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Nancy Olnick might never have dedicated herself to Italian art without meeting Giorgio Spanu and Spanu might never have entered the world of art collecting—or reconnected with his homeland—if it weren’t for Olnick. Had the two not come together around this shared passion for art and culture, Magazzino Italian Art would likely not exist. Since its founding in 2017, the institution has become the leading U.S. platform for Italian art and a catalyst for its study and appreciation worldwide.
To learn more about their collecting journey and the institution’s history, we met the two collectors and patrons on a late-autumn day in Cold Spring, where Magazzino rises from the luxuriant Hudson Valley landscape. The clear, geometric volumes of Miguel Quismondo’s redesigned warehouse and the Robert Olnick Pavilion, created by Quismondo with Alberto Campo Baeza, stand in striking contrast to the surrounding greenery.
Since they met 32 years ago, Olnick and Spanu have shared a passionate journey in collecting—one that has accompanied their relationship and ultimately led to the creation of Magazzino. Olnick describes this journey as “very organic for their life.”
From the start, collecting for Olnick and Spanu was about more than simply buying and possessing. It has been a process—one that began with learning and naturally evolved into sharing their passion with others. “For us, it is much less about possessing than it is about engaging and educating—that’s what motivates us,” Olnick tells Observer.
From day one, Olnick and Spanu set a rule never to purchase anything before educating themselves. “We learn, we collect and we’ve been gathering books and research materials for as long as we’ve been collecting art,” Olnick explains. “That’s what made it interesting: it wasn’t just about acquiring, it was about learning. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
The expansion of Magazzino Italian Art with the new Robert Olnick Pavilion was driven largely by a desire to move beyond merely displaying part of their collection—focused primarily on Arte Povera—in the existing 11,000-square-foot L-shaped warehouse. Their goal was to integrate exhibitions with educational and public programming, just as they had always envisioned for the museum and to advance their mission of fostering appreciation for Italian art and culture while making a tangible impact on the local community.
As Spanu explains while guiding us through the new building, before they even began designing it, they made one thing clear to the architect: two dedicated spaces, one for research and one for education, had to be part of the project.
Magazzino now houses a Research Center with a library of more than 5,000 volumes on Italian art and culture. This hub serves scholars, students and curators studying Italian art in an international context and is complemented by a fellowship and research program dedicated to postwar and contemporary Italian art—particularly Arte Povera, a movement still largely underappreciated internationally despite the relevance of its ideas and practices today, as evidenced by last year’s exhibition at Pinault Collection’s Bourse de Commerce.
The local response has been enthusiastic, particularly among schools that lack such opportunities across the river and in nearby communities. What Magazzino offers is entirely free, driven by Olnick and Spanu’s commitment to expanding cultural access and creating opportunities for the community—especially for underserved schools in the surrounding area.
“We have the town of Philipstown and some of the surrounding communities coming here to learn how to do art-centered object teaching,” explains Spanu, gesturing toward works in the classroom. “Those programs have been oversubscribed with waitlists, so we now have two of those coming up, so that our program can become part of the curriculum on a regular basis.”
This focus on education and research has profoundly reshaped not only the museum’s mission and local impact but also its internal structure. Previously, Magazzino had a single director overseeing programming and operations for the warehouse, with only limited external initiatives beyond the Arte Povera collection on view. Last September, however, Magazzino announced a new leadership team to guide its growth, naming Adam Sheffer as director, Paola Mura as artistic director, Monica Eisner as chief operating officer and Nicola Lucchi as director of education at the Germano Celant Research Center.
The creation of the education center also made room for a new lower-floor design gallery. “From the beginning, I wanted to expand our mission to include Italian design,” Spanu explains, introducing us to the work of Japanese-born, Venice-based glass artist Yoichi Ohira, currently on view in the space. Long overlooked but collected for years by the couple, Ohira developed a distinctive aesthetic that merges Japanese ceramic traditions with Venetian Murano glass mastery.
The couple has followed Ohira’s work since 1996 and he was among the first artists they collected as part of their extensive Murano glass holdings, which began around 1992. Over the years, they have assembled one of the most comprehensive collections of works by Murano-based artists and designers, focusing on contemporary reinterpretations of glass rather than traditional Murano production.
The couple began seriously collecting Murano glass after visiting a major exhibition dedicated to it in Venice during one of their trips to Italy. Olnick had just started to take an interest, occasionally browsing postwar Murano glass in New York—particularly pieces from the 1950s that had made their way to the U.S. after the war. Then a serendipitous moment changed the course of their collecting: on a flight to Milan in 1992, they spotted a small notice in an in-flight magazine about a show in Venice at Fondazione Cini Stampalia. They decided to make a detour, and the experience opened their eyes to the artistic depth and diversity of Murano glass.
They began collecting in earnest between 1993 and 1994, when they gained access to an important trove that would become the heart of their collection. “I was pregnant. I still remember—it was February 1994, and we suddenly had access to an existing collection of glass that had been put together by an American,” Olnick recalls. Through a chance phone call with a friend, she learned that a warehouse in the Hamptons held an entire collection of Murano glass that had just become available. She and Spanu, guided by friends from the Barovier family, visited and found themselves “like kids in a candy store,” discovering what turned out to be the collection of Muriel Karasick. With her New York gallery, Karasick had introduced Murano glass to American collectors and artists alike. “Warhol used to go to her store. She was also a photographer and had started a great collection of Mapplethorpe. In fact, Mapplethorpe started collecting Murano glass thanks to Muriel, who showed it to him for the first time,” Olnick explains. Acquiring that group of works marked the true beginning of their deep engagement with glass.
