Part 3: Essay

Introduction

Part 1: Immigration and the Traditions from the Old Country

Part 2:Inside and Outside the Sphere of Ethnicity

All images and essays (c) the individual artists unless otherwise noted

Two Worlds / Due Mondi

By Joanne Mattera

I was born here, a citizen of the United States, but by nurture and osmosis my cultural identity is Italian. At 35 I went to Italy for the first time, where I found to my dismay that while I felt completely at home with the culture, language, and food—and, indeed, with people who looked like me—in the eyes of the Italians I was un’americana. Even my aunt Antonette, who was born in Ortona on the Abbruzzi coast and lived there for 25 years before joining her parents and six siblings here, was stunned to learn on a return visit some years later that she had become na'merigan—she who had always referred to her American-born family as "you people."

It turns out that culture and identity are not fixed. We navigate between here and there, us and them, now and then, Italian and American. 

The successive generations are more American than Italian. Sunday dinners, with several generations gathered around the table conversing in a mishcoolanz—a mescolanza, a mix—of regional dialect, Italian, and English, are increasingly infrequent, with Italian phasing out and everyone constantly checking their phones. As a group, we are thus at a remove once, twice, or more from the Old Country. Moreover, the Italy we knew from our grandparents—dialect, customs, even geography—may be a century old. A friend who learned Italian as a child from his elderly grandfather laughs now about the time when, as a young adult, he visited his family’s paese for the first time. As he began to speak, the paesani raised their eyebrows and drew their fingers together. “Ma chi è questo gualione che parla come un vecchione?” they asked each other. Who is this kid who talks like an old man?

To add a bit of confusion to our culturally and lingually bifurcated identity, the term “first-generation Italian Americans” may refer to the children of immigrants—the first born as American citizens—or it might refer to the immigrants themselves, who may or may not have adopted American culture. And, of course, there are many families in which one of the parents was born in Italy or some of the children were born here.

Language 

“Though I studied the Italian language, I am far from fluent,” says Jeanne Brasile. Like many of us, she heard dialect at home but was not encouraged to speak it. When she took an Italian class, she was surprised to learn that the “sharp-sounding” language she grew up hearing bore little resemblance to what she describes as the “mellifluous, even poetic” language she was learning in school. “I felt cheated,” she says, “as if somehow my home experience was not quite authentic and I wasn’t really Italian.”

She needn't have worried. Being authentically Italian means carrying within us the entirety of the Mediterranean gene pool, from the Alps to North Africa, Provence to the Levant—and all the languages encompassed therein. Much of Southern Italy speaks some version of Napulitan, considered by some linguists to be a language different from the Tuscan Italian on which contemporary standard Italian is based. The Roman-built Napoli was constructed over the Greek city of Neopolis, after all, and between the 15^th and 18^th centuries the region was under the rule of Spain, so the linguistic base for Napulitan was wide. Sicilian, also considered to be another language, contains elements of Arabic, Catalan, Norman, Greek, and more. The sounds of both these languages are familiar to us even if we do not know their meaning. Ironically, as Standard Italian asserts itself in Italy, the languages and dialects we grew up with are each a time capsule of time and place. In a behind-the-scenes video that accompanied the first season of the My Brilliant Friend series, for instance, director Saverio Costanzo noted that the young actors speaking the pre-War Napulitan dialog had to learn it phonetically, since most of them did not understand it.

In the Italian Diaspora, language has its own particular transformations. Diana Gonzalez Gandolfi, who grew up in Buenos Aires, recalls, "We spoke a little French and Italian but mostly Porteño, the language of Buenos Aires, which is a mixture of Spanish and Italian. Words like parlar, ciao . . .  buonyorno,were part of our daily vocabulary. I also grew up hearing Lunfardo, the jargon enshrined in Tango lyrics, laden with Italianisms, often also found in a mainstream colloquial dialect."

In terms of this project, language is an influence on a number of artists, notably Brasile’s word assemblages and much of John Avelluto’s oeuvre.

Food

Patricia Miranda sets the table here: “My Italian American connection is first through family and food, the kind with long Sunday dinners that start at 1:00 p.m. and last until bedtime, listening to the grownups tell stories around the table, cracking walnuts into piles of shells to be swept away later.” 

For Janet Filomeno, the highlight of a visit to her grandparents in the Bronx was going to the markets on Arthur Avenue with her grandfather. Anna Patalano remembers the sawdust on the floor of the butcher shops there. She also remembers “the ever-important extra kitchen in the basement.”

Gender
In her book The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America, Joanna Clapps Herman writes: “I was born in 1944 but raised in the fifteenth century.” She is referring in part to the self sufficiency and communal effort that enabled so many Italians on both sides of the Atlantic to survive, but also to the treatment of girls and women. There is not an Italian American woman born before this new millennium who has not experienced some version of the Middle Ages at home. Indeed, Paula Roland (neé Maenza) places the timeline farther back: "Growing up I didn't want anything to do with my family's . . . rules, which must have originated in the 12th century."

The Double Standard, my god! Girls were not allowed the same freedoms as the boys. And we were reminded in so many ways that we were not as important. “Why were women always in the other room?” asks Patti Russotti. In my memoir, Vita: Growing Up Italian, Coming Out, and Making a Life in Art, I write about receiving a boy’s bike for Christmas. “This way your brothers can inherit it when you grow out of it,” my parents explained—helpfully, they thought—to a crushed six-year-old. It was not the crossbar I found upsetting but the realization in that moment that I, the oldest child and only daughter, did not count.

The lucky ones among us were taken under the wing of a beloved nonna or nonno or zia or zio who loved us unconditionally. To be “the favorite” was to be treasured for the individuals we were, empowered in a way that the rest of Italian American culture, with its ingrained gender preference, could not do.

