We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Maria Molteni. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maria below.

Maria, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

It’s incredibly difficult to choose since my projects are like my children. I put an incredible amount of care, research, and back-breaking labor into each. They also build off of one another and sort of converse back and forth.

However, especially since I’m currently deep IN IT, I would say the “Counting to Infinity” (Contando all’Infinito) body of work- which includes my recent deck of playing + divination cards “Stelle Scopa”. It’s difficult to explain, but I do feel that most of my projects or commissions arrive as divine assignments, from somewhere mysterious, somewhere “beyond”. They often align with major life shifts that I experience personally and in community. In the case of C2I, the work resonates with this theme of “homecomings” and brought me deeper into ancestral work via two synchronous invitations from my hometown of Nashville and home of familial origin in Italy.

In some ways the work began when I found an Italian playing/ divination card at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea, on the great solar eclipse of 2017- the Fante di Spade (or Page of Swords). I was already reading Tarot by that point, but the event catapulted deeper research into card design, history, variety and use. In 2022 I was invited by Coop Gallery to have my first solo in Nashville, where I was raised and where my family has lived for several generations. Just as I began brainstorming, I received some strange family heirlooms related to Tarot imagery, followed by a surprise invitation to expand the work for a show in Venice, Italy- and, no less, during the “Milk of Dreams” Biennale that featured many of my favorite women mystic art ancestors. It was a true privilege that gave me fuel for years of inspired artwork.

Just this month, I returned from another trip to Italy, this time the Campania region, which gifted me a large wave of miraculous inspiration. I’ll be creating work in response to my experiences with various Madonna grottos in those mountains, still under the Counting to Infinity umbrella, for a show at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art that will also tie in the work I was making in SLO about the Seven Sisters (see my mural on the back of the Fremont Theatre from 2021). And Keep your eyes peeled- the show at SLOMA will open this August!

Maria, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Maria Elizabeth/ Zita Molteni (They/Them, b 1983, Nashville) is a queer interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator, beekeeper and mystic. They descend from Tennessee square dancers, stunt motorcyclists, quilters, beekeepers and opera singers of various European backgrounds. Maria is the first working artist in their family. Their practice has grown from formal studies in Painting, Printmaking and Dance (educated at Boston University + Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venezia), to incorporate research, ritual and play-based collaboration with the living and dead.

Molteni is an independent scholar of matriarchal/ communal societies, specializing in honeybees and the Shaker “Era of Manifestations”. They also picture themself as an inter-dimensional Phys Ed “coach” for visionary communities like Shakers, Bauhaus or Black Mountain College. Most known for their massive, site-specific painted ground works (often on basketball courts), they track movements of the heavens to create altars to the sky and horizontal/anti-monuments for all kinds of bodies. Their most recent groundwork, Gateway to Infinity: An Anti-monument, brought together four of their dearest fellow queer Italian-American artists in a Summer Solstice ritual to call in “Medusa Consciousness” in the place of Boston’s formerly beheaded Christopher Columbus statue.

Molteni sits on the board of the Golden Dome School and is a member of Lake Pleasant, one of the oldest Spiritualist communities in the US. They are also a member of an ocean rowing team that evolved from 19th century volunteer shipwreck “lifesavers”. Much of their work incorporates nautical spectronomy and Siren lore, including formal card + seashell divination referred to as “Siren Calls”. Their intuitive practice spans somatic spellcraft, astrology, tarot, dreamwork, and color magic. They recently completed their first deck of original playing/ divination cards called Contando all’Infinito * Stelle Scopa. This deck reimagines traditional Italian playing/ Tarot cards and the game of Scopa through the lens of embodied mysticism, queer/ feminist Rosary prayer, and cosmic/ planetary devotions.

Molteni’s research often utilizes publication formats and multiples to anchor, bolster and expand their artwork. Molteni’s experimental product lines Infinite Goddetc + Free Bleed Press offer zines, artist books, prints, apparel original tarot + playing cards, and limited editioned art objects that embrace the margins. They center queerness, intersectional feminism and gender expansive mysticism via a playful framework for editioned multiples called “Counting to Infinity”.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

The most important thing society can do for artists is TRUST US, invest in us, stop micromanaging, marginalizing, and exploiting us. We need to deprogram the ways we tend to measure value/ worth in a country built upon unimaginative puritanisms and deprogram whatever taught us that art is an extra rather than the beating center of a full life.

Even just on a practical level, if you’re a client looking to hire/ work with an artist, I promise everyone will benefit and conserve potentially wasted energy if you let an artist DO WHAT THEY DO and work how they work. Give them what they need and recognize that artists are not only creative geniuses, small business owners, deep researchers, often excellent writers, problem solvers, you name it. Artists, especially in this day, have to learn a lot of skills on their own and be incredibly organized to survive in our environments. We know what we’re doing!

Lastly, don’t appoint an artist for their radical ideas, authentic values, diverse perspectives and then try to control their messages or forms of expression. With more heightened and strict censorship in art institutions, we will just get a bunch of homogenous, boring hamster wheels that will not push society forward in the ways it needs to grow.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

This question builds well off the last one. The direct answer is – I had to learn that when I’m IN MY ELEMENT and making work that is truest to myself, more people resonate with and are inspired by it.

For a bit of context, I’ve done a lot of work in community and in collaboration, as well as in solitude. Because I deeply value community, however large or small, especially when I’m working in public space, it’s important for me to consider site-specificity, community needs, cultural/ environmental context, etc. Many don’t know this (“probably” because I’m not a man- wink) but my work, in collaboration with my collective New Craft Artists in Action, laid the foundations for the nation-wide community-centered basketball court painting movement. We’ve painted 7 total courts and we paint them ourselves under my creative/ project direction with 2” brushes and teams of rad queer adult and young artists. I often work directly with youth to design public works together.

It has always been a skill of mine, weaving their ideas into my style or skillset, but I used to be more stressed out about serving or pleasing the community, and appealing to traditional “sportsfans” or status quo aesthetics. The work was just fine and often lovely- I would never make something I wasn’t proud of- but as more people started replicating the model of my practice and doing court projects, it kind of freed me up to get weird and more niche and bring a more radical approach to my own work and community approach. At first it was tricky, and it continues to be tough doing this work- getting enough jobs in the field I basically created and being properly credited for my influence in a male and market-dominated athletic world- but it also encouraged me to give myself permission to do things in my most authentic, out-of-the-box way. As a result my work has really taken off and all of my varied interests are more synthesized. I can see audiences, fellow artists, collaborators, curators, and the public responding more enthusiastically and wanting more. When an artist makes their truest work, people can tell and they are inspired to be more authentic themselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.mariamolteni.com
• Instagram: @strega_maria
• Other: https://www.patreon.com/MariaMolteni

Image Credits
Photo of me: Heraldo Creative Studio 1. Chris Rucinski 2. Ironside Photography 3. Alex Pickering 4. John Maciel 5-8: Me