2024 Catherine W. Bishir Prize Recipient

The winner of the 2024 Bishir Prize is Joseph Sciorra for “‘The Strange Artistic Genius of This People’: The Ephemeral Art and Impermanent Architecture of Italian Immigrant Catholic Feste,” published in the Fall/Spring 2023 issue of the VAF’s own journal, Buildings & Landscapes. Sciorra has degrees from Brooklyn College and NYU, and received his Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. For 25 years he has directed Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, City University of New York. He is also the former editor of the Institute’s peer-reviewed journal, Italian American Review. In 2016 the Italian American Studies Association awarded him its non-fiction book award for Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City, a University of Tennessee Press publication. 

Sciorra looks at late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, mobile shrines and street chapels—Baroque confections as tall as 60 feet or as wide as buildings, shaped like altars, towers, or even land-faring boats. Italian-American craftsmen created these for their immigrant community festes—or, as Sciorra calls them—“cultural-religious extravaganzas.” He shows us these works through the eyes of their intended audiences, as well as those of outsiders—photographers, journalists, visual artists—whose potential biases he carefully considers. He examines, and I quote, “how these transient objects of devotion…enacted and proclaimed a diasporic community of believers that challenged hegemonic notions of artistry, religion, the built environment, and the public sphere.” He further expands his gaze to contextualize his hand-crafted sources of study as, in his words, “part of the Progressive era’s xenophobic climate and, in particular, the picturesque gaze that racialized and othered Italian immigrants.”