New Online Portfolio ?>

New Online Portfolio


Saul Metnick: Construction Sites

The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the third fall installment of our Online Portfolio Series with Saul Metnick’s Construction Sites.

“These photographs were made between 2009 and 2017 in New York City, on a number of different construction sites. It’s a largely visual investigation of the temporary phases the buildings we make go through on the way to becoming a finished thing. Their settled forms were fine in the end, but I always missed how they shifted from month to month.”

—Saul Metnick, 2021


Artist Bio: Saul Metnick is a Brooklyn-based photographer who once quit his day job as a producer to be a photographer. Then he quit his day job as a photographer to be a producer. He still takes pictures, teaches photography, and is raising two young children with the help of a Fuji Instax Wide.


Saul Metnick Website
IG: @blandscape


For further information, please contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

“Regrets Only” opens at the Lipani Gallery ?>

“Regrets Only” opens at the Lipani Gallery


Regrets Only

Artists: Andy Brown, Michael Endy, Lisa DiClerico, Zelda Zinn, Juliet Martin, James Gardella, Marc Pelletier
Curator: Wilson Duggan


October 3—November 3, 2021


The Fordham University Galleries
Fordham University at Lincoln Center map
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries


The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present a new exhibition, Regrets Only, by curator Wilson Duggan in the Lipani Gallery. Regrets Only is an instruction sometimes found on event invitations, an alternative to the more common and more formal request to RSVP or communicate to the host whether or not one plans to accept the invitation. The direction to send “regrets only” is broadly considered presumptuous, not only in that it presumes the recipient of the invitation will attend, but also that no matter the reason why they will regret not being able to.

In late 2021, with over a year of global isolation in rearview and few events attended or invitations to accept, what regrets do we hold about past opportunities declined and the pressures to attend and participate in life tomorrow? When invited to participate in an exhibition, how does an introverted and isolated artist and their practice reemerge from professional quarantine? The artworks in the exhibition explore themes of regret, isolation, ennui, and mundanity, exhibited together in an attempt to escape these confinements in dialogue with each other.

About the curator:
Wilson Duggan is an arts administrator and curator. He received his BA in Art History from Fordham College Rose Hill in 2012 and is the Co-Founder and Director of Operations at SHIM Art Network, an organization committed to providing artists, curators, collectives, galleries, universities, and other organizations and affiliations with resources and opportunities for professional development, exhibitions, and sales.


Image credit: Juliet Martin, I Hope That When I Wake, 2021


For further information on the exhibition, please contact Wilson Duggan.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One ?>

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One

The Fordham University Galleries
Fordham University at Lincoln Center map
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries


The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight exhibition in the Ildiko Butler Gallery. We are fortunate to have so many exceptionally talented Adjunct Professors teaching in our department, in fact, so many that we have had to divide this exhibition into two parts.

The first installment, Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One, will include a sampling of work from the following artists: Zeljka BlaksicDoug ClouseAmie CunatPatrice HelmarMatthew López-JensenAnibal J. Pella-WooKimberly Reinhardt, and Lesley Wamsley. This group of artists represents the breadth of disciplines offered in the Visual Arts Department, including film, graphic design, painting, and photography. Despite the differences in their mediums, approaches, and subjects, their works generate a lively dialogue.

New Generation, by Zeljka Blaksic, is a short animated video that relies on photographs found in START magazine, one of the most popular newspapers in the seventies and eighties throughout the territory of former Yugoslavia. Her piece utilizes the archive as source material and provides a critical analysis of sexual discourse in the cultural and political context of socialism.

Doug Clouse prints and paints over commercially printed ephemera, coaxing out new possibilities by altering existing images and text. He is a graphic designer in New York City.

Influenced by depictions of nature from Shaker gift drawings, Art Deco, science fiction, and horror movies, Amie Cunat’swork is loud and flamboyant at first read; however, upon closer inspection, her paintings offer subtle play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien.

Patrice Helmar’s Down By Law is a series of photographs examining the American dream’s dark mythology and the timeless story of returning home. The history of photography is rife with work made by visitors that often have little connection to people and places they depict. In Down By Law, the artist is not attempting to document or sensationalize working-class and queer life; instead, she records what she would like to exist about her communities in contemporary culture.

Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based environmental artist, photographer, educator, Citizen Pruner, and community gardener. His projects combine walking, collecting, mapping, and extensive research. He is particularly interested in the relationships between people and local landscapes. Featured in the Lincoln Center’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is a recent walking-based artist project exploring Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The map, completely redesigned by the artist, centers an experience in the landscape around beech trees struggling to survive. The adjacent photographs are some of the trees featured on the map.

Selling Bananas In Ascending Order Of Ripeness is a project by Anibal J. Pella-Woo made up of 90 double-sided photographic prints. Each of the photographs was taken from the front seat of his car while parked at various locations. The texts accompanying the photographs are from overheard talk shows broadcasting on the car radio from when the photographs were made.

