The Feast of San Gennaro festival, painted by a Little Italy artist

Born in 1914 in the Bronx and raised in Greenwich Village’s Little Italy, Ralph Fasanella became a union organizer, a gas station owner, and a self-taught painter of colorful, carnival-like panoramas depicting New York City at work and at play.

“San Gennaro,” is his 1976 take on the annual festival held every September on Mulberry Street since 1926. (The festival is going on in New York right now, through September 26.)

Fasanella’s work is a folk art-inspired, social realist vision of the crowds, vendors, food, games, and patron saint of Naples himself in the center of the canvas, surrounded by Little Italy’s tenements and the tenement dwellers who inhabit them. It’s also currently up for auction; 1stdibs has the info.

[Image: 1stdibs.com]

Tags: Feast of San Gennaro Festival New York City, Little Italy New York City Festival, Ralph Fasanella, Ralph Fasanella Painter NYC, Ralph Fasanella San Gennaro Festival