Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts: Lecture by Luisa Del Giudice

Location

Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Warren Auditorium

Free

In this presentation Dr. Del Giudice will discuss her edited volume Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development (NY: Fordham University Press, 2014), a tour de force culmination of the last five years of activity around the extraordinary Watts Towers, a National Historic Monument, created over the course of 3 decades by a visionary artist, Italian immigrant laborer, Sam, Simon (born Sabato) Rodia, who wanted to "do something big." Through international conferences (Università di Genova, 2009; UCLA and Watts, 2010), and the Watts Towers Common Ground Initiative, scholars, artists, civic authorities, conservators, and others, explored the monument's multiple resonances within local and global migrations, contested social and urban spaces, and the relationship between art and economic development. These new voices, as well as Rodia's own words (transcribed from sound recordings at UCLA Research Library's Special Collections for the first time), return to the mysteries that remain around the man and his artwork: What are they? Why did he build them? Why is a new generation rallying around this icon?

About the speaker:
Luisa Del Giudice is an Independent Scholar, former university academic (University of California Los Angeles, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia), public sector educator (Founder-Director of the Italian Oral History Institute), and community activist. She has published and lectured widely on Italian and Italian American and Canadian folklife, ethnology, oral history, and has produced many innovative public programs on Italian, Mediterranean regional and folk culture, and local history in Los Angeles. In 2008 she was named an honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society and knighted by the Italian Republic. She is the coordinator of the Watts Towers Common Ground Initiative.

Sponsored by the Italian Program and the Department of Languages and Literatures and supported with an award from the ESFI Fund.