Three women artists with roots in Basilicata gather to discuss their work and shared origins. Penny Arcade (born Susana Ventura into a family hailing from Picerno) is a primal force in the New York City performance art scene. Her work explores themes including women’s sexuality and working-class and immigrant identity. Joanna Clapps Herman is a writer who has portrayed the “two worlds” she inhabited while growing up in Waterbury, Connecticut, as the child of Italian American immigrants from Avigliano and Tolve, in works including The Anarchist Bastard. Journalist Helene Stapinski’s family origins in Bernalda formed the basis of her memoir Murder in Matera, in which she investigates the life of her great-great-grandmother, who fled to the United States after a murder.
In conjunction with the exhibition BASILICATË: A Celebration of Lucanian Culture in the World
The death of Christopher Sorrentino’s mother in 2017 marked the end of a journey that had begun eighty years earlier in the South Bronx. Victoria Ortiz’s life took her to New York City’s vibrant downtown art scene—where she met her husband, the writer Gilbert Sorrentino—to the sedate Stanford campus, and finally to south Brooklyn. Her son watched helplessly as she grew more isolated, distancing herself from everyone and everything she loved. Sorrentino excavates his own memories and family folklore in an effort to peel back the ways in which Victoria seemed trapped between conflicting identities: the Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black, and the white woman she had decided to become. Meanwhile Christopher experiences his own transformation, emerging from under his father’s shadow and his mother’s thumb to establish his identity as a writer.
In partnership with Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College
“Christopher Sorrentino’s memoir is an incredibly moving masterpiece. … I had to reach back to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory to find another memoir as powerful and poignant as this one and to find one that as profoundly explores the art of memory.”— David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
Discussion led by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Queens College, and Joseph Salvatore, The New School. Register to attend this event on Zoom here: https://centropr.nationbuilder.com/cafecito_con_christopher_sorrentino.
REGISTER in advance to attend in person by calling 212-642-2094. Covid protocols will be strictly enforced.
