Join us in celebrating the immigrant history of the South Village with a special talk by Mary Elizabeth Brown, the Center for Migration Studies’ archivist, on her new book The Art of Immigration: Italian Art in an American Church.

In this illustrated Zoom presentation we’ll explore the artistic legacy of Church of the Most Precious Blood and its impact on the surrounding Italian immigrant community. It is one of the few churches with an interior almost completely preserved from the early twentieth-century with Sicilian marble altar furnishings, statues dating back to the earliest Italian immigrant communities, and a complete suite of murals by Italian immigrant artist Donatus Buongiorno.

Comprehensive detective work reveals an intricate, interwoven community of multiple generations at Most Precious Blood. New immigrants established neighborhood businesses in the shadow of the church and preserved their families’ stories in Most Precious Blood’s decorations, which came from other immigrants in the community.

Village Preservation kicked off its campaign to honor, document, and seek landmark designation for the South Village and its remarkable immigrant and bohemian histories in December of 2006 and completed the effort in December of 2016 with designation of the third and final phase of our proposed South Village Historic District, the largest expansion of landmark protections in the neighborhood since 1969, and among the city’s first and only historic districts to honor immigrant and artistic history. We now celebrate each December as “South Village Month.”

Mary Brown first spoke to a Village Preservation audience in Spring 2005.  She works as an archivist at the Center for Migration Studies, a mission of the Scalabrini Fathers, who are also active in the Village at Our Lady of Pompeii parish, and she teaches writing and US history as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College. She received her doctorate from Columbia University in 1986. Her dissertation was on Italian Catholic immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York. She also authored the Village Preservation commissioned report and study, The Italians of the South Village.