Arte Povera is an Italian term that literally means “poor art.” It refers to a movement in the 1960s and 1970s whose artists used recycled and otherwise unconventional materials. Coined in 1967 by art critic and curator Germano Celant, Arte Povera artists generally composed their works from recycled metal, rags, soil, and other rejected and marginalized substances. Their goal was to move away from a culture of materialism and commercialism, and to disrupt the art world’s emphasis on valuable substances. The artists associated with Arte Povera also valued handwork, rejecting the technologically produced art associated with Minimalism. By using quotidian, often abject materials, Arte Povera artists aimed to break down the barrier between fine art and the rest of life.

Some of the artists involved in the Arte Povera movement were Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Marisa Merz, and Giovanni Anselmo. Their work took many forms: sculpture, installation, performance, paintings, and more. Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags (1967)placed a classical representation of Venus next to a pile of discarded rags and clothing. Boetti’s embroidered works used traditional handwork—which is often denigrated as mere craft—and elevated it to the level of high art. While Arte Povera is used to refer specifically to work produced by this group of Italian artists, their ideology echoed in parallel movement in other countries. In the United States, Post-Minimalist artists like Robert Smithson and Lynda Benglis, used similarly non-traditional materials in their radical new work.