The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the third spring installment of the Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Vincent Stracquadanio. Over the weeks to come, members from the Department of Visual Arts adjunct faculty will be sharing samplings of their production with the Fordham community.
The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed to the general public in response to COVID-19 (open for those on campus registered with VitalCheck). However, our gallery website will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study offered in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this spring as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.
Artist Statement: My work depicts spaces of transformation and magic. These lavish interior spaces collapse and extend using patterning and flatness that eliminates hierarchies between front and back, foreground and background.
The rich patterning of these spaces is dense with visual surprise and full of organic references, geometry, personal history, horror films, and antiquities. Each picture not only exhibits an interior logic but also presents distinct idiosyncrasies suggesting differentiation in time, event, or architecture.
Some spaces are filled with foreboding forms such as dark fire and cloud-like mists that appear to seep through various spaces disrupting spatial certainty. Others, silhouetted figures and latticed patterns line corridors and form structures for rhythm and magic. In many, lingering shadowy hands cradle and loom over these spaces, suggesting a menacing presence that creates and holds these spaces together.
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.
The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our exhibitions are still underway.
The Fordham University Department of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the start of the 2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions. Please follow our talented emerging artists as they exhibit throughout the spring semester. Part one is now available online.
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 exhibitions are still underway.
The Department of Visual Arts is pleased to present the Fordham University Galleries Online second installment of 2021, a portfolio of projects by the filmmaker, educator, walker/researcher Walis Johnson. Our gallery regularly features a body of work by a contemporary artist, alternating with our Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series, in which our talented adjunct faculty share samplings of their production with the Fordham community.
The Red Line Archive by Walis Johnson is a mobile public art project that engages New York City residents in a conversation about race and the history of the 1938 Red Line Map that helped create the segregated urban landscapes of the city. This “cabinet of curiosities” is wheeled along city streets, inviting people to freely associate about personal artifacts and documents from the artist’s family history in gentrifying Brooklyn and ephemera collected during four artist walks in and along the periphery of redlined neighborhoods.
Redlining refers to discriminatory lending practices that prevented African-Americans (and other people of color) from attaining home mortgages and business loans in New York City and urban communities nationwide. Even as loans to blacks were discouraged, real estate brokers actively used racial and economic fear-mongering that encouraged white homeowners to sell their properties at reduced prices and move en masse to new suburbs created for them. This was known as white flight.
Neighborhoods of historic and cultural importance in Black Brooklyn such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Greene, and Crown Heights – areas now on the frontline of gentrification – went from racially diverse to black “ghettos” almost overnight as redlining excelled. These neighborhoods physically declined as city services and economic development were withheld. Redlining was not solely confined to African-American neighborhoods; areas like Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Dumbo, among others, were redlined, too.
Red Line Labyrinth is a site-specific participatory art installation enacted in neighborhoods at the epicenter of aggressive gentrification and displacement. Labyrinths have been used throughout human history as a means to inspire personal and community reflection and renewal. The artist installed the labyrinth at Weeksville Heritage Center on October 18, 2017. Weeksville is the site of one of the first free Black communities in Brooklyn. Participants walked the Labyrinth alone or in pairs to activate reflection on the practice of redlining and its effects on their life and family in the past and present. Each person enacted the experience of healing and pilgrimage as they walked. Produced and Edited by Walis Johnson, Cinematography by Teodora Altomare.
About the artist: Walis Johnson is a filmmaker, educator, walker/researcher interested in the intersection of documentary film and performance whose work documents the urban landscape through ethnographic film, oral history, and artist walking practice. She holds a BA in History from Williams College and an MFA from Hunter College, in Interactive Media and Advanced Documentary film. She has taught at Parsons School of Design.
Walis Johnson’s essay Walking the Geography of Racism has been published in a new anthology entitled In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism, edited by Jeffrey Hogrefe and Scott Ruff with Carrie Eastmond and Ashley Simone. The anthology is published by Lars Müller Publishers. The essay focuses on Johnson’s artist walking practice and The Red Line Archive Project of the past few years. It is a truly beautiful book with essays by an important group of architects and artists who think deeply about architecture, performance art, history, and visual theory, exploring the creative relationship between the African diaspora and social space in America.
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 exhibitions are still underway.
New Exhibition: Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Željka Blakšic ?>
Adjunct Faculty Spotlight SeriesŽeljka Blakšic AKA Gita Blak: Connect the DotsThe Fordham University Galleries Online 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 second spring installment of the Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Željka Blakšic AKA Gita Blak: Connect the Dots 2019. Over the weeks to come, members from the Department of Visual Arts adjunct faculty will be sharing samplings of their production with the Fordham community.