Folklore, Superstition, and Religion

In his story, Mark Wethli mentions “a hint of magic realism” as an element in his Neapolitan family. Those of us from the tribal South, home of il mal’occhio, la tarantella, and that uniquely Neapolitan method of divination, la smorfia, know this to be true. 

The Evil Eye—maloik in dialect; mal'occhio in standard Italian—is a curse. Less harmful than a vendetta, it is the look you give to someone when you wish them harm. Those horn amulets you see in gold, silver, or coral, shaped like a chili pepper, are worn to ward off the evil spirits. What I didn't know until I did some research is that the horn likely evolved from the sacred prehistoric Moon goddess. A multicultural protector, she is seen most clearly as the Egyptian goddess, Isis, depicted with a moon disc between her horns.

La tarantella, the dance everyone does at Italian weddings, has its origin in the Middle Ages when it was believed that dancing would purge the body of toxins from a spider bite. La smorfia employs dream images to pick lottery numbers. (Smorfia, emphasis on the first syllable, is derived from the name of Morpheus, the shape-shifting Greek god of sleep, who enters your dreams.)

Then, of course, there’s the Catholic religion. Whatever we may feel about it now, there is no doubt that it informed who we are. “Catholicism was a big part of my childhood," says Carolanna Parlato. "I attended Catholic schools through college. My first photo series was of my parent’s bedroom. Portraits of the Virgin Mary and Jesus as a young man and a small wooden crucifix hung over their bed.” 

 Paul Corio will tell you that he “embraced atheism at a very early age.” Nevertheless, he says, “I’m still a baptized, confirmed Roman Catholic. When I walked into those many Italian churches, from cavernous cathedrals to modest size spaces, I was instinctively aware that I belonged there, that I was part of the club.”

John Paul Morabito tells the story of immigrant grandparents who worshipped at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in then-Italian East Harlem, home of the Madonna of 115th Street. Art and religion are entwined. “The Italian Renaissance is a heritage that represents an orthodoxy from which I, the queer child of an Italian American immigrant family, have been ostracized.” Still, says the artist, “It is a bond I cannot and will not deny.” Morabito's Magnificat series, rendered in tapestry, depicts Madonnas inspired by art history.

Judaism woven into the culture

With the overwhelming number of churches in Italy—some 1600 just in Rome—it’s easy to forget that Catholicism is not alone in Italy. In a country close to 61 million some 40,000 Italians are Jewish, about .07 percent. Yet the larger culture has always reflected the efforts of Italy’s Jews. Italy, more than any other European country, offered a haven in Jewish communities, some dating back thousands of years. “The city of Rome itself sustained the one continuous site of Jewish settlement in Europe from antiquity to the present,” notes a catalog essay for a Sotheby’s auction. (The Hebrew word, Italkim, refers to the ancient communities that still exist, or more broadly, it may denote all Jews living in or with roots in Italy.)

With regard to art, “There is no Italian Renaissance without Judaism,” says Giulio Busi, co-curator of the exhibition, The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew, which inaugurated the National Museum of Italian Judaism in Ferrara in 2019.

Italian Jews in the 20^th Century include the writers Natalia Ginsburg, Carlo Levi, Else Morante, and Alberto Moravia; the actor and director Vittorio Gassman and director Gillo Pontecorvo; painter Amedeo Modigliani, and art dealer Leo Castelli. I’ll add as I learn more. 

Transcending
As artists we get to be part of a larger tribe that transcends our ethnicity, superstitions, even (sometimes) gender. Our relatives may have come from tiny villages with fixed ideas about how to live in their tight-knit society of family and friends, but as citizens of a larger, more diverse world, we have freedoms they could not have imagined (or if they had, might have condemned). Still, I like to think we carry within us the best of who they were. Certainly their will to survive against all odds has kept us persevering through the dips and crashes in our own art lives.

The 75 artists I have brought together are aligned, generally, in two groups: the ones whose art is manifestly connected to the work or traditions of their forebears, and those whose art does not have an apparent aesthetic association. The division is not absolute, but it does allow us to see the immigrant experience expressed visually in new generations and to understand through each artist's own story the Italianità that informs the splendid work in this project.

Part 1: Transitions from the Old Country

A bridge between this side and the other side
The legacy of the Mezzogiorno and beyond is diverse. We start with the artists whose contemporary expression has a connection to the past—to the language, the journey over, the generations, maintaining traditions, making things, making do.

Through a long career, B. Amore has researched and documented seven generations of her Italian family, maternal and paternal, a journey that culminated in 2000 in the brilliant installation of photographs, objects, and papers contained on tables and in vitrines exhibited at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York City. Lifeline, Filo della Vita: An Italian American Odyssey then traveled to museums in San Francisco and Boston, then Rome, and finally to Napoli, where her family’s journey began. Her ongoing interest in immigration continues in the experiences of Spanish-speaking migrants, whose journeys are not so different from our own.

The throughline between generations continues with Rosemarie Fiore, who lives in the Bronx home her grandparents once occupied—a building with a sub-basement in which her grandfather made wine during the Prohibition and a yard in which Nonna Assunta's magnolia tree still blooms. Fiore makes paintings from colored smoke, using tools she constructs herself and adorns with icons of her Sicilian culture: the painted donkey cart and the trinacria, the three-legged symbol of the island. 

Pasquale Natale’s paternal grandmother, Arcangela, offered sanctuary in his young life and provided inspiration for the art he would make as an adult. Rolling pasta dough with her, and placing the pasta to dry on clean white sheets laid over the beds, gave way to working in clay with such iconic forms as crosses (a positive expression of his HIV positivity), as well as vessels, chairs, and houses, all symbols of the haven of home. Pasta making with Arcangela remains a potent memory, says the man whose name celebrates two Catholic holidays. “I have often thought how wonderful it would be to create an installation with three old iron beds, the sheets, and the pasta.”

