"XX: Women, 'Made in the South of Italy'/XX: Donne, 'Create nel sud Italia' " Exhibition

Onishi Gallery

poster for "XX: Women, 'Made in the South of Italy'/XX: Donne, 'Create nel sud Italia' " Exhibition

This event has ended.

Onishi Gallery presents the first exhibit of XX: Women, "Made in the South of Italy"/XX: Donne, "Create nel sud Italia", contemporary Italian art based on the San Luca Women's Movement of Southern Italy. A little over a year ago when Rosy Canale, a businesswoman and volunteer social worker in Calabria (the toe-of-the-boot region and poorest area of Italy), organized the San Luca Women's Movement into a sewing collective to preserve the areas tradition of hand-loomed and hand-crafted flax, silk and straw textiles, to give the town's women a small income and to improve the image of a place known as the home of Italy's most powerful and dangerous mafia, the 'Ndrangheta (pronounced en-DRAHN-geh-tah), her car was burned and she was threatened. Today, with 300 members selling their handmade placemats, table runners and linen towels outside their community, the women are using their influence to break the century old cycle of Mafia crime that has increased drastically in the past few years when the 'Ndrangheta took over lucrative cocaine routes from Latin America to Europe, a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

*For more information on the women of San Luca, please read Tracy Wilkinson's article in the Los Angeles Times. October 3, 2008: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/03/world/fg-sanluca3

Now Rosy Canale and artist, Pamela Cento, are curating a show of 15 Italian artists, inspired by these fearless, courageous women who dared to say "No" to unending violence that would engulf, yet another generation of their relatives. The exhibit in New York which will feature installations, new photography and video artworks, will travel for shows in Berlin (Three people from San Luca, including a 16-year-old boy, and three others from nearby Calabrian towns were gunned down outside a pizzeria in Duisburg, Germany, in 2007, in what authorities called a revenge hit in an escalating 'Ndrangheta feud.) and Rome in March.

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