“to be children of immigrants”
LuLu LoLo
Interviewed on August 26th, 2022
by Anabella Lenzu
Anabella: Thank you so much for being willing to have this conversation. I would like to talk to you about how you made your career as a performance artist and as a mother.
Can you tell me about your life when you started your performance art, as well as what it was like before and after the kids?
LuLu: Well, we were very fortunate in that we lived a very creative life. Dan, my husband, was able to be home a lot sharing in taking care of our children.
I had my children really young. I feel like I grew up with them. Sometimes, I feel like they're my brothers, or maybe I'm the child and they're the parents.
I have three sons. I had Alex when I was 19, but the next month I turned 20. They're all a year and a half apart, so I grew up with them, and I had a very creative life with them. We always told them stories about artists and writers. We took them to Europe when they were young. They always went to the museums with us. We did a lot with them. Dan is wonderful. Danny can really make history come alive. We would go to the museum and he would tell wonderful stories about the artists. When they were little, Dan painted a lot, so they would watch him paint.
Celebrating holidays was an important part of our lives, like Groundhog Day. February 2nd is James Joyce's birthday and it's also Groundhog Day–we always display a copy of his book “Pomes Penyeach” with his photo on the cover and a vintage illustration of a Groundhog celebrating Groundhog Day.
I always think of my life in 20-year segments. I spent a lot of time with them during their first years and I did a lot of creative things with them, like crafts and other things. My youngest son, Vincent, named after Vincent Van Gogh (and yes he did become an artist), once told me that we would go to the museum and we’d see something, and I would say, “Oh we can make that.” And we'd go home and make it. I loved getting involved with all things my sons were interested in. One of my sons, Leo, loved the flags of all the different countries, so we made a book of his flag drawings.
So, a little background –– my mother was very creative, and my parents were well-known community activists. They were involved with a settlement house, Harlem House, later named LaGuardia Memorial House. My mother was the arts and crafts teacher, she even took classes in jewelry making because she really wanted to be a designer.
My father loved movies and the theater. He was part of an acting group in the settlement house where I acted with my father, so it was a very creative life and our house was filled with art making. I also did a lot of baking. I'm really good with my hands and I would involve my kids. Even though I had sons, I would still get them involved in what I was working on baking and sewing. Vincent sewed clothes for his Bert and Ernie toys; Leo baked cookies selling them outside our house, and for Easter made rabbit-shaped bread. We just did a lot of creative things.
When we went to Europe, we would take them around to the museums and they could each buy one postcard. Alex only bought Leger, Leo bought the surrealists, and Vincent, he's the artist, he bought all these paintings with animals and he is a figurative artist. He also loved to take care of animals, bringing home hurt birds. He once brought home a hurt crow from a class trip. So, I spent a lot of time with them.
I do have an acting background. I went to the High School of Performing Arts and studied acting. I would read the boys fairy tales and they loved when I did all the voices. Even when they were older, like 13, they would say “Oh, you have to read to us.” Then as they got older they went into their creative lives, Leo started making films and I’d be in his videos. Vincent, the artist went on to become a really good illustrator, and a comic book artist for Marvel. Dan and I would pose for him because he worked a lot with photographs. He's really big on his anatomy. It was a really creative place that they grew up in.
And then, when I was 40, my birthday is April 10th, I was all into the art of Russian constructivism –– there's a famous show of 5 x 5= 25 –– so I said 4 x 10 = 40, so I'll make 40 collages. And I set out to make 40 collages.
I never realized I was always doing performance art. The artist, Petah Coyne told me a long time ago, “You're a performance artist!” I didn't know that was what I was doing. I would do things like go down the street and do odd things. When there was an event like the Oscars or big sports events, I’d do contests. I went over the top on holidays with decorating too and baking and making holiday greeting cards. I’d make the kids make little calendars. When Vincent was young, I'd say “You have to make a little calendar with your drawings for a Christmas gift.” So they made gifts.
Oh, here’s a story. Vincent made a macrame snowflake design and I said to him, “This is really great, these would be really good as a gift! He still talks about it. I had him making these macrame snowflakes for Christmas gifts.
They've been involved in helping me all this time. The black and white photographs of me, in the Film Noir series, Vincent posed in them with me. Vincent’s the one who does comic art, and works from photographs, so he knew how to pose, and Dan took those photos.