In her monumental wood carvings, Nancy Azara pays homage to the generations before and after her: Nunzia, her mother; Nana, her daughter, also an artist; and Maxi, Nana’s daughter—a bloodline that is intertwined with a force—we call it feminism now—that empowered an Italian American girl growing up in the Forties, who studied fashion and costume design in college, to pick up a mallet and chisel to make art on a grand scale.

John Avelluto, a generation younger, draws from the language, specifically our Southern Italian and Sicilian dialects, to make graphic paintings that depict the expressions we know so well: fingers brought to the lips in a grand show of satisfaction or brushing under the chin in a gesture of me ne frego, I don’t give a damn. These are outsize and familiar gestures. Avelluto’s images are a painter’s take on the drama of talking with our hands, something most of us were discouraged from doing lest we look too ethnic. 

Jeanne Brasile grew up hearing dialect but was not taught it as a child. This second language was for her a marker of Italianità, something she felt was missing in her own identity. She studied Italian on her own. More to the point for an artist, she found in words both the inspiration for and content in her work. "My sense of loss is likely the root of my artistic engagement with syntaxes, etymology, idioms, and slang," she says. 

Textile Traditions
There are many in this project, myself among them, who draw from the textile traditions of Italy. 

Let Jennifer Cecere describe it: “Until a generation ago, almost everyone practiced handwork. Women, especially, knitted, crocheted, and embroidered, and girls learned by example. All of us then had a connection to these traditions. Not so much anymore, but what does endure from my own experience, in addition to a love of needlework, is how intent my Italian grandparents were in weaving their traditions into the experience of their children and grandchildren in this new country.”

Cecere makes public art: large-scale renditions of lace, in materials as diverse as ripstop nylon and brushed aluminum, which she has laser cut, bringing together the modesty of handwork with the ambition of a sculptor. In their expansiveness they have much in common with Avelluto’s operatic hand talkers.

Patricia Miranda takes conventional lace, dyes it red, and pieces it into room-size installations—“shrouds,” she calls them—that pay homage to her grandmothers, Ermenegilda and Rebecca—the red suggestive of birth and blood, and the pricks of so many fingers by so many needles in the making of handwork. The nexus of religion and feminism is another area of interest. A woman of the 21st Century, Miranda nevertheless mines ancient materials, like the red dye cochineal, for her contemporary work.

Milisa Galazzi makes “lace” that originates as a drawing whose line she stitches by hand. After cutting away the negative space, Galazzi dips each handstitched sheet into a vat of warm wax and then installs it, with other similarly cut and waxed sheets, into a layered relief sculpture whose shadows are as integral to the work as the stitching itself. She likens the process to cranking out the pasta dough. I'm reminded of the weekly chore of laundry as it was done by our grandmothers: in a vat against a washboard and then hung on the line to dry, just before those electricity-powered white tubs arrived to make the chore (slightly) easier.

Sheila Pepe has used fiber to work through the issues of feminism, class, and ethnicity. “For years crocheting abstractions in space was my way to blend the Italian with the American,” she says. I love the way Pepe has resolved the cultural dichotomy. Even more I love that her room-size constructions do what so many Italian American girls were discouraged from doing: They take up space, asserting their place in both cultures—and in the art world as well.

Chris Costan, whose day job for some years was the as the color designer for a ready-to-wear fashion company, brings a number of material influences to her paintings and sculptures, among them the threads and notions of dressmaking. Her work is witty, and even when small has a large-scale presence. It's the antithesis of passive domesticity. Perhaps that's a family tradition. I love the story she tells about an aunt who, finding a thief in her home, chased him down the street with a broom—an urban Befana doing her own kind of housecleaning.

David Ambrose, from a family of tailors, pierces paper as his grandparents once pierced cloth. He does not embellish with thread but rather with paint, applying layers of marks and colors to achieve a surface that appears up close as richly embroidered and from a distance as suggestive of stained glass. Tailoring was needle-and-thread work that was acceptable for men, so Ambrose had role models, even if his work is now squarely in the camp of contemporary abstraction.

There are many influences in any artist’s life. For Cianne Fragione it was a Sicilian nonna who ran a dressmaking business out of the front room of her family’s home, a multilingual nonno who cut hair for a living and gathered the family to listen to broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, and her own near-death experience as a child that imbued her with a sense of the fragility and evanescence of life. Her long-running, mixed-media series, Heaven and Earth Dressed in Their Summer Wear, and the clothesline as a metaphor for time, offer a clear connection between the artist’s childhood and her present as a contemporary artist who traverses a creative path between Italy and here.

Drawing from her early Roman Catholic experience, specifically the glowing light of stained glass windows and the kinesthetic experience of fingering rosary beads, Grace DeGennaro makes geometric paintings composed of orderly configurations of dots, which she refers to as “beads.” The rectangular proportions of the paintings are aligned with the golden mean and thus of sacred geometry.

John Paul Morabito is "defiantly" a weaver. Let the artist tell you: "With sincere blasphemy, I employ the fallen glory of tapestry to reorient the holy image within queer cosmology. My materials—cotton, wool, synthetic gold, glass beads, and digital matter—are at once exquisite and contrived, further reflecting the irresolute tensions between queerness, ethnicity, and the sacred. New worlds are imagined where no resolutions can be made . . . Released from the tyranny of the present, my work looks toward a future-past horizon where one can exalt queer grace."

My own work references fabric. The paintings are first and foremost color fields, but the textile influence is apparent in their edge-to-edge construction and visually tactile surfaces. I am the great granddaughter of a weaver, the granddaughter of a tailor, and the niece of two women—one a dressmaker, the other an embroiderer and lacemaker—whose handwork left an undeniable imprint on my creative expression.

