September 21, 2002
Macaroni and Mal Occhio (Evil Eye): Food, Faith, and Family - Growing up Italian- American -
One Woman Performance by LuLu LoLo
6:00 PM

Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) is pleased to open its 2002-03 "High/Low" performing arts series with a one woman show by Lulu Lolo performed at 6:00 PM, immediately following the opening reception of BRAC's first exhibition of the season.

Ms. Lolo is an installation and performance artist whose work highlights her immigrant family heritage and her fascination with mystery and melodrama especially as pertaining to the dramatic struggle of women in New York City's past.

In "Macaroni and Mal Occhio (Evil Eye)" LoLo recaptures the love, laughter, and tears of her Italian-American childhood in East Harlem's Little Italy by taking her audience back to the tenement life of her Italian immigrant grandparents. With a non-stop parade of family characters, LoLo enacts such vignettes as making macaroni with Grandma LuLu; Great Aunt Lena warding off the Evil Eye (Mal Occhio); the seven fishes Christmas Eve dinner; the dreaded cupping and leech cure for illness and many more of the traditions that encompassed growing up Italian-American.

Ms. LoLo has performed at several venues through New York City including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Smack Mellon Studios in Brooklyn, the Leonard Branch of the New York Public Library in Williamsburg Brooklyn, the Islip Art Museum and, later this fall, at the Spotlight On Productions Halloween Festival at Raw Space on 42.nd Street. She also has an impressive exhibition record of her installation work at such exhibition spaces as Exit Art, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore La MaMa Galleria and The National Art Club in Manhattan. Her work has been reviewed by the New York times and the Village Voice and she has been seen in a NYC cable TV series: The Young and the Stupid.

An avid researcher of historical facts, she is a veritable encyclopedia of emigrant stories and the history of women's struggle in America. Ms. LoLo's 50-minute performance should delight the many immigrant populations living throughout the Bronx.