Readings from Italianità

Italianità: Contemporary Art Inspired by the Italian Immigrant Experience is an anthology of the art and writing of 59 artists, most the children or grandchildren of people who escaped the poverty of the Mezzogiorno to make new lives for themselves here in l’ameriga. ”We carry the history of our families and our culture in our psyches as well as our genes,” says B. Amore, one of this event’s four speakers, all of whom call the Boston area home.

B. Amore researched seven generations of her family, culminating in a monumental exhibition of sculpture, collage, and artifacts at the Ellis Island Museum in 2020. Lifeline, Filo della Vita: An Italian American Odyssey, traveled to Boston, San Francisco, Rome, and finally to Napoli where her family’s journey began. She continues to exhibit.

Joe Cultrera tells stories through film. Over the decades he has brought us into his hometown of Salem with stories about the decline of factory life and the commercialization of the city’s witch history. Hand of God, which was featured on PBS’s Frontline,documents the effect on his close-knit family of sexual abuse by clergy in his own parish.

Joanne Mattera is a widely exhibited painter (in Boston at Arden Gallery) who brings her visual art community together through word and image, whether in her Joanne Mattera Art Blog or in projects like Italianità, in which the descendants of Italian immigrants relate how culture and experience have shaped them into the artists they are today.

Charyl (Urbano) Weissbach) comes from a family of makers—a grandfather and uncles who worked in Connecticut’s metal foundries and grandmothers who imbued their handwork with a sense of Neapolitan Baroque. “Given my creative heritage,“ she says, “it’s not surprising that I pursued a creative path.”