Neapolitan Baroque 

Who of us has not marveled at the exuberant drama of the Baroque? Lovely in small doses, with its arabesques, gilding, and jewels stuffed and layered on every centimeter of surface, it is nevertheless too over the top for our contemporary tastes—except by artists who temper that richness with 21st Century sensibilities and materials. Two artists in this project do just that. 

Long an artist, John Monti has come to see the connection between his Italian American identity and the emotion of Italian Baroque. One need only think of the gorgeous excess of Neapolitan churches to understand the aesthetic. Monti considers himself a “cultural Catholic,” drawing inspiration from ornamentation rather than religion or ritual. As he sees it, each intertwined vine or bouquet is a “psychodrama” reflecting the complexities of the sacred and the mundane, particularly as played out in our culture.

Charyl Weissbach’s experience is more material. Her grandfathers and uncles worked in Connecticut's metal foundries, forging steel and casting silver. The early memory of watching her paternal grandfather cast silver objects in his basement workshop has stayed with her. The pull of Baroque design was equally strong, as she recalls the intricate patterns crocheted by her Neapolitan grandmother. 

Sculpture
So much of the Italian DNA comes from people who made things—the carpenters and stonemasons, for instance, or the basement winemakers, or the women who turned out perfect tortellini every Sunday. I’m thinking, too, of the packages tied with rope or string that accompanied so many immigrants on their journey here in steerage. The work by contemporary artists is more sophisticated, but it seems connected by the filo della vita, that thread of life, and the skills our forebears developed to survive.

Don Porcaro stacks stone into anthropomorphic sculptures—some quirky and playful, others like sentinels with a looming, but most often reassuring, presence. Installations of multiple sculptures  can feel like family groupings. Cutting stone “felt right,” says Porcaro. “It fed a driving need to work with a material that speaks to tradition, and I knew that the tradition belonged to my culture.”

D. Dominick Lombardi learned to use the hammer, saw, and chisel as a boy at the elbow of his grandfather and father, both of whom were master carpenters. Lombardi has used those tools to go in a different direction, but the Old Country skills remain. Lombardi cites "high and low" aesthetic influences, from Picasso at one end to comic books at the other. 

Melissa Stern is equally fluent in sculpture and painting, assemblage and collage, often employing a variety of materials to construct her quirky figures. Her work might be, she says, the physical expression of the “collaging cultures” in her life. Her father is a Jewish Italian whose grandmother, Bella, came from Genoa with the language, food, and warmth of a doting Italian immigrant grandmother. Her mother’s side of the family were Russian Jews. Melissa learned Italian from her father, but listened to her parents speak Yiddish at home, learning to decipher—as many of us did with Italian—what was being said, particularly when it was not meant for our ears. “ I am a mélange of it all,” she says.

Next, we consider the hand-built ceramic forms of Elisa D’Arrigo, whose influences include the wooden forms used by her Sicilian grandfather, a shoemaker, and the beehive hairdos of the Bronx in the Fifties. There’s more, of course: “Everyone made things, repaired things, jerry-rigged things. That atmosphere had a powerful effect on my sensibility and is with me still.”

Lisa Zukowski’s sculptures are borne of secrets, the legacy of a grandfather who hid the past and was suspicious of the present. Her bundles and packages contain texts and objects that will never see the light of day. The overt materials are old clothes, some belonging to members of her family. Not all of Zukowski’s work is as mysterious, but much of it is made from discarded materials, a legacy of making do. In that regard it is aligned with Arte Povera, that mid-Century Italian movement which employed quotidian materials to powerful effect. 

Here’s a little of what I learned about Claudia DeMonte from her 2017 chapbook, Things I Have Done/Cose Che Ho Fatto: She was 5’11” at 14 years old. She danced with Rudolf Nureyev at a disco, walked on the Great Wall of China with Mohammed Ali, had lunch with Louise Nevelson. She sailed on the Ganges, made offerings to the orisha Yemanja on New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janiero, and worked as a model. This is not your average Italian American girl from Astoria, Queens. As an artist, DeMonte brings a global perspective to her work. She curated an exhibition, Women of the World, that traveled to 24 venues around the world. Yet for all that, it is the thread of Italian culture that runs through her work. She holds dual citizenship with Italy.

Laura Moriarty’s prints suggest cross-sections of geologic formations. Her chunky sculptures, constructed from wax, might be miniature excavations from a richly chromatic land. While Moriarty’s interest in geology is clearly evident, she will tell you that “kitchen culture,” with its process and improvisation, is an inspiration as well. Like Milisa Galazzi and others of us, she has memories of working the pasta machine, cranking out flat ribbons of dough to be cut into noodles or stuffed with ricotta.

The Natural World
The fecund land here offered food, solace, and pleasure. Who recalls seeing the old women gathering chiggodia—that's cicoria in standard Italian, dandelion greens—from fields near their home? This was cucina povera, poor people’s food, nutritious and free. Gardens and grape vines, or at least tomatoes, were cultivated in even the tiniest plots. And, of course, many Italians settled along the water, whose bays and beaches reminded them of home and often provided a meal.

Sandra DeSando recalls foraging regularly with her parents near their home in rural New Jersey and returning with a bounty of edibles. They also planted a vegetable garden along with the requisite and carefully cared-for fig tree. On her own, DeSando has spent endless hours in the woods, inspired by the trees which have become muse and object.

Margaret Lanzetta spent girlhood hours in her grandfather's garden, drawing his plants and flowers and learning from him the dialect names for each. Lanzetta maintains a garden at her studio in Long Island City—with some perennials transplanted from her grandfather's own garden—finding in it inspiration for her paintings, in which she combines plant forms and the geometric patterns of ornament from around the world.

