Festa, Family & Food

Before I started Stevie's Artisans Urban Fok Art, I curated for and managed the gift shop at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. And before that, I spent 9 months in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar researching a project about folk art, cultural traditions, music and food.

Of course, I have tons of photos and lots to say about my project so I have begun doing presentations. My project, Festa, Family and Food, is a study of continuity, change and identity manifested in three saints' feasts celebrated both in Italy and in Italian-American communities in the US. The key themes of all three feasts are sacrifice and redemption, suffering, survival and communal rejoicing and celebration. The feasts honor three heroic and charasmatic figures (saints) who rescued their communities from destruction and ruin.

Women and their daughters make bread, crafted in myriad shapes and forms, as the principle element used to decorate the altars and banquet tables created to celebrate the feast of St.Joseph in Sicily and New Orleans. Papier-mache is the art form used to create ornately sculpted facades for the 85-foot towers - the giglio - carried on the shoulders of men through the streets of Nola and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The towers dance to music, all in honor of St Paulinus, who in the fifth century, rescued Nola's men from slavery at the hands of the Saracens. The Ceri is a race through the streets of Gubbio and Jessup, Pennsylvania of three Baroque wooden towers born on the shoulders of a nine-man team, to honor St Ubaldo who saved his town in the eleventh century from sack and ruin by the Vandals.

This past November 17, I gave a presentation - commentary and power point photo presentation at the Italian American Museum in New York's Little Italy. I'm going to be presenting at the Brooklyn Historical Society on March 29, 2012. That presentation will focus on the giglio celebration in Brooklyn with background information of the celebration in Nola, Italy. Danny Vecchiano, leader of the Vecchiano Festival Band and archivist of American tradtional giglio music will join me. I wrote an article about Danny - Born to Giglio - for "Voices" the New York Folklore Society magazine. I am hoping Danny - a superb trumpeter - plays giglio music for us.

Born to Giglio, a celebration of a Brooklyn Neighborhood, will be Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 7:00 PM at the Brooklyn Historical Society on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights.