.”
Stefano Collicelli Cagol, General Director of the Pecci Center in Prato, explains: “A Contemporary Art Center that focuses on its audiences, each characterized by their specific needs, is something urgent in Italy. The tool we choose is accessibility: at the Pecci Center, we are working to find different ways to bring people closer to contemporary art, communicating it in a simple and clear manner, searching for points of connection in our narratives that allow everyone to engage with the works based on their own experiences and knowledge.
We are equipping ourselves with new tools to expand our reach, but also to make everyone feel comfortable when entering the museum spaces. Never before has there been such a need for gathering spaces where people can confront, get to know each other, touch, and be physically together. Today, more than ever, art that speaks of the present can serve as a guide to understanding the world through its forms, colors, and the contrasting emotions it can evoke.
With the collection, archive, library—set to reopen this year as a new gathering space open to the city and as a platform for national and international research—along with exhibitions, cinema, educational workshops, and special projects in Art and Wellbeing, the restaurant, bistro, playground, and outdoor arena, the Pecci Center aims to serve all those who choose to enrich their daily lives through engagement with contemporary art languages.”
With the exhibition SMISURATA. XXL Works from the Pecci Collection, designed by architect Ibrahim Kombarji in collaboration with the Center, the museum intends to celebrate some fundamental contributions to the history of its collections and subsequent opportunities for expanding its holdings. The exhibition invites visitors to engage with large-scale works from the collection, installed in the Gamberini halls through a close dialogue between spatial needs, accessibility principles, and the requirements of the artworks.
Furthermore, the exhibition also celebrates the return of Prato ’88, the large work by Mauro Staccioli, which will be reinstalled in the adjacent area of the Pecci, serving as a landmark that has welcomed visitors for years and, more broadly, anyone entering Prato. The show is made possible by the unique architecture of the rooms, designed and built specifically with foresight to accommodate very large contemporary artworks.
Following the trauma of World War II and the fall of fascist dictatorship, Italian museography has historically prioritized museums and their collections as tools to regenerate the social and community fabric of a wounded nation. In this year dedicated to community building, it is important to recognize the collective patrimony, seen as a shared good, as a driving force for fostering a sense of belonging to the city, the territory, and a constantly evolving community.
The collection continues to grow through recent acquisitions, including a video work that marks a milestone in Italian art history and will be presented alongside the spring exhibitions. Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s The Man’s March is a monumental installation created by two pioneers of moving images, who since the 1970s have explored family archives and footage from early 20th-century filmmakers, uncovering important testimonies of how the world was viewed at that time.
This work’s installation, part of the project The Museum Situated. New Acquisitions for the Pecci Center, supported by PAC2024—The Contemporary Art Plan, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, allows viewers to confront the imagery with which colonizers represented Africa, restoring dignity to colonized populations and highlighting the brutal power dynamics enacted by Italian colonists. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s work builds on research that anticipated many subsequent perspectives.
First presented at the 49th Venice Biennale—La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Harald Szeemann—and later in a solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca curated by Andrea Lissoni, the piece will become a permanent part of the Pecci collection. Today more than ever, it is vital to recognize how power and control dynamics—territorial, economic, and social—can have disastrous effects on the possibility of peaceful coexistence among different communities.
Continuing its exploration of Italian art—a long-standing core of its identity—the Pecci Center presents the first institutional exhibition of Davide Stucchi, Light Lights, an immersive journey through light works created by the artist and installed in dialogue with the spaces of the Nio Small Wing. These delicate, fragile sculptures reflect a world in constant movement, shifting from one space to another, emotion to emotion, showcasing Stucchi’s remarkable ability to transform the environments in which he works.
In October, the Pecci Center hosts its first major exhibition dedicated to a theme central to community building: They Live. Art and Emotions, HIV/AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996, curated by Michele Bertolino, who received a scholarship from MIC to research this topic. A generation of artists and creatives devastated by HIV/AIDS is given space in this exhibition, and their work is reconsidered in the context of its historical impact.
This exhibition, for the first time, reconstructs the environment in which the HIV pandemic emerged and addresses still-relevant issues such as health, community building, sexual and emotional education, resilience through art, and the pursuit of beauty and connection despite difficulties.