Although she didn’t grow up gardening, save for the tomato plants she watched over as a child, Debra Claffey has nevertheless connected strongly with horticulture in her adult life. One might attribute the connection to her Sicilian genes, which are so closely aligned with the cycles of planting, cultivating, and harvesting. A career in garden care—she founded her own New Hampshire company—is intertwined with a studio practice that focuses on plant forms. 

Patti Russotti scans and photographs flowers and botanical forms, the world of life and beauty in her yard. She is taken with the society of plant life—“the interconnectedness of trees, fungi, and lichen”—often combining her photographs with elements from that other interconnected society: the women in her family from whom she learned handwork as a girl.

After a long career on the technical side of digital photography, Brian Alterio returned to the view through the lens, as he had in art school. Described in one review as “a digital scientist with a poetic soul,” Alterio photographs nature in all its aspects, from the human form to landscape to plant life, the latter represented in this project by a selection of vividly illuminated black and white images.

Thomas Sarrantonio makes paintings inspired by land and sea, "meditations on nature and self," he calls them. On a visit to the Abruzzi hills where his father's family is from, he found the landscape not unlike the one in which he now lives, near the Shawangunk mountains of Ulster County north of New York City. Ultimately it is not a specific place he is painting but a striving for a sense of the timeless.

Paula Roland (née Maenza) is a painter and printmaker who draws from earth and spirit, science and art. Her maternal grandfather was an innovative farmer whose lush 45-acre farm was the pride of Birmingham, Alabama. She grew up in neighboring Mississippi with the Gulf Coast at her door. Her often plant-based imagery is expressed in paintings and painterly encaustic monotypes (the latter created by placing paper on a hot surface where wax paint has been melted and manipulated). She credits her mother with teaching her to see "the beauty in small things and in nature–wabi sabi Italian-style." She also acknowledges the Sicilian Baroque tendencies that sometimes show up in her work.

The maternal side of Tracy Spadafora’s family is from the cool Alpine north while her paternal side is from the hot Mezzogiorno. In Italy this would have been an improbable family union, but in the melting pot of the United States it is not so unusual. Both sides of the family were gardeners, which not only put food on the table but brought color and beauty into their homes. “My own love of gardening and appreciation for the natural environment is one thing from my Italian heritage that has influenced my artwork directly,” says Spadafora, who addresses what she describes as “a complex and shifting relationship between humans, our biological roots, and the shaping of our natural environment.”  

The Church as Institution
And finally there is the institution of the Catholic church. While many of us have admired the architectural majesty of the structures and perhaps the rituals practiced within them, maybe even the religion itself (although many of us have left that part behind), there is the seamy underside of corruption and abuse.

Joe Cultrera is a filmmaker who has focused on many aspects of community life, but in his film, Hand of God, he tells the story of his brother’s abuse at the hands of one Father Birmingham. His work ends Part 1 on a somber note, but it is nevertheless one of triumph—of secrets revealed, of abuses acknowledged, of a family brought together, and psyches healed.  

Part 2: Beyond the Sphere of Ethnicity

In this section of the essay we look at the work of artists who are Italian American but whose influences and ideas have come from outside the immigrant culture. Here I’m connecting dots. My intent is not to lock artists into categories, but to provide a way to consider their work. I must admit, however, that as I write about each artist’s work, I am looking at it with Italian American (and feminist) eyes. Pace, in advance if I have come to the wrong conclusions. (And, yes, there are some blue abstract paintings.)

Representation
We are moved, of course, by the art, architecture, history, and landscape of Italy. Traveling there is an opportunity to experience in person what we had seen only in books. 

Many of the artists in this project speak of their “art pilgrimages.” Indeed, who among us has not traipsed from church to chapel or spent long days in museums while ordinary tourists were having leisurely lunches in the sun?  Thomas Micchelli draws from art on view, whether sketching from Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel or sculpting small-scale figures in wax that feel powwerfully monumental.

Despite his Scottish surname, Timothy McDowell has had a lifetime of extended periods in Italy among the members of his mother’s family, the Macellari. His history is not one of Southern Italian emigration but of educated Northerners remaining on their ancestral land. His is a lineage of accomplished musicians, designers, architects, publishers, and painters. McDowell’s images, while often drawing from art history, are of our time, evoking mystery and magic, and sometimes the outrage of a contemporary world collapsing into its own destruction.

Victor Pesce, the only artist in this group who is no longer living, was from a Southern Italian family. Although there were mural painters on his mother’s side, his father, a demanding Southern Italian (many of us are familiar with the type) pushed him into the family plumbing business. He acquiesced, but art prevailed. His intimate still lifes animate and elevate the quotidian.

Grace Roselli embraces her ethnicity while pushing beyond it—or should I say vrooms past it on her Ducati. An accomplished painter and photographer, she is also a serious rider. Here, however, we focus on her photography, as she has undertaken a major initiative, The Pandora’s BoxX Project, for which she has been photographing a multigenerational, multiethnic group of women in the fine arts. Her plan is to photograph 360 women, one for each degree in a circle. For Italianità we focused on the Italian American women in the project. Who better to represent the project here than the photographer herself?

Geometric Abstraction
Given the patterning in Renaissance painting, the geometry-based compositions of painters like Piero Della Francesca, and of course the design of virtually all the churches, we know that geometry was an essential element in Italian art and architecture. Geometric abstraction is a 20th Century movement that has persisted into the 21st. What does one have to do with the other? Sometimes everything, sometimes nothing.

Formerly a realist painter of exquisitely serene interiors, Mark Wethli turned his attention to geometric abstraction 20 years ago. It was a big change, but he carried with him the underlying compositional elements of shape, balance, and harmony. “I try to paint geometry the way that Morandi painted bottles—using something as humble and familiar as the rectangle,” he has written. This aesthetic, the influence of the reserved Swiss/English side of his family, is quite different from the warm and raucous Southern Italian side.