Currently, the Fordham University Galleries are closed to the general public in response to COVID-19 (open for those on campus registered with VitalCheck). However, our gallery website will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study offered in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this spring as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.
Željka Blakšic AKA Gita Blak, Connect the Dots, 2019, Polymer relief print on Arches Cover, 13 x 18 inches, printed by Ruth Lingen at Line Press Ltd and published by Planthouse GalleryConnect the Dots by Željka Blakšic started years ago as a drawing game made for a Game Night series of free public events presenting artist-made games, organized by Sheetal Prajapati and Anna Harsanyi at Soho20 Gallery in New York City. Participants were invited to connect the dots in order to reveal and discover a female revolutionary portrait. All the women represented in the series of prints played a pivotal role in their community and later society; as activists, theorists, educators, and politicians in launching the revolution or bringing in a monumental social change that enriched the lives of many. Here we remember them and celebrate their bravery, selflessness, dedication, and complexity.
Željka Blakšic AKA Gita Blak is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who works with performance, 16mm film, video, and installation. Her practice is often collaborative and inspired by the sub-culture of the 1990s-era in Croatia when punk, anarcho, and eco movements were having a renewal. Resistance manifested itself through the cooperation and gathering of different alternative social groups and this experimental environment became a university of rebellion–a key force, giving voice to new expressions of democracy, justice, common values, and free speech. Blakšic often collaborates with members of different subcultures, activists, schoolgirls, singers, urbanists, and students, creating sites and praxis of collectivity. Using pedagogical methodologies within the context of contemporary art she organizes workshops, creates publications, makes films and exhibitions.Recent exhibitions include “It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades!” curated by Inga Lace & Katia Krupennikova at Framer Framed in Amsterdam; “The Witnessing Event” curated by Rashmi Viswanathan at Los Sures Museum in NY; “BROUHAHA” project at Recess SoHo; “Claim Space” performance at Museum of Modern Art, NY; Artizen Cluj, Romania; BRIC Contemporary Art Gallery, NY; Gallery Augusta, Helsinki; District Kunst- und Kulturförderung, Berlin; AIR Gallery, NY; Active Space, NY; Urban Festival in Croatia; Gallery of SESI, Sao Paolo, Brazil; The Kitchen, NY and The Khyber Center for the Arts in Canada. She was a recipient of the Residency Unlimited & National Endowment for the Arts Award 2017, New York USA; Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto Residency 2017, Biella, Italy; Recess Session commission 2016, New York USA; A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship Program for emerging women artists 2014/15, New York USA; The District Kunst Award 2013, Berlin; New York Foundation for the Arts Residency 2012, Paula Rhodes Award 2010, New York USA, and many others. Most recently she was a resident at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, UAE.
Image caption: Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869 – 1939) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, activist, and politician who believed that access to education was a step towards improving people’s lives. She was a historian and a theoretician of educational science in addition to being one of the main organizers of the socialist system of education. She served as the Soviet Union’s Deputy Minister of Education from 1929 until her death in 1939. A committed Marxist, she encouraged the development of a library system in the Soviet Union. She was the wife of Vladimir Lenin from 1898 until his death in 1924.
The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our exhibitions are still underway.
For Željka Blakšic’s website (AKA Gita Blak) click here. For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.
The Fordham University Galleries Online 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 spring installment of the Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Dickson Despommier: Photographs. Over the weeks to come, members from the Department of Visual Arts adjunct faculty will be sharing samplings of their production with the Fordham community.
Currently, the Fordham University Galleries are closed to the general public in response to COVID-19 (open for those on campus registered with VitalCheck). However, our gallery website will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study offered in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this spring as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.
Dickson Despommier: Statement The salmon and trout flies that are shown in this collection are superb examples of the craftsmanship of fly tying produced by two of the most highly praised and internationally recognized masters of the art form, Warren Duncan of St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, and Walt Dette of Roscoe, New York.
The images were produced by imaging each fly with a high-resolution scanner (Epson Perfection V750 PRO), then spending many hours on the computer “cleaning them up” and applying the names of each in script using Adobe Photoshop.
My passion for nature began when I was a kid, like so many others who also have developed a deep attachment to the natural world. At around the age of seven or eight, I began exploring my surroundings. I would wander through the tall grass fields near my house in northern California, collecting things that nature provided just for me (or so I thought) – bird’s nests, sometimes with the eggs still inside them, spiders of all sizes, tadpoles, and frogs, caterpillars, cocoons and butterflies, and a million other creepy crawlies, many of which were strictly prohibited from coming inside the house. Reluctantly, back into the fields they went. When I was 11, my family moved to New Jersey. My father and his two brothers were ardent fishers, casting their lines into the salty and brackish waters around their hometown of New Orleans (where I was born). In New Jersey, my dad joined the Oradell reservoir fishing fraternity.