When I was creating a large installation for an exhibition, there was a huge dumpster from the Mattel toy display company by my office at the School of Visual Arts. I would call Vincent at work to hurry and come get things out of the dumpster. He would go into the dumpster to pull at these heavy pieces for me–he still insists he injured his back doing that. When I performed in Art In Odd Places, Alex was filming me on the street. I've called Vincent a lot to help out graphically. He did the layout and the lettering for the newspapers: the “14th Street Tribune” that I offered to the public when I was NewsBoy for Art in Odd Places and he designs all my postcard announcements. Leo does the MailChimp, but now I have my granddaughter! They all help me alot. When you're born into our family, you become part of the company.
Anabella: Now you have your granddaughter, it’s transcended to another generation!
LuLu: Right! She's working on the website for my Bird Project “Listening to the Birds” https://listeningtobirds.net/ We haven’t gotten into my own website yet, that's going to be a lot of work. She was coming over every Friday. I would call her my intern and she helped a lot on Art In Odd Places, she was out there on the street with me. For the Staten Island Museum exhibit, I gave her all the bird calls and she made the audio. In the installation in the Staten Island Museum, you hear the birds when you enter. She was really good! She said the birds should come in overlapping their sounds because you don’t want to hear just one bird at a time. She figured it out really wonderfully. It's now intergenerational and she's taken over what her father used to do for me technically.
Anabella: What is the secret? How do you transfer all of this love you have for art and creativity to the next generation, your granddaughter?
LuLu: She was surrounded by art. Dan took care of our granddaughter, Chloe, when she was little. For a time she also lived with her parents in our house. We also traveled to Paris with her, her parents, and my mother, Chloe’s great grandmother visiting museums. I remember when she was very young Dan took her to see Nijinsky drawings. It was how we were with our sons. We shared our life and interests with her and she has shared hers with us.
With our sons well, we were worried they were going to become insurance salesmen and we thought that would be too depressing.
We would take them to Central Park and then they would say, wait a minute, they took us to the park and it's by the Metropolitan Museum of Art…that means we're going in there. One of our sons Leo only liked the Guggenheim because it had a beginning and an end.
We would be obsessive about their interests. We were in Europe and Leo loved trains, so we went to the train museum. We're collectors, so whatever they did, they got passionate about it and were collectors too.
Leo wanted to be a Marine Biologist, so there were all these fish tanks in his room with amazing saltwater fish. On the other hand, Alex coached basketball, so I got very involved with the basketball team because I was a baker. I used to bake cookies for his debate team at Bronx Science. Then I started baking cookies for the basketball team. And nobody knows this about me in the art world, but I’m very well known in the basketball world. Now, most of them are pros or retired, but I used to make chocolate chip cookies for them. Alex was coaching these kids in high school, they’re called AAU teams, at the very famous Riverside Church and then he was a coach at St. John’s University. So then it happened that everybody got the cookies, even when they went away to college. I would mail them cookies wherever they went. I used to go to Madison Square Garden for the St. John’s games and bring them cookies. The ushers knew me at Madison Square Garden and then it became a thing that I'd have to give them to the families of the players, other fans. I'd make little individual packs. I would go to the Garden with like 600 cookies! Then if they were playing a team and I knew these kids on the other team I would give them cookies too. Players and artists like Jay-Z knew me with the cookies. It was a very well-known tradition. There's no photographs of anything, no documentation. When I used to bake them, my sons knew that they could only get one if they were broken! One of my sons used to say “distract her so she will burn them.” At a very sad occasion recently –– I saw a lot of the basketball players and everybody told me how much the cookies meant to them because they were away from home. It was very sweet.
Anabella: Let’s talk about these traditions. Could you talk about being the daughter of Italian immigrants? How did you pass these traditions on, even to your granddaughter, and what does it mean to you –– your traditions and your roots?
LuLu: My grandparents were immigrants, my parents were born here. My grandparents are from Melfi and San Fele in the province of Potenza in Basilicata, Italy.
My mother named me Lois, which I think is kind of interesting. It was a bit rebellious of her because it wasn't an Italian name.. She rationalized that she named me after her father Louis. She heard the name when she was in a shoe store–a little girl was named Lois.
My father's mother didn't speak English and she couldn't say my name Lois–so she called me LuLu and I called her Grandma LuLu. Her house was really dark with wooden furniture and I think she had gas heat. She had an altar in a bedroom with Saints and I loved that. I loved the snow globe with the rose petals falling on the Madonna.
I had lunch with her every day, but she didn't speak English. I came home and told my mother she had to teach me how to say “no more”in Italian, because she kept feeding me. She was very loving. She only had Terrone candy and chocolate-covered cherries. One time, I lost my tooth filling on one of the Terrone candies. If my parents were there talking Italian, I would just play make up games looking out the window, there was no TV.
