Last week, Calandra’s Dr. Joseph Sciorra delivered a talk at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò on the topic of labor activist Pietro “Pete” Panto. Sciorra spearheaded a successful effort last year to have Panto’s headstone made and installed in St. John’s Cemetery on Long Island, where the longshoreman’s remains are buried.
Click here to watch the entire presentation at Casa Italiana.
In April 2025 the Calandra Institute will mount an exhibit on the artistry of World War II Italian POWs in the United States. The exhibit will feature handcrafted objects, paintings, photographs, letters, newspapers, and other artifacts documenting creativity under captivity. During the war more than 51,000 Italian military personnel were held throughout the country, from Massachusetts to Hawaii. The curators, Laura E. Ruberto (Berkeley City College) and Joseph Sciorra (Calandra Institute), are looking for items, especially crafts and artwork, for possible inclusion in the exhibit. While the exhibit will focus on the United States, objects from other parts of the world concerning Italian POWs are also of interest. Such artwork may have been made while in a POW camp or after the war as a reflection of wartime captivity and experience. The exhibit is co-sponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College, CUNY), the Australian Research Council, and the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships.
Please contact both Dr. Ruberto (lruberto@peralta.edu) and Dr. Sciorra (joseph.sciorra@qc.cuny.edu) directly with any leads, examples of artifacts, or questions.
The Vernacular Architecture Forum has awarded Joseph Sciorra its 2024 Catherine W. Bishir Prize for his article “‘The Strange Artistic Genius of This People’: The Ephemeral Art and Impermanent Architecture of Italian Immigrant Catholic Feste,” published in the Fall/Spring 2023 issue of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.
Sciorra looks at late nineteenth and early twentieth-century mobile shrines and street chapels—Baroque confections as tall as sixty feet or as wide as buildings, shaped like altars, towers, or even land-faring boats. Italian American craftsmen created these for their immigrant community feste, or—as Sciorra calls them—“cultural-religious extravaganzas.” He shows the reader these works through the eyes of their intended audiences, as well as those of outsiders—photographers, journalists, visual artists—whose potential biases he carefully considers. Sciorra examines, “how these transient objects of devotion … enacted and proclaimed a diasporic community of believers that challenged hegemonic notions of artistry, religion, the built environment, and the public sphere.” He further expands his gaze to contextualize his hand-crafted sources of study as, in his words, “part of the Progressive era’s xenophobic climate and, in particular, the picturesque gaze that racialized and othered Italian immigrants.”
An online copy of the article is accessible here.
Curated by Joanne Mattera and Joseph Sciorra
Exhibition opening takes place on Wednesday, September 27, 2023, at 6pm.
The work of the twenty-one artists featured in this exhibit offers a richness of form, medium, subject matter, color, and style that is a delight and a revelation to behold. Connections to a discernable Italian art tradition—or for that matter to Italian American aesthetic practices more specifically—vary across the exhibition, ranging from the explicit to the suggestive to the nonexistent.
After the opening on September 27, the exhibition will be accessible during business hours, 9:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday, and is located in the Galleria of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute.
Today’s New York Times features an article by James Barron that details Calandra’s Dr. Joseph Sciorra’s tireless campaign to recognize the life of dockworker Pete Panto by erecting a gravestone for the murdered labor activist buried in the St. Charles Cemetery on Long Island. Read the article here. And please consider attending the commemoration of Panto that will take place at the gravesite on Tuesday, September 26, 2023, at 2:30pm. Click here for the address and further details.
On Saturday, April 23, Dr. Sciorra made a presentation at the IAMLA in connection with the museum’s show “Woven Lives: Exploring Women’s Needlework from the Italian Diaspora.” The talk incorporated some material from his 2014 book (with co-editor Edvige Giunta, published by University Press of Mississippi) Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora. To watch an earlier presentation (from the Institute’s cable TV show Italics) on this topic by Dr. Sciorra, click here.
