Recent Posts on Updated Forte e Gentile Site

 

Friends and readers, let me share some newer pieces posted to my updated version of Forte e Gentile:

"As only an Italian can": The Grand Gennaro, by Garibaldi M. Lapolla: a reading of this novel, first published in 1935.

WOP! or: You Talkin' to Me?: a discussion of WOP! A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination in the United States, edited by Salvatore J. LaGumina. 

 As always, thank you for reading!

Continuing Forte e Gentile at a new site

My thanks to all of you for reading my blog for the past eleven-plus years (and driving up the page views to more than 200,000). As of July 2020, I've moved over to a new site and will be continuing this blog from there:

https://forte-e-gentile.com/

Many thanks to Blogger for hosting me all these years. I'll be keeping this archive up for the foreseeable future. 

Ci vediamo presto!

Marino Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace Returns to the American Folk Art Museum

It’s a real pleasure to report that my grandfather’s great labor of love, the Encyclopedic Palace, is back at the American Folk Art Museum as part of the show “American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection.”

 

The show looks to be full of riches: work by Nella Mae Rowe, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Consuelo “Chelo” González Amézcua, a beautiful Freedom quilt by Jessie Bell Telfair, paintings by my longtime hero Ralph Fasanella, and plenty of other artists whose names have been lost but whose work endures. The show is up through May 31, 2020. For a nice piece about it on NY1 by Juan Manuel Benítez, go here.

This link to the February 6th episode of NYC-Arts will take you to a re-broadcast of a 2015 interview that curator Valérie Rousseau gave about the Encyclopedic Palace (that clip comes in toward the end, at about 21:26).

 

And here are my earlier posts about the Encyclopedic Palace—its journey from a storage locker, where it sat for twenty-two years, to the Folk Art Museum when my family donated it in 2003; and three posts from 2013 (and early 2014) when the Encyclopedic Palace miraculously became the centerpiece of the 55th Venice Biennale curated by Massimiliano Gioni. Finally, a piece by Leigh Anne Miller about that “backstory” from Art in America in 2013.

Thank you for reading. And thank you for dreaming with me.