Project Director
Dr. Rebecca Bauman is Associate Professor of Italian at FIT in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. A specialist in Italian American cultural studies, she has extensive practice in teaching Italian American studies at a variety of public institutions, and her pedagogy emphasizes place-based learning for language and cultural studies courses. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Italian American Studies Association, as well as Film and Digital Media Reviews Editor of Italian American Review, a bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal investigating the history and culture of Italian Americans.
Project Co-Director and Replacement Director
Dr. Amy Werbel is Professor of History of Art at FIT. She is the author of numerous works on the subject of American visual culture and sexuality, including Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock. A specialist in art of the United States, Dr. Werbel is experienced in leading students and colleagues through discussions of art controversies, past and present; this includes a focus on public monuments. She created a course at FIT entitled “Racism and Anti-Racism in Public Art and Architecture of the United States,” which helps students analyze and reimagine local sites, including Columbus Circle.
Project Co-Director
Dr. Daniel Levinson Wilk is Professor of American History at FIT and a specialist in American labor history. In 2018, he and Dr. Kyunghee Pyun won a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop new curriculum that teaches art and design students the business and labor histories of the careers they plan to enter. Dr. Levinson Wilk is also a member of the board of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, an organization that recently unveiled “Reframing the Sky,” a memorial attached to the facade of the building where the 1911 industrial disaster took place.
Guest speakers
John Avelluto is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He works in sculpture and painting, and his work incorporates Italian American vernacular culture and examines linguistic and verbal tropes of ethnic identity. In his talk, Mr. Avelluto will discuss his own forays into public art, and the challenges of obtaining commissions for works that contradict more traditional and received ideas of expressions of Italian American identity.
Dr. Marcella Bencivenni is Professor of History at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. Her research focuses on the histories of immigration, labor, and social movements in the modern United States, with a particular interest in the Italian diaspora. She is the author of Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940 (New York University Press, 2011). She will discuss the less-known history of radical Italian artists in New York City in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
Dr. Michele H. Bogart is Professor Emeritus of Art History and visual culture at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. She is the author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 and The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission, both published by University of Chicago Press. She was vice president of the Art Commission of the City of New York from 1999 to 2003 and is a member of an advisory group to the Commission. She will speak about the history of public art in New York City and the political, ethical, and aesthetic considerations that affect the installation, preservation and removal of public monuments.
Valerio Ciriaci and Isaak Liptzin are director and producer, respectively, of the award-winning documentary film Stonebreakers (2022), which chronicles the conflicts around monuments that arose in the United States during the George Floyd protests and the 2020 presidential election. In the discussion following the screening of the film they will address how the shifting discourses on monumentality in the United States have linked history and political action as a means of confronting the past.
Dr. Nicola Lucchi is Executive Director of the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA), an exhibition and research center in New York City dedicated to advancing the study of modern and contemporary Italian art in the United States. A specialist in twentieth-century Italian art and literature, industrial history, labor history, and the reception of Italian culture in the United States, Dr. Lucchi will give a presentation on the contested history of Fascist-era public art in New York City, focusing on the example of the Palazzo d’Italia murals at Rockefeller Center. He will also host the workshop for a half-day at CIMA.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley is an Argentinian-born filmmaker who is known for his documentaries Evita, Harto the Borges, and Black Fiddlers, as well as films on Rita Dove, Joy Brown, and Daniel Chester French. He is completing an hour-long documentary entitled The Italian Factor that tells the story of the Piccirilli family, Italian sculptors who became essential collaborators for some of the most prominent American sculptors of their time and whose public artworks made a significant impact on the urban landscape of New York City.
Dr. Kyunghee Pyun is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Professions at FIT and is a specialist of Asian art, Asian American studies, and European medieval art. She has served as the Principal Investigator on two NEH grants that focus on utilizing the humanities to teach the history of labor and business to pre-professional students. Dr. Pyun will discuss her experience in collaborating with faculty from various disciplines in creating open-sourced digital teaching resources for educators in higher education.
Dr. Laura Ruberto is Professor of Humanities at Berkeley City College, California, and will discuss her research on Italian Americans’ engagement with Columbus monuments. Dr. Ruberto is co-editor with Dr. Joseph Sciorra of the two-volume series New Italian Migrations to the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2017). A Fulbright recipient and ACLS/Mellon Faculty Fellow, Dr. Ruberto is also on the board of the journals California Italian Studies and Italian American Review.
Dr. Joseph Sciorra is a folklorist and Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College (City University of New York). He is author of Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015), and numerous articles and edited volumes on Italian American migration. He will speak about his research with Dr. Ruberto on Italian Americans’ engagement with Columbus monuments, as well as guiding the workshops in exploring the hidden vernacular culture of Italian American communities in New York City.
Dr. Jack Tchen is Professor of Public History & Humanities and Director of the Price Institute at Rutgers University, State University New Jersey. Dr. Tchen is co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City and served as an advisor for the New York City Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. Dr. Tchen will speak in the roundtable discussion on Columbus monuments and will discuss his place-based field work and activism with Munsee Lenape Communities.
Dr. Mary Anne Trasciatti is Professor of Rhetoric and Director of the Labor Studies Program at Hofstra University, Long Island, and President of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. She is a co-editor of Where Are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites (University of Illinois Press, 2022). Her talk will discuss the intricate issues involved with creating a memorial for the victims of the disaster and how public art can cross-over to speak to different communities.
Dr. Mario Valero is Associate Professor of Spanish at FIT who specializes in race and the scientific imagination in Latin American art, photography and literature. An expert on the use of new technologies in the classroom, Dr. Valero will give a presentation on how to augment place-based teaching of ethnic cultures with the use of software such as Padlet, Sketchfab, and Adobe Spark, using as a model his course “Hispanic Cultures in New York.”