After abandoning her studies in chemical nuclear engineering, Pivi shifted her ambitions and attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. As a student there she made her first artwork in 1994. The aspiring artist gathered ready-made objects to assemble, in her words, ‘a shirt, in which I put knives, with the blades sticking out like a porcupine, which I wore’.²  The pierced purple blouse, perhaps suggesting costume or armour, also hinted at a future practice of making art with the animal kingdom in mind. ‘The first animals that came into my art were the two ostriches on the boat…I never had any inclinations towards animals, and then all of a sudden they started popping up everywhere,’ Pivi states.³  Since 2003, an exotic cast has taken centre stage in her work. From ostriches, horses and sheep to donkeys, bears and zebras, wildlife invaded Pivi’s imagination. As ringleader she organizes impossible tableaux vivants starring magnificent creatures in unusual settings. For example, a leopard (safely) paces an encaged gallery around 3,000 fabricated cappuccino cups or an alligator meanders through 10,000 litres of whipped cream in the Florida Everglades.⁴  The final images, printed at various scales, emerge from intimately staged and meticulously detailed performances that are professionally filmed and photographed.

Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live in one place at a time. And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.⁵ 

Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928 into a poor working-class Carpatho-Rusyn family. The Warhola family had recently immigrated to Pittsburgh, then an industrial Goliath in steel production, and settled in the Ruska Dolina, a neighborhood of compatriots anchored by Saint John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church and adjacent to steel mills and the Monongahela River. His father, Andrej Warhola, a laborer, died in 1942, when Andy was thirteen years old, leaving his mother, Julia, to support the family with the assistance of his two older brothers. Julia herself was not only a hardworking, pious caregiver but also a self-taught artist who made flowers from old tin cans and crepe paper, which she sold door to door, and produced hundreds of drawings, mostly of cats and angels. Warhol, a sickly child, spent copious amounts of time with Julia, who nurtured his physical health and spiritual well-being as well as his artistic side. This would get them through the Great Depression and World War II, and in 1945 Warhol entered Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he would earn a degree in pictorial design. The young graduate made a swift relocation to New York City in 1949.