Built with Faith - Joseph Sciorra

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Résumé :
Over the course of 130 years, Italian-American Catholics in New York City have developed a varied repertoire of devotional art and architecture to create community-based sacred spaces in their homes and neighbourhoods. These spaces exist outside of but in relationship to the consecrated halls of local parishes and are sites of worship in conventionally secular locations. Such ethnic building traditions and urban ethnic landscapes have long been neglected by all but a few scholars. Joseph Sciorra’...

Biographie:
s Italian-American Catholics.

Sciorra spent thirty-five years researching these community art forms and interviewing Italian immigrants and US-born Catholics. By documenting the folklife of this group, Sciorra reveals how Italian-Americans in the city use expressive culture and religious practices to transform everyday urban space into unique, communal sites of ethnically infused religiosity. The folk aesthetics practiced by individuals within their communities are integral to understanding how art is conceptualised, implemented, and esteemed outside of museum and gallery walls. Yard shrines, sidewalk altars, Nativity presepi, Christmas house displays, a stone-studded grotto, and neighbourhood processions —...

Sommaire:
s Built with Faith offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’...