Nearly every Sunday morning in the summer, he enjoyed the solitude of sitting along that lakeshore, firmly ensconced on his folding chair next to several solid fiberglass bait-casting rods propped up by forked sticks that were embedded in the muddy bank. He was a worm dunker most of his life but made the switch to lures when we bought a summer cottage in upper New York State. Meanwhile, back at the reservoir, he often did not catch anything, but occasionally would come home with a mixed stringer of perch, crappie, sunnies, and the occasional largemouth bass. Good eats! I was always impressed with his stick-to-itiveness and dedication to the sport, despite his low frequency of successes. When I became his fishing partner, I learned that it was not only about the catching that mattered. We shared many quiet days and some all-nighters on nearby lakes, again with mixed results. Nonetheless, when it was time to go home, we always expressed to each other how good it was to be off by ourselves surrounded by the beauty of the natural world. Few words were ever spoken, but I could feel that we both deeply appreciated the time we spent together.
In the meantime, my trusty bicycle allowed me the freedom to wander in ever-increasingly wider circles away from my apartment complex in Dumont. Eventually, I had my first encounter with a genuine trout stream, the Tenekill Brook in Demarest, New Jersey (see: Waist Deep In Water). It was love at first sight. As I matured, it was inevitable that I would take up some form of recreation that involved being outside for long periods of time. Trout fishing was my first and only choice, and it still is. I went off to college and gravitated towards the natural sciences, becoming a research parasitologist after graduating from the University of Notre Dame with a Ph.D. degree in microbiology. When I finished my post-doctoral years at The Rockefeller University in the late 1960s, I was fortunate to be asked to join the faculty at Columbia University’s medical school. I have been there ever since. The years flew by (where the hell did they go?), and I am now emeritus professor of microbiology and public health.
My interest in stream ecology arose early on during my undergraduate days. I joined Trout Unlimited after returning to the East Coast and became friends with a small group of dedicated fly fishers. Four of us formed an education group and developed a 13-week survey course on stream ecology for adult learners. We called the course “We All Live Downstream”. We offered it in multiple places over a six-year period during the 1970s. I never lost interest in the subject and began to take pictures each time I went out on the stream. Many of them are part of this website. I also began collecting published scientific studies on subjects related to various aspects of trout stream ecology. I have distilled this literature into the summaries for each section, serving as the foundation for The Living River: Stream Ecology for Trout Anglers. An earlier version was posted on the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum. It is my hope that the information contained within the body of The Living River website will inspire others to become involved in the stewardship of their home waters.
The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our exhibitions are still underway.
The Department of Visual Arts is pleased to present the Fordham University Galleries Online first installment of 2021, a portfolio of projects by Taiwanese artist Ya-chu Kang. Our gallery regularly features a body of work by a contemporary artist, alternating with our Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series, in which our talented adjunct faculty share samplings of their production with the Fordham community.
Ya-chu Kang is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on the relationship between humans, nature, and their intersection with social issues. Her ongoing textile cultural history research highlights the rich connection between craft and physical labor and its junction with trade and social structures. Kang’s projects often question how contemporary circumstances influence our understanding of tradition, affect economies, and impact natural environments. Both travel and residency experiences implicitly shape her perception, and exhibition themes strategically reflect site-specific concerns of materials, processes, and community-based collaborations.
Kang is a recipient of the 2007 Freeman Fellowship Program of Vermont Studio Center, the 2008 Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Program, the 2014 Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation FellowshipProgram, and numerous AIR Fellowships for her research. Since 2006 she has exhibited works locally in Taiwan and internationally in Japan, Europe, North America, and South Asia. Kang has researched textile culture in Japan, Peru, Thailand, and India with her publications, including Textile Map Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Image: Dirt Carpet #9 – Taitung, 2020, Mountain dirt The concept of this installation originated from the Taitung city’s location, which is surrounded by mountains and faces the sea where one can see the first sunrise from the Pacific Ocean. It is a stunning natural landscape, a traditional settlement of aboriginal cultures, and a rich natural resource that has attracted land development company interest. The ongoing construction process has caused ecological concerns and controversy, indirectly destroying the beaches and marine environment.
Dirt Carpet #9 is dirt and crushed stones shaped into repeating and symmetrical patterns. The sun and rays of light in the center mimic the warp yarns of the backstrap weaving loom. This type of loom uses two beams to hold the warp yarns, which attach to a strap passing across the weaver’s back and are fixed at the waist. This weaving method is popular among many indigenous cultures in various countries.