The structure for Crystal Gazing AmplifiersKimberly Reinhardt’s installation of ten naturally dyed, silkscreened bandannas is inspired by twill weaving patterns and Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall. Relying on the exponential effects of repetition and variation, Reinhardt plays with the transmutation from vernacular utilitarian object to a contemplative device meant to harness and focus the tension that arises between the two.

Lesley Wamsley is a plein air artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY, with a deep commitment to drawing from life. The relationship between observation and documentation is the foundation of her practice, and her work aims to communicate the personal and historical consciousness of place and time. For Wamsley, context is an essential question—how does it feel to experience a place, and how does the broader context shape that experience?


Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

New Online Portfolio: Martha Clippinger ?>

New Online Portfolio: Martha Clippinger

The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the second fall installment of our Online Portfolio Series with Martha Clippinger’s Vibrating Boundaries.

Artist Statement: The observation of color relationships engages and stimulates me throughout all of my art-making processes. Josef Albers and his “Interaction of Color” heightened my awareness of the relativity of color, and his proposed exercises continue to influence my process and inspire me to create works that encourage contemplation of color.

The intersection of fine art and craft has long been an interest of mine, and in recent years, the textile traditions of weavings and quilts have provided fertile ground for me to consider color relationships and geometric abstraction.

In 2014, I began an ongoing collaboration with master weavers Licha González Ruiz and Agustín Contreras Lopez of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico to create tapetes (Spanish for “rugs”). The Zapotec architecture of Oaxaca inspires my designs, while the environs of the region inform the intense hues of the woolen yarns, hand dyed by Licha and Agustín.

I use gouache and watercolor studies as a jumping-off point for the tapetes. I often select the rug’s colors in person, based on the dyed wool that Licha and Agustín have available in their workshop. This adaptive process often leads to shifts in color from the original design, but as with the piecing of my quilts or constructing paintings from scraps of wood, I look forward to the surprises that result from a flexible and intuitive approach to making.

I embrace the inherent imperfections of my reclaimed materials, to create works that have a ‘rough around the edges’ quality and an improvisational aesthetic. My painted constructions, composed of off-kilter geometries and irregular symmetries, are modest in scale but occupy a space beyond their physical dimensions. I’m interested in how I can engage and play with architecture through their placement.

In my work, ceramics, textiles, prints, and painted constructions exist on equal ground. Many of my works may serve as both functional objects and as works of art, and that creates an open-endedness that I love, for it blurs the borders and flattens the hierarchies between art and craft.

—Statement for the Vibrating Boundaries exhibition at Warren Wilson College, 2021

The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed to the public in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our gallery will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for more online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this fall as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.


Artist Bio: Born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, Martha Clippinger received a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a 2017 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council, a 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, and a 2013 Fulbright-Garcia Robles research grant completed in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has been a fellow at Kohler Arts & Industry, the Sam and Adele Golden Art Foundation, Artspace, MacDowell Colony, Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. Her work has been featured in The Brooklyn RailBurnaway, and Hyperallergic, and is in public collections such as The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and The Columbus Museum. Clippinger is represented by Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York and Hodges Taylor in Charlotte, NC. She lives and works in Durham, North Carolin


Image caption: Martha Clippinger, Spiral, 2021, machine-pieced and hand-quilted reclaimed fabrics, 69” x 62”. All images courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery.

Martha Clippinger’s Website. For further information contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock. For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

New Online Portfolio: Michelle Sijia Ma: A Hundred Stories ?>

New Online Portfolio: Michelle Sijia Ma: A Hundred Stories


The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the first fall installment of our Online Portfolio Series with Michelle Sijia Ma’s A Hundred Stories. In 2016, China declared its transition from a nation of unlimited labor supply to a country that bloomed with an aging population. Mostly consists of women in rural areas, they operate small enterprises supported by local governments. However, life among these populations is not only centered around the private enterprises, but supported by young generations that promise the aging ones their houses, health, and prosperity. A Hundred Stories seeks to tell the story of these people that are at once radical and conservative; grand, yet banal. Through inserting staged self-portraits with documentary images of the aging populations, A Hundred Stories investigate China’s past and its strange, yet paradoxical impacts on the young generations.

The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed to the public in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our gallery will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for more online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this fall as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.


Artist Bio: Sijia Ma (b. 2001 in Shenyang, China), is a visual artist based in Shanghai and MA. She is currently pursuing a B.A. in Studio Arts and Quantitative Economics at Smith College, MA. She also studied Graphic Design at Yale University and Photography at Amherst College in 2020. Sijia has worked to develop image-based projects and used the language of photography to explore the complexity of today’s Chinese identity in a subtler way.

