Month: August 2021

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