In 2003, their glass collection was presented at the Museum of Arts and Design—then still the American Craft Museum—in New York. “The show happened just organically,” recounts Olnick. A friend from high school called her after decades, saying she had seen some glass they had loaned to Montreal and wanted to organize an exhibition of their collection. “We had never even thought of it as a collection—you know, it was just things we liked. We never had that mentality of being ‘collectors,’” Olnick admits. She recalls how, on opening night, she turned to Giorgio and asked, “Who do you think is going to come see this?” “It was packed,” she says. “It reminds me of when we first opened in Cold Spring. That first day, I thought, ‘Who is going to come all the way to Cold Spring to see Arte Povera?’ Well, at first it was slow, but now people from all over come to visit.”
Most importantly, the show resulted in a catalog—now in its second edition—that remains one of the few publications to map and examine this vital side of Italian design, exploring its connections with international creators and the dialogue between tradition and contemporary innovation. “That book became the beginning—not only of collecting together, but of realizing that as much as we were showing this work to teach others, we were also teaching ourselves,” Olnick reflects. Publishing catalogs alongside each exhibition has since become a core part of Magazzino’s mission.
The story of how the couple assembled one of the most significant collections of Italian art unfolded in much the same organic way—not from a fixed plan, but from curiosity, chance encounters and a shared willingness to follow their passion wherever it led.
Before Olnick met Giorgio, she was collecting American Pop Art. “I was born and raised in New York, so Pop Art was my era, my environment,” she reflects. Yet as an avid reader and lifelong art lover, she was also, as she puts it, an Italophile. “That was always part of me—just as you asked how I started. But Italy pulled me in. I went as often as I could, immersing myself in the music, the food and the culture,” she explains.
After marrying, the couple moved with their daughter to Rome for a few years, eager to learn more about Italian culture and its contemporary artists. Through friends, Spanu and Olnick met Sauro Bocchi, a gallerist deeply connected to Rome’s artistic circles, who introduced them to postwar Italian art and, in particular, Arte Povera. As the couple recalled in a post on Magazzino’s website announcing his passing, “Bocchi didn’t want to follow trends and gave an opportunity to many women artists such as Giosetta Fioroni, Cloti Ricciardi, Lisa Montessori and Maria Lai, which was not easy at the time.” When they asked him where to begin learning about Arte Povera, he advised, “Go to Torino, go to Castello di Rivoli and then come back and we’ll talk.”
As Olnick remembers, it was an Arte Povera exhibition curated by Rudi Fuchs, the celebrated curator from the Stedelijk. “We walked around like people walk around Magazzino now—completely taken aback. We went back to Rome and sat down with Sauro. He asked us what we liked and we said, ‘We liked everything.’”
Spanu admits that without Nancy, he might never have embraced Italian art. Having spent more than a decade in Paris working in communications and marketing, he was steeped in the art of the great Parisian avant-garde and pioneering postwar movements. “She’s the one who brought me back to Italy,” Spanu says. “I was very much a Francophile. My love was for Klee, Dubuffet, Picasso, Matisse. I really didn’t know much about contemporary Italian art—probably less than Nancy.”
Together, the couple began to study, visit galleries, ask questions and learn. Another of their earliest mentors was gallerist Mario Pieroni, who played a fundamental role in shaping their taste and collection. From him, they acquired their first six Arte Povera works—one each from the key members of the movement still alive at the time. They soon developed close relationships with several of the artists but have recently watched with sadness as many of them have passed away, often without receiving the international recognition they deserve. This has made their mission feel even more urgent, deepening their commitment to preserving and honoring these legacies.
Still, Spanu and Olnick remain intent on broadening their mission beyond a singular focus on Arte Povera, dedicating themselves to the reassessment and proper presentation of other figures in Italian postwar and contemporary art—as seen most recently in their thoughtful surveys of Maria Lai and Lucio Pozzi. At the same time, they are eager to revive their program for on-site commissions by younger Italian artists.
The couple admits they came late to acquiring works by other postwar Italian masters such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, whose pieces they collected when possible, though they often couldn’t afford the most significant ones.
The couple was recently recognized for their dedication with a major gift of two significant works by Piero Manzoni, donated under a joint decision by the artist’s foundation and Hauser & Wirth. The works are two room-size immersive environments conceived but never realized by Manzoni in 1961, shortly before his death at age 29. Far ahead of his time, Manzoni envisioned immersive installations decades before the idea of “immersive art” entered mainstream discourse. These environments represent the culmination of his radical exploration of the “dematerialization of art,” paired with an emphasis on the viewer’s experience and co-creation, serving as a sharp critique of authorship and the commodification of art.
These visionary projects by Manzoni first moved from concept to reality for his 2019 museum-quality exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s New York and Los Angeles galleries. Afterward, they went into storage—until now, when they found their ideal permanent home at Magazzino Italian Art. “She felt Magazzino was the perfect place to receive these works, to keep them alive and to ensure they could one day be shared again,” says Magazzino’s director, Adam Sheffer. “She did not expect us to move so quickly.” In fact, Magazzino responded that they intended to stage a show in September. The foundation initially assumed she meant 2026, but Sheffer clarified it would be September 2025—just six weeks away. Despite the ambitious timeline, there was a shared determination to make it happen.
To honor and celebrate this major donation, Magazzino Italian Art is presenting “Piero Manzoni: Total Space,” on view through March 23. The exhibition reintroduces these visionary installations to the public, alongside exceptional examples of his Achromes from the late 1950s on loan from American collections. As Manzoni conceived them, one room is filled with light, immersing the viewer in an experience of pure dematerialization, transience and disorientation; the other is completely dark, its walls covered in fur, heightening the viewer’s physical awareness and sensory engagement. To contemporary audiences, both installations seem to anticipate—decades ahead of their time—the complexities of our relationship with the virtual and the tangible.
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Elisa Carollo
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