Passages: Hand to Hand is the guiding theme of the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art’s program in 2026, following Building Communities in 2025 and Tuscany at the Center in 2024.
The title establishes a conceptual framework and proposes a way of understanding the institution as a space of relationship, transmission, and transformation: a place where people can gather, share, and create cultures together. The theme is inspired by La grande mano by Adelaide Cioni, displayed at the entrance to the Center. The gesture that welcomes visitors as they enter the Museum is at once a greeting and an invitation, as well as a celebration of the history of textile manufacturing that shaped Prato’s economy and society and made possible, through the Founding Members, the birth of the institution. In a historical phase dominated by digital immateriality, the hand also recalls the importance of touch and contact, bringing the sensory dimension of experience back to the center.
“Hand to hand” is an expression that brings together the concreteness of exchanges and the circulation of ideas: the reuse of objects and materials that once belonged to others, donations and gifts, the passing on of knowledge between generations and across fields of expertise, from research to manufacturing.
The 2026 program translates this vision into a schedule that looks to Tuscany and Prato as laboratories of contemporary cultures, enriched by continuous crossings into complex territories in constant transformation. From this perspective, the Pecci Center opens itself to the 115 nationalities present in the city and prepares to welcome twenty young artists and curators who, thanks to the European Social Fund call of the Tuscany Region, will give rise in 2026 to a widespread celebration of creativity in Prato and in the project’s other regional venues.
The theme also involves the very architecture of the Pecci Center, conceived as an experience of continuous passages among exhibitions, galleries, spaces, and activities, in an uninterrupted movement that is constantly expanding. In 2026, the library and the outdoor theater will reopen, further strengthening the Center as a public space for meeting and sharing.
The year also marks the beginning of the path leading up to the celebrations of the Pecci Center’s fortieth anniversary, keeping alive its openness toward the city of Prato, which is invited from now on to share in the preparation of the festivities and to identify, together with the Center, the many routes and passages that lead, from the most diverse directions, to Viale della Repubblica.
Exhibitions, the collection, and the archive form the backbone of the Pecci Center’s activities. The exhibition program opens at the end of May with the celebration of the donation by Carlo Palli, who has decided to leave to the Pecci Center and the city of Prato an important core of his collection. Routes. Art of Rupture from the Carlo Palli Donation proposes a journey through personalities and practices that marked moments of discontinuity in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Verita Monselles. Carnal is the first exhibition in over twenty years dedicated to a photographer whose work moved between fashion, theater, and art from the 1970s to the 1990s, offering an erotic and carnal gaze on the body.