John D. Calandra Italian American Institute: Academic & Cultural Programs

Monday, September 8, 2003: The Black Madonna of East 13th Street: Italian American Religious Devotion in the East Village,” presentation and cocktails at the restaurant Il Covo dell'Est

Friday, October 24, 2003: Visual artist Elisa D’Arrigio, a 2003 Artists' Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation For the Arts (NYFA), will present a slide talk on her drawings and sculptures.

“Elisa D’Arrigo makes bounteous constructions with cloth, paint and thread, composed of small unites linked in honeycombed arrangements that suggest celluar growth…. Aside from suggesting nature’s exuberant hand, the repetition of the units into an assembled mass is also intended, the artist says, to invoke the idea of votive shrines. And it works: the earthy connects with the spiritual in these intense pieces.”

– The New York Times

This presentation is co-sponsored by Artists & Audiences Exchange, a public program of NYFA.

Special Guest Lecturer
Tuesday, May 4, 2004: Food Consumption, Topographies of Taste, and Ethnic Identity in Italian Harlem, 1920-1940
Simone Cinotto, University of Turin

Utilizing the largest "Little Italy" in the interwar years as a case study, Simone Cinotto looks at the function of food in the construction of a peculiar Italian American ideology of home, family, and community, and in the redefinition of concepts like "domesticity" and "respectability." Focusing on intergenerational interaction, Cinotto discusses the role of the family table as a site where a particular compromise took place between conflicting narratives of "being Italian" and "becoming American." He will also explore how food helped to create affective relations toward place, and to draw boundaries between neighboring groups in the community.

Call (212) 642-2042 for further information.