Lloyd Martin typically makes large-scale works that consist of horizontal color bands punctuated by vertical demarcations. It’s an architectural sensibility rife with rhythm, even musicality. There’s nothing necessarily “Italian” about the work (well, maybe the intensity of the color) but it was the force of a strong-willed grandmother and generous artist uncle who guided Martin to his career choice. They might not have used the word mentor to describe what they were for him, but that’s what they were.

Paul Corio will tell you that his trips to Italy have always been organized around the paintings he wanted to see. It’s a sentiment that art aficionados of any ethnicity share. What makes the experience different for Corio is the context of a Catholic boyhood. As he notes in his story, seeing the art in churches “positions them within the framework of a culture that I am intimately connected to.” Influences on his meticulous abstractions are as diverse as a Roman mosaic floor pattern or the music he performs as a jazz drummer.

Medieval architecture figures into Marina Cappelletto's work. The stone and marble buildings she knew as a child in Milan were solid, so different from the American suburban home she moved to in the 1960s, with its wall-to-wall carpeting and hollow core doors. Her reductive architectural paintings provide what she calls "a centering sense of history."

From a family of stone carvers—her great grandfather worked on Mount Rushmore—and strivers, many of whom developed careers in creative industries, Carleen Zimbalatti combines elements of craft and fine art in her work. (She trained in metalsmithing and created jewelry for many years, then culminated her studies with a master’s degree in painting.) Line is her means of growing geometric shape—grids or networks that offer a sense of deep space, or chromatic squares with a symmetry that invites contemplative viewing. 

From a family she describes as “cento per cento” Italian and Italian American, Roberta Tucci tells a story of geography. Her mother’s family is from Trentino in the North, her father’s family from Calabria in the South. The poles for her own parents were reversed: Dad’s family settled uptown in the Bronx, mom’s in Brooklyn (a subway romance ensued). Tucci traveled to Italy, connecting with “the family that stayed behind,” immersing herself in the culture and absorbing, she says, “the essence of my living ancestry.” Layers of Italian history, the urban landscape here, travel, and weather translate into the personal geometry expressed in her paintings.

Aldo Longo grew up in an Italian community in New Haven, Connecticut. The Navy sent him to Japan where a new and different world opened to him. Eventually settling in Hawaii, between those two worlds, you might say, he found himself seeking to integrate the two cultures. Among many bodies of work he has produced over the years, Longo's long-running series of mandalas seems to be a bridge, reflecting, he says, the rose windows of the churches he attended as a youth, and the Japanese temples that affected him so deeply as an adult. 

Karen Schifano is the granddaughter of immigrants. The daughter of artists, she continues the tradition as a painter who has exhibited internationally. Of her work she says, “Shape is the major motivation behind my impulse to paint. . . The shapes that catch my eye are usually openings: mouths, theater stages, circus arenas. These openings are bounded by edges, like lips or curtains, that reveal and partially conceal, the void at the center."

Applying color to strips of translucent Mylar and hanging them in a formal arrangement away from the wall, Mary Schiliro makes paintings that exist dimensionally in space. In doing so, she also expands the way the light in her work is perceived, which is to say not just reflecting from a flat surface but permeating it. Perspective may intensify the color as the work recedes; works hung parallel to the wall, but at a slight distance, create shadows that are integral to the perception of the work. Among many elements in Italian culture, Schiliro says that the translucent color of stained-glass windows has inspired her work.

After years of working as a museum curator, Michael A. Giaquinto has returned full time to the easel. Applying cubist principals to his work, he creates paintings and mixed-media constructions that ask us to consider his pictorial space. A new series of mixed media on panel is playful, suggesting maps or space charts. 

Physical Gesture

There is no idea that is not expressed through abstraction. The artists I have grouped here are physical in their approach to painting as they employ pouring and vigorous brushwork or markmaking.

Janet Filomeno’s big expressionist abstractions are a response to many environmental influences, particularly water. Often working with a stretched canvas on the floor, she pours paint onto the surface, directing its movement by shifting or tilting the canvas, thereby suggesting river currents or ocean tides. Materials such as ink or shellac add the element of fluid interaction. Other elements of interaction: her own “repository of collected personal histories” and her “inner drama in response to the world around me.”

Carolanna Parlato’s poured paintings are buoyant in color and biomorphic in composition. A marvel of fluidity and control, they are built up layer upon layer of acrylic paint applied and then directed into contours and rivulets. There’s nothing particularly Italian or Italian American about them. But allow me to read something into the work without ascribing it specifically to Parlato or her family: When light hits the surface of her paintings just so, you see each one’s history in relief—the ridges, drips, and outlined edges of hidden color. Isn’t that just like our culture? Put on your best face and keep the rest hidden.

Serena Bocchino expresses sound through color and gesture in a physical process that involves pouring enamel paint in vigorous splashes and lyrical drips, layer upon layer. As with musical movements, each passage—in this case, layer—informs the next. The work shown in this Italianità project includes a new element: transparent panels—Bocchino calls them “veils”—hung in the center of a gallery to create a dimensional dialog with the wall-hung paintings. The fabric is reference to her grandmother’s textile work.

Josette Urso makes what she calls “intuitive expressions of places and experiences observed and reimagined." She creates compositional collisions of color, texture, and shape. Once you know that her first-generation Sicilian parents lived in the multicultural Ybor City section of Tampa, with, as Urso describes it, “an environment of hand-rolled cigars, café con leche, and Italian opera,” it’s impossible to not connect the dots to her work. 

As an artist who is fully bilingual in Italian and English, Anna Patalano has chosen gesture in paint to say in her work what she cannot express in any other language or medium. “The material itself is seductive in a primal way,” she says. “There is an elegance, rawness, and directness to the material that allows a certain freedom for me. How an image emerges from that is a mystery.”

Organic Concerns
All of the artists in this group share an interest in the organic—which includes plant life, the environment, and the incremental development of an image or work.

Spending time in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery as a child, Denise Sfraga came to understand—remarkably, for a young person—the cycle of life and death, or as she describes it, “the balance between quiet moments for the dead and vibrant flowers adorning those graves.” The life cycle holds her interest as a painter and a gardener. Her paintings, some in otherworldly hues, burst with germination and growth and the passage back to the earth.

Sean Capone references the same cyclical transcience, but on a microscopic scale. His Molecular Clock is a digital fantasy of, as Capone describes it, “microbiological flora and virus-like organisms churning in a cyclical swirl of phantasmagoric fission.” It is no coincidence that the work emerged at the same time as Covid, or more specifically, the appearance of the microscopic images of the virus. We humans have always been locked in a tango with microbes and viruses. Capone depicts it as startlingly beautiful.

The disappearance of the world’s coral reefs inspired Sandi Miot to understand the importance of what we were losing and acknowledge the loss with an installation of brilliantly hued relief sculptures. Miot created The Coral Project, which consists of mixed-media sculptures drawn from research and her own imagination, with the intent of inspiring others to make some small effort to halt the destruction of our environment.

Landscape—more specifically, the mutable place where land and water meet—is what inspires Len Bellinger's organic abstractions. Perhaps this is the legacy of the maternal side of his family, whjch came from Positano on the Amalfi Coast. Bellinger is the son of a first-generation Italian American mother who “never let a moment pass to let you know she was Italian to the core” and a father who claims a family connection to the Hatfields of West Virginia, of the famously feuding Hatfields and McCoys. 

With a visual language suggestive of shifting tectonics and geological materials like sand, mica, and marble dust mixed into her paint, Mary Bucci McCoy makes paintings that reference the human body and its relationship to the landscape. The paintings are human size, a little bit larger than your own visage, which brings you quite literally face to face with them. The intimacy is such that you and the earth and the painting merge in the moment.

Structure
For this group of artists, construction and/or deconstruction are the operative elements.

With his relief sculptures suggestive of the urban landscape, Robert Maloney shows himself to be part architect, part painter, part printmaker. He’s also a master of ambiguity. Does his work show a structure being erected or torn down? In a recent project, the restoration of the Haffenreffer Chimney in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, he was instrumental in rebuilding a brewery chimney with his signature scaffold-like construction, but his relief work offers no such clear-cut answer.

Vincent Pidone will tell you, “There’s no one description of my work, other than to say that’s it’s largely experimental.” The optical drawings he shows in this project feature a moiré pattern that develops as lines cross at oblique angles. Some of the works are executed by hand, others by a mechanical pen plotter.

Paul Rinaldi’s grandparents were from different parts of Italy: his grandmother, who was a seamstress, from the North, and his grandfather, who repaired violins, from the South--Naples. Mixed geographical relationships like these could only have happened once the immigrants arrived on these shores. Mirroring that kind of union, Rinaldi's paintings bring together two disparate elements: the sumptuousness of material, encaustic, with the rigor of the grid. One look at the work tells you that multiple layers are involved in the construction of the image. In some instances, added layers obscure what’s underneath—barely, if Rinaldi uses translucent paint—or they interact in a pas de deux of the visible and the concealed.

After almost two decades as the owner of a bookstore, Hugo Rizzoli now makes art with a visual, if non-objective, narrative. A builder of small chromatic sculptures and collages in a pared-down geometric style, he typically employs cast-off and reclaimed materials, mostly wood but also antique papers and fabrics. I do see a connection between his previous vocation and this. The intimacy of reading translates to the small scale of his work, which engages the viewer in a similar kind of rapport.

Wayne Montecalvo, whose grandfather owned a pizzeria across the street from Rahway State Prison in New Jersey, is full of family anecdotes. Storytelling, albeit with a sometimes enigmatic narrative, is also present in his work. Montecalvo constructs a two-dimensional image from multiple layers. His goal, which he achieves admirably through distortion and intervention with wax, ink, and paint, is “to reinvent rather than reproduce” an image. As he describes it, “I start with something expected, and end up with something mysterious.” Indeed. 

The Embrace of the Italian Diaspora

While Italianità features some splendid Italian American talent, I would be remiss if this project did not also reflect the larger Italian Diaspora. In this section I note those artists whose experience is different, for the most part, from the familiar grandparents-came-over-on-the-boat narrative. Their stories expand and deepen what we understand of emigration and immigration.

Lucio Pozzi arrived as a 20-something painter for a summer of study at Harvard. Then he moved to New York City and became a U.S. citizen. Pozzi toggles between studios in both countries; here it is Hudson, New York, north of Manhattan, and there, Valeggio, near Milan. One can’t help but think of him as an “American Italian.” A critic and essayist as well as a painter, he writes fluently about art in both languages. And, I would note, like many native-born Italians, his view of Italy is far less romantic than what the rest of us see.

Lorenza Sannai is another “American Italian.” Born in Sardinia, she grew up at a linguistic and geographic remove from the mainland. Now she travels between here and Northern Italy, returning occasionally to her island roots. She shows and curates both here and throughout Europe. In her practice she brings together stitching and contemporary abstraction, a suturing of genre and culture.

Assunta Sera arrived as an eight-year-old with her mother and sister, all survivors of the WWII bombing of their town. Sera grew up in Detroit, becoming fully Americanized in the unique way that Italian-Italian Americans do, which is to say with a psychic foot in each country. The Fragments series that represents her in this project was inspired by the pieces of shrapnel that pierced her arm as a child.

After an earthquake reduced Avellino to rubble in 1980, Gianluca Bianchino relocated to New Jersey with his parents and older sibling. Then they went back to Italy and returned again to the U.S. The saving grace of what Bianchino calls a "rutted journey" were the flights that allowed him to see an aerial landscape without borders and imagine what could be possible, despite fault lines and political boundaries.

