As Brilliant As the Sun, edited by Camilla Boemio, reconstructs a journey into the artistic practices of California and in the city of Rome, creating a hybrid cartography through a vision of expanded art geography marked by analogies and contradictions. The volume explores the state of the art in these two geographical and psychological places through the conversations carried out by the writer with artists Tom Marioni and Sergio Lombardo. The sun, the special light, the relationship with space, their distance from a purely commercial art system, their common search for spirituality, the attention to experimentation have allowed some individual artists, galleries and art centres to find an ideal context to shape new and alternative models of artistic production and presentation. More affordable locations and a mix of urban city life and serene beach/dolce vita life have attracted visual artists to these geographically distant but intrinsically close places to create their work. Many artists in California and in Roma consider themselves both artists and activists, not as separate but as intertwined realities. Collective action is and has always been extremely important in California, specifically amongst marginalized groups – whether it be in relation to disability, gender, sexuality, race, class, or the intersections amongst these communities. The volume investigates the efforts made to consolidate the aesthetical structures by focusing on the projects of the artists in which they are highlighted: focal points are then the intersectional feminist perspective, social and political issues, activism, the diaspora, the relationship with the landscape, the change in progress, conflicts related to identity issues and the ethics of ecology.

Contributors: Ludovica Gioscia, Dean Smith, Cody Trepte, William E. Jones, Geof Oppenheimer, Tam Van Tran, Kevin Cooley e Phillip Andrew, Lewis Jamie Hamilton con Hannah Hughes, Stephanie Syjuco, Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Mara De Luca, Peter Halasz, Adriano Valeri, Carly Chubak, Katherine Sherwood, Lapo Simeoni, lsmael de Anda III, Todd Gray, Nicole Eisenman, Maria Elisa D’Andrea, Mark Todd, Sean Noyce, Scarlet Mann, Curtis Stage, Katie Shapiro, Daniela de Paulis, Amir Zaki, Jebila Okongwu, Stefano Canto, Salvatore Arancio, Ryts Monet, Marta Mancini, Ra di Martino, and Catherine Opie.