I loved to watch her make macaroni. For me, that was my introduction to sculpture. She would take a mound of flour, break eggs in the center and, using her hands, she would shape the macaroni. That for me was when I saw what you could do with your hands. I love that and all of that Italian tradition. It was the most beautiful experience that I was so close to her.
I didn’t know my grandfather Giovanni, he died before I was born, but he loved opera and reciting Dante. There was this tradition of opera and creating with your hands
Then my mother's parents, they were more Americanized. They spoke English but they also had their traditions –– My Grandmother Lizzie (Grandma 116) crocheted, she had the store room with all these jars of vegetables she had preserved, it was my uncle's old bedroom. I remember once all of these women were in her bedroom and she had red circle marks on her back. They were doing the ritual of cupping with a glass to cure her of her ailments.
When I was thinking of my past, my grandma LuLu used to make round ravioli. She cut them round by using glasses, but my other grandma, I used to call her Grandma 116 because she lived on 116th street, she used a pastry cutter and hers were square. I suddenly saw the difference between the two of them and theirs both tasted different. It was just a wonderful environment of food.
When I started creating those big headpieces, I felt I was a sculptor. Wearing those headpieces I felt as if I was in one of the church processions that I would see in East Harlem with the floats carrying the saints. I also created big installations. I had a really amazing installation about my Italian grandmothers, and their apartment. I included what I felt was the creative moment of her making macaroni and the visual of that. I even did an exhibition of other Italian Americans that were craft people that used their hands to make ironwork, cemetery angels, and things like that.
Another influence was presentation. My mother would spend a lot of time on the visual sense of presentation: the arrangement of the food platter, making the Antipasto –– how you arranged it and how everything had to be–– and setting the tables and the traditions of the guests come first.
If you visited on Sunday after church, Grandma 116 would have the tray out on the table with the liquors and the cookies. Both of my grandmother’s baked, many of the recipes were lost unfortunately, my father's sisters didn't keep up the baking tradition.
The one other thing I have to say, I was not taught Italian. My parents only spoke English to me because it was that time period when if you're in America, then you speak English. I used to say my parents didn’t teach me Italian because when they talked to each other in Italian I wouldn't know what they were saying. It's sad because I didn’t learn the language of my ancestors.
We all lived in a house together with my parents, and they lived downstairs. We celebrated holidays with them and there was always Christmas with the tradition of serving seven fish. My husband's not Italian, but he got all involved with helping my mother get the fish from the market and he even cooked some of the fish dishes. He loves Italian food with hot pepper and garlic. Food, hospitality, and sharing was very important.
Something that was so great about my parents is that, as the neighborhood changed, my parents didn’t leave like many Italians. They stayed and helped the community. They never forgot what it was to be children of immigrants. They loved East Harlem. My father said, “I'll only leave when they carry me out.” My father was so beloved that the community named East 116th Street between First and Second Avenues “Pete Pascale Place” in his honor.
Anabella: Thank you for sharing this. It's very important because you are the artist. You are the product of all this love and all your art pieces are full of love and tradition. That’s why I wanted to interview you because you have so many things to share. You are giving this care to the community, to the arts. And you are a product of this love.
LuLu: I think generosity is very important to me. All of my performances are often acts of generosity–offering gifts to passersby on the street.
It’s funny how as social workers my parents always went to meetings. Our life was consumed with meetings. And now I am going to meetings. They would work during the day and then when I knew they were coming home I'd have to put the pot on to boil the water for the macaroni and my mother would be late, so I had to keep adding water. After dinner they went out to more meetings.
My children all know that if we're throwing in the macaroni, everything stops. It becomes like a battle cry. If you’re not downstairs it’s a catastrophe. For Italians the macaroni has to be al dente. Notice I say macaroni not pasta, it might be an Italian American thing.
I want to tell you something. I know I'm going on about a lot of things,at my parents' settlement house Harlem House/ LaGuardia House it was a wonderful place filled with art, music, dance, and acting.. That’s where I studied acting, ballet, modern dance and sculpture. It was inviting, like a home.
I’m working on my memoir and I'm going to write about Edward Corsi who was the Director of the settlement house, he ran for Mayor and was the Commissioner of Labor. In his soul, he was an artist, we have some of his paintings. He loved art, and the settlement house was filled with art reproductions that, at the time, were interesting Leger, Stuart Davis. There was a Modigliani in the lobby.
He was wonderfully friendly with me and he would walk around with me to talk about art. I would burst into his office and show him my latest sculpture. In fact, when the Mona Lisa was on view at the Metropolitan Museum he arranged to take a group of children there.
