Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
The Italian American community knows Jean Parisi best as La Befana, the good Christmas witch who made appearances for decades at yuletide celebrations throughout the Chicago area. But that’s just the tip of the cultural iceberg for this veteran community arts activist.
Over the decades, she has created massive community art installations, staged plays with puppets of her own making and performed commedia dell’arte, the traditional Italian improvisational theater. She’s also taught a range of visual and performing arts to students of all ages and experiences including families, senior citizens and individuals with special needs. And for 30 years she helped lead a Pilsen community arts collective that showcases artists and helps develop their talents.
What has driven her to dedicate so much of her life to fostering and performing the arts?
“The most rewarding part is doing all the collaborative work I do,” Parisi says.
Take, for example, her illustrations for the Folk Tales series in Fra Noi, which she has been doing since 1995. The scene she depicts depends on what her husband, Lionel Bottari, is writing about that issue.
“I show him what I’m drafting, he gives me feedback and I pursue it,” Parisi says. “I always try to work with something from the beginning of the story, I don’t try to give away the ending even if that might be more fun to draw.”
Even her solo work has had an element of collaboration. For years, Parisi would construct large sculptures out of papier mâché with painted hangings in the dance hall of a tavern turned into an art space where she lives, each with a timely theme.
“One of the installations had a focus on immigrant issues, so the sculptures would show people running with their possessions or gathering and waiting with suitcases,” Parisi says. “It takes over the whole space and people would walk through and interact. It wasn’t ever just like art on the wall.”
Douglas Grew, a fellow artist and longtime collaborator, calls Jean a mentor and inspiration.
“She’s always about using art to create community,” Grew says. “It was never just an audience, the people there were like neighbors. She was always getting people involved.”
Collaboration is also a theme in her performance artwork. Her role as La Befana at the Christmas Village at Casa Italia is a good example. Parisi wasn’t just reading a story to children, she was interacting with the audience and responding to them.
“It’s about interacting with the kids,” she says. “You engage them in the conversation. The audience becomes part of it.”
The spirit of collaboration is evident in Pros Arts Studio, a community arts collective based in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago she co-founded in 1978 and ran as executive director for 30 years.
Grew says countless people came through Pros Arts and now have full-fledged careers in the arts, a testament to the community Parisi helped foster.
“She moved in all sorts of circles,” Grew says. “She’d be doing family-based community art projects while also doing some of the most out-there work in Chicago art spaces that no longer exist.”
Grew says Parisi’s collaborative instincts and ability to listen to her peers and the community helped Pros Arts be so successful.
“When she was running Pros Arts Studio, the instructors all still had a say and still somehow she could get all these artists moving in the same direction,” Grew says. “It was her ability to listen and create the projects that the community wants.”
