page_title: Francesco Bonami
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Francesco Bonami / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: The Boy and the Frog 2
context_page_description: Francesco Bonami is an Italian art curator and writer who is currently Honorary Director of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. He lives in Milan and Manhattan, New York.
context_section_description: Bonami was born in Florence. After a brief spell as an artist he moved to New York City in 1991 where he was appointed U.S. Editor of Flash Art magazine. From 1999 to 2008 he was Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and artistic director of Fondazione Pitti Discovery in Florence and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. From 2004 through 2008 he was Artistic Director of the Villa Manin Contemporary Art Center in Codroipo, Italy. He directed the 2nd edition of the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in 1997, the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003  and was one of the curators of Manifesta 3 (2000) and the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
  Bonami has also organised exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), the Hayward Gallery (London), the Pinault Foundation (Venice), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha and the JNBY Foundation in Hangzhou.
  In 2013 Bonami wrote in La Stampa that the Venice City Council decision to remove the "Boy with Frog" sculpture by Charles Ray from the front of the Punta della dogana was "administrative cowardice" and that the lamppost which replaced it represented "a moment of cultural darkness".
caption: Charles Ray: Boy with Frog, Punta della dogana, Venice
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