LOS ANGELES BOOK PRESENTATION–Woven Lives: Exploring Women’s Needlework from the Italian Diaspora

LOS ANGELES BOOK PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION–As part of the exhibition Woven Lives: Exploring Women’s Needlework from the Italian Diaspora, the Italian America Museum of Los Angeles invites you to a book presentation and discussion. “Embroidered Stories’ Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from The Italian Diaspora” edited by Edvige Giunta and Joseph Sciorra. For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women’s needlework. The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their descendants. Saturday, April 23 from 3:30-5 pm The Italian American Museum of Los Angeles 644 North Main Street Los Angeles, CA 90012 For more information, click here. This is free event, but registration is required. Click here to register. This project is supported by a Humanities for All Project Grant.