Patterns include daylilies, sugar apples, bonito fish, pottery wheels, and agricultural artifacts unearthed from the prehistoric ruins, in addition to construction-related images. The installation incorporates unpredictable external forces as time passes, how life responds to action, and intervention changes patterns. Location: Taitung Art Museum, Taitung, Taiwan. This series has been presented in Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Portugal, UK, and Hong Kong. It utilizes the shift of patterns and materials to tell a story and provide a new physical experience for audiences.
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 exhibitions are still underway.
Curators: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock & Joseph Lawton
Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is pleased to present the photographs of Gary Monroe. Exhibited here are twenty-one gelatin silver prints made between 1977 and 1986 in South Beach, Florida, of the elderly Jewish community.
In Gary’s words: South Beach was remarkable when I photographed there, which was almost daily. Actually, it was for a longer period, but that decade constitutes my being committed to making visual sense of life there. It was where Jewish people came to be together in their later years. In its way, it was a sacred place. These were the Jewish of the ‘Greatest Generation,’ Holocaust survivors among them; refugees from the cold northeast; working-class retirees. The average age was well into retirement. Ten years later, the Art Deco movement and other forces, including Miami Vice, and economic development, caused the demise of the old-world traditions long before attrition would have taken its toll. The lifestyle vanished as if it had never happened.
Gary Monroe, a native of Miami Beach, received a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1977. Since 1984 he has photographed throughout Haiti, Brazil, Israel, Cuba, India, Trinidad, Poland, France, Russia, Egypt, and in his home state of Florida. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Florida Department of State’s Division of Cultural Affairs, Florida Humanities Council, and the Fulbright Foundation. Gary’s publications include The Last Resort, Florida Dreams, Life in South Beach, Miami Beach, and Haiti. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters, Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman, and Silver Springs: The Underwater Photographs of Bruce Mozert. Recently he has been photographing the impact of corporate-driven planning on the Florida landscape.
Image credit: Gary Monroe, Sixth Street by Washington Avenue, 1978
Each fall, Fordham students working on their thesis projects in architecture, graphic design, film & video, painting & drawing, and photography come together for the Senior Seminar to share ideas, give feedback, and develop their unique vision. The semester culminates in the annual Highlights exhibition, featuring a selection of student works across all media.
This year, Amanda Asciutto contributes whimsical watercolor paintings that give traditional fairy tale narratives a feminist twist; Ashlinn Casey offers subtly moody oil paintings of interiors that are clearly lived in but devoid of inhabitants at the moment of depiction; Laura Foley presents a proposal for a sustainably built pavilion inspired by the waves of the Hudson and East River and the hills that once made up the island of Manhattan; and Alejandra Garcia puts forward brightly hued yet often ominous acrylic paintings depicting diosa, a skeletal protagonist who partially reflects Garcia’s experiences growing up as a Mexican American. Mary Hurstell’s quirky paintings of otherworldly bathroom scenes tread the line between the aversion to being seen and the desire to be known and understood; Bawila Idris’s lushly colored videos and photographic portraits navigate the prism of the body, beauty, femininity, race, and identity; and Lizzie McLaughlin’s mixed-medium abstract paintings vibrate with the energy of the psychedelic aesthetic that inspired them. Sophia Riley transforms street scenes from her native San Francisco in semi-abstract acrylic paintings in which bold planes of color teeter and collide; Justin Schwartz creates a tender portrait of his elderly grandmother by photographing the eerily empty suburban house she abruptly left after the pandemic struck; and Julia Taylor plumbs the mysteries of the nineteenth-century Spiritualism movement with multimedia collages and sculptures that suggest peculiar narratives with no clear answers.
These works offer a preview of the virtual solo student exhibitions that will be launched later this spring. To read more about the work, please visit the Fordham Art History Society’s Instagram page Art Ramblings, which is posting reviews by Lilianna Harris, Tess McNamara, Elise Beck, McKenna Meskan, Kassandra Ibrahim, Samantha White, Abigail McClain, Gillian Kwok, and Sarah Hujber.
Curated in collaboration with Casey Ruble, Associate Clinical Professor, Fordham University. For more information, email Professor Ruble.
Jazmin Ali Caitlin Bury Ally Cali Ethan Coughlin Valeria Deminova Emma Giroir Shannah Harris Meah Nizan Tori Pante Leeza Richter Evelina Tokareva
Organized by Professor Mark Street
Students were invited to respond to the neighborhoods around FCLC by taking photographs, shooting digital video, painting, and drawing, using posters and text, recording sound, making architectural sketches, or engaging in site-specific performances. Given the vagaries of the pandemic, some chose to focus on locales closer to where they live. Each student is working on both an artistic and a service project and presenting documentation of either or both.
Adjunct Faculty Spotlight SeriesŽeljka Blakšic AKA Gita Blak: Connect the DotsThe Fordham University Galleries Online