He would find artists and give them work. If he met you and you are a dancer, he would say, “Oh, come and teach the children.” One of the earliest acting teachers I had there was Margaret Croyden, and I loved her. She made a big impression on me. A few years ago I googled her name and found out she had passed away. She had become a very important art critic. I knew her when she was really young and I thought she was very glamorous.
Edward Corsi was also very connected with the Metropolitan opera because he loved the opera. He knew the opera singer Licia Albanese, all these opera singers came to the settlement house. This culture was all around us when we had our children. Even now my sons go to all the art exhibitions. This was a part of our lives, to do what we do, and we did it together.
I never really say anything about having children. I’m kind of private on Facebook and all that. I don't really show pictures of my family or anything, because it's about my work. Somebody once said to me, they were surprised, they didn't know I had children. They thought I was living in the East Village, running around, having this wild life. I don't even like parties.
Anabella: Tell me, how does tradition ignite your creativity?
LuLu: Right. Well, that's interesting. Besides the Italian traditions, my parents were social workers, and I never realized how all of my work, especially my plays, all have social issues.
My parents were radical Italian-Americans. My father was very close friends with the late East Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio. I'm one of the few people who remembers my father talking to him on the street corner. In fact, I remember seeing him coming towards us and going, “Oh no,” because I'd have to stand there for a long time and I knew I had to be quiet and not interrupt. Now people keep asking me, “What were they talking about?” because I was around all these famous Italian American leaders.
Growing up I remember from a very early age, My father talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the fact that they locked the door. I can still hear the anger in his voice. There was a tradition of factory work in our family, my mother's aunt did beadwork on hats at home . My mother had to quit high school to work at a factory. It is not surprising that I wrote a play about the Triangle fire and I have been working on having a Triangle Memorial. My father was pro-union. So I heard a lot of political things that weren't right, stuff about McCarthy. I have to say, I grew up with my parents being very open-minded, nothing prejudicial was ever said in our house.
When I was a little girl, I got a Jackie Robinson doll for Christmas, which I was fascinated by because it was my first boy doll. My father was a New York Giants fan and I can still remember my father was so excited because he admired Jackie Robinson and he loved the uniform on the doll. It felt like the real fabric of a baseball uniform.
For a long time I never realized how much social issues came into my work and my activism and also the struggles of immigrants. The influences of my parents, my grandparents, and growing up in East Harlem are reflected in my work and are also handed down to my sons and my granddaughter. It is a rich heritage.
LuLu LoLo has been a visual/performance artist, playwright/actor and activist for over twenty-five years. LuLu’s latest performance and installation Listening To The Birds is currently on view at the Staten Island Museum in the exhibition YES, AND until March 26, 2023. LuLu’s performance Dante, Opera, and Shining Shoes: Rituals of My Italian Immigrant Grandpa’s Life incorporated memoir, dance, opera, and poetry with choreography by Anabella Lenzu was funded by the City Artist Corps Grants program. LuLu has performed in six Art in Odd Places (AiOP) festivals on 14th Street, NYC in the guise of different personas calling attention to urgent topical issues. Her public actions in Where Are the Women? (2015) highlighting the lack of public monuments to women in NYC was featured in the New York Times. Blessings from Mother Cabrini, Saint of the Immigrants focused on immigrants of the world; and stressing the fragility of the aging body, LuLu performed while wearing a chair strapped to her body offering A Seat for the Elderly: The Invisible Generation. LuLu was the Curator of (AiOP) 2019: INVISIBLE, featuring eighty-two artists celebrating the indomitable spirit of artists who are sixty years of age or older. LuLu has written and performed eight one-person plays that evolved from her passion for historical research and social justice, especially as pertaining to the dramatic struggle of women in New York City’s past. LuLu was a Blade of Grass Fellow in social engagement, and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer in Residence. LuLu is a board member of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.
*LuLu LoLo’s headshot: photo credit by Paul Takeuchi
Anabella Lenzu: Originally from Argentina, Anabella Lenzu is a dancer, choreographer, scholar & educator with over 30 years of experience working in Argentina, Chile, Italy, and the USA. Lenzu directs her own company, Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama (ALDD), which since 2006 has presented 400 performances, created 15 choreographic works, and performed at 100 venues, presenting thought-provoking and historically conscious dance-theater in NYC. As a choreographer, she has been commissioned all over the world for opera, TV programs, theatre productions, and by many dance companies. She has produced and directed several award-winning short dance films and screened her work in over 200 festivals both nationally and internationally.