Angelica Bergamini is deeply rooted in Etruscan culture yet very much a citizen of her adopted  New York City. From a family of Tuscan shipmasters, she draws imagery from the ocean that unites both places she calls home. On a more symbolic level, “the immense blue,” as she describes it, is a place with no borders. The ships she places into her ultramarine fields symbolize life’s passage. Roots, too, figure into her iconography, the source of growth and life. 

Dario Mohr is a Caribbean Italian American whose identity and early cultural influences are Black, yet on his father’s side he shares an immigration story that is familiar to so many of us. As an artist he is fully aware of the richness of Italian art history and now seeks to integrate elements of Italian culture into his mixed-media installations, which embrace black culture, and into his life.

Antonietta Grassi shares a parallel narrative with so many of us—the emigration of her parents from Italy to North America, learning to sew at the hands of the women in her family, and making art that reflects her textile heritage—but there is a difference of geographic parallel and cultural complexity. She is an Italian Canadian, living and working in Montreal (juggling not only Italian and English growing up but French as well).

Diana González Gandolfi's early experiences as a foreigner in many countries and then an immigrant to the United States left her feeling caught between worlds. "Moving with my family from Buenos Aires, where I was born, to Colombia, Indonesia, and New York, I absorbed diverse cultural environments without feeling deeply rooted in any one of them," says the artist. The thread of Italianità is one constant, beginning with her paternal great grandfather, who fought side by side with Garibaldi in Italy's War of Independence, to the Italian traditions her family maintained in Buenos Aires. 

While most Italians made the westward journey to North or South America, Michelangelo Russo headed east, first to Berlin, where he set up a studio during the burgeoning art scene of the early Nineties, and then to Australia, whose light and open expanses beckoned. He settled in Melbourne, establishing himself not only as an exhibiting artist but as a musician whose discography is as long as his exhibition resume. "Regardless of the city I am working in and the series I am working on," he says, "I always feel connected, inspired and motivated by my Italianità."

Luci Callipari-Marcuzzo was born in Australia. Her is familiar: “Both my grandfathers took a leap of faith in the early 1950s to move their immediate families to a place halfway across the globe to start afresh in a foreign land, without any knowledge of the English language." Through manual labor they forged a home in North-West Victoria. Yet it is the women of Callipari-Marcuzzo’s family who inspired her work. Their handwork skills, passed down to her, are at the heart of her performances and artwork.

Marthe Keller’s story is one of reverse immigration. Her family moved to Rome when she was 12, and she spent her adolescence there. Although she returned to the States for college, her identity as an artist was formed in Italy. She returns every year for extended periods of studio time. While she is neither Italian nor Italian American, she is clearly an "American Italian."

Although I place these artists within the breadth of the Italian Diaspora, their work is part of the visual narrative of this project. You will see González Gandolfi's map-referenced works, Angelica Bergamini's poetic boats, the textile-influenced paintings of Grassi and Sannai, and Callipari-Marcuzzo's performative works in Part One, while Mohr’s installations, the paintings of Pozzi, Sera, and Keller, and the sculptural constructions of Bianchino and Russo are in Part Two.

Recording Our Own Stories
While I have loved every image posted here, the stories are for me the heart and soul of this project. There are the expected commonalities—like the backyard tomatoes, the everybody-around-the-table Sunday dinners, and the tradition of the women teaching the girls to sew— but there are also particular commonalities. I hope you will discover your own as you read.

For me it was learning that Carolanna Parlato’s maternal grandfather, Carlo, left Ischia, that island so far out in the Bay of Naples that it is not visible from shore, and stowed away on a ship to the United States, just as my paternal grandfather, Antonio, did. Fourteen-year-old Antonio walked down the mountain from Serrara Fontana to catch the ferry in Ischia Porto that took him to the port of Naples where, somehow, he slipped onto a freighter and made his way here by himself. Those two homeboys—paesani—strangers to each other, ended up in New York City and Boston respectively. Each would have, among their many American-born grandchildren, a granddaughter who was a painter. Those painters would find themselves in the same art orbit in New York City, sometimes exhibiting together, getting to know each other as colleagues and friends.

I would encourage the participating artists—and indeed, anyone reading—to seek out and record your stories. Ancestry tests have their place, but it’s the lived history, recounted and probably embellished over multiple tellings, that is embedded within our genome. Do it now while the generations before you are still here, otherwise, as Sandi Miot notes, the questions you have will remain forever unanswered.

Many artists will respond with, “But I’m not a writer.” The stories you read here will refute that. My editing was light, mainly for style. The words are the artists’ own. From my own experience, I can tell you that once I opened the floodgates of memory, I could not stop writing.

Our advantage as artists is that we don’t have to tell a story with words if they are a barrier to the narrative. We can come up with numerous ways to record our history and make it visually interesting. If it’s a personal story, excerpts from your diaries and journals can become the core of the narrative. If it’s a larger family project, photo albums are a wealth of visual history that can be edited, scanned and compiled into print-on-demand books. There are drawings, or a combination of drawings and photos that can go into sketchbooks; scan them if you want to make more than one copy.

While not everyone has the experience or means to create a film as Joe Cultrera did, you can shoot videos on your phone in cinema verité style, or with a combination of photos and talking heads, a la Ken Burns. Record a Sunday dinner before too much wine is consumed—or maybe after, when the secrets slip out. Create a Facebook page. A blog. A website. A newsletter that goes out to the extended family with a request for their stories, which you compile. Do it before the pictures fade, before the memories recede, before the history is interred. Do it before the pandemic ends and we resume our non-stop lives.

Thank you to all the artists who have participated in this project. You have made my life richer.