Sijia has had solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including the International Center of Photography in New York, Houston Center for Photography, Massachusett College of Art and Design, Kunstpunt Groningen in Netherland, New Era Research Institute of Photography in Beijing, Glasgow Gallery of Photography in Scotland, and Millepiani Gallery in Rome. Sijia’s images have been included in publications such as the American Photography Annual Award Book, China Souhu News, Vanderbilt University’s Nashville Review, Glass Mountain Magazine, F-Stop Magazine, and Lenscratch.

In 2020 Sijia co-founded China’s first junior art investment firm 1CM Inc. in Shanghai. She is currently working on the brand marketing team at Universal Studio Beijing.


Michelle Siji Ma Website
Instagram: @michelle_sijiama


For further information, please contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Vincent Stracquadanio: strutture d’ombra ?>

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Vincent Stracquadanio: strutture d’ombra

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series:
Vincent Stracquadanio: strutture d’ombra

The Fordham University Galleries
Fordham University at Lincoln Center map
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023

fordhamuniversitygalleries The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the first fall installment of the Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series with Vincent Stracquadanio. The selection of drawings featured in his book, strutture d’ombra (shadow structures), highlights Stracquadanio’s spaces depicting moments of transformation and magic, all of which are marked by rich patterning and dense with visual surprise and reference.

Vincent Stracquadanio: strutture d’ombra is the third publication for Hayden’s Books, a series honoring Hayden Hartnett, a much-loved visual art major. Hayden’s Books focuses on presenting artist projects, research, critical writings, and works in progress.

The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed to the public in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our gallery will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for more online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this fall as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.

Artist Statement: The structures that surround us provide the boundaries that help define and clarify our collective understanding of the world. Their very presence however demarcates the moment of subversion where these structures can be broken down and changed.

The spaces in my work depict moments of transformation and magic. The rich patterning of these spaces is dense with visual surprise and reference. Some spaces are filled with foreboding forms such as dark fire and cloud-like mists that appear to seep through various Sicilian porticos disrupting spatial certainty. Others, archetypal forms like the “Arch” and the “Portal” line technicolor corridors that peer out into a horrific black abyss from a Giallo film. In these spaces, I’ve mined my own relationship to histories of art, family, and self.

These lavish interior spaces collapse and extend using patterning and flatness that eliminates hierarchies between foreground and background, form and formlessness, clarity and confusion. Each picture not only exhibits an interior logic but also presents distinct idiosyncrasies suggesting differentiation in time, event, or architecture. These defined moments are subverted and broken down to begin to illustrate the fluidity of one’s full identity and one’s relationship to histories both individual and shared.

Artist Bio: Vincent Stracquadanio is an artist living and working in New York City. He earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BA in visual arts from Fordham University. He has been exhibited at Good Naked Gallery (NY), New Release (NY), Trestle Gallery (NY), Artspace (CT), among others. He was a nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and received both the Gamblin Paint Award and James Storey Memorial Visual Arts Award. Stracquadanio has taught at the Yale University Art Gallery and is currently a museum educator at the Jewish Museum and an adjunct professor at Fordham University.

strutture d’ombra Book Link
Vincent Stracquadanio Website


For further information contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.
Faculty Spotlight Series: Amie Cunat Drawings ?>

Faculty Spotlight Series: Amie Cunat Drawings

The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present a new summer installment of the Faculty Spotlight Series with Amie Cunat. This selection of drawings shares Cunat’s explorations, which have informed her recent work on canvas, and offer a play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien.

Amie Cunat Drawings is the second publication for Hayden’s Books, a series honoring Hayden Hartnett, a much-loved visual art major. Hayden’s Books focuses on presenting artist projects, research, critical writings, and works in progress.

The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed to the public in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our gallery will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for more online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this fall as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.

Artist Statement:
In 2018, Amie Cunat began to explore plant-like imagery within her abstract paintings. Influenced by depictions of nature from Shaker gift drawings, Art Deco, science fiction, and horror movies, Cunat’s work appears loud and flamboyant at first read. Whether they are painted from an observed source or the artist’s memory, their exclamatory presence is supplanted and prolonged through charged hue and inventive form. They offer a play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien. The selection of drawings shares her explorations, which have informed her recent work on canvas.

Artist Bio:
Amie Cunat (b. 1986, McHenry, IL) is a Japanese American artist, who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Cunat received her MFA from Cornell University, Post-Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Fordham University. She has had solo exhibitions at Peep (PA), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, Victori +Mo, Knockdown Center, Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill, Outside (MA), The Cooper Union, among others. Recent group exhibitions include Fur Cup at Underdonk (Brooklyn), The Unusual Suspects at DC Moore Gallery (NY), Surreality at Crush Curatorial (NY), The Unlikely Whole at ArtYard (NJ) and Softer but Louder at Geary Contemporary (NY). In 2019, she was awarded a Regional Economic Development Council Grant by NYSCA in collaboration with Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon. Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, ARTnews, Artsy, Artnet News, Vogue Italia, ArtMaze Mag, and Two Coats of Paint.

Book Link
Amie Cunat Website