Last chance to see Amused Medusa, by Matthew Bakkom, in the Lincoln Center Visual Arts Complex Susan Lipani Gallery until September 30th. Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
Amused Medusa is a visual explication of the phenomenon of the anagram, a word or phrase whose constituent letters can be reordered to create an entirely new word. The occurrence of these linguistic gems is fundamentally accidental, yet their consideration as ordered pairs suggests intriguing new spaces of potential meaning for each audience member to contemplate.
This exhibition, inspired by Dutch grocery store flower displays, creates a rich, optically saturated context for the word pairings. The linear parameters of each piece are based on a set of children’s stencils the artist stumbled upon in Glendale, Queens, during the winter of 2025. All work in the exhibition was produced over the past year, first in Rotterdam, Minneapolis, and New Orleans.
In VART 2222 Art of the Interview, students record interviews with community members who discuss the past, present and future of the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which was demolished in the 1950’s to build Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and other developments.
This Fall 2025 class was generously supported by funding and staff at Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning
On Wednesday December 17th, the Fall 2025 class presented videos highlighting various stories at Good Shepherd Faith Presbyterian Church, where many interviewees are members:
This short film by Nora Kinney features interviews with Freddie Richardson, Humberto Pichardo, Jackie Brown Richardson and Tanisha Hill
Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, by the way, is the last standing church to predate the Lincoln Center urban renewal project that demolished the rest of the neighborhood, and has a rich civil rights history.
Video by Ayden Suber, featuring a story told by Huberto Pichardo
Lauren Vaughn and Kylie O’Toole made this video from an interview with longtime Lincoln Square community member, Mr. Freddie Richardson
Phillip (Rohde) Costello created this piece from interviews with Freddie Richardson and Humberto Pichardo.
Here is Amanda video featuring stories told by Freddie Richardson and Tanisha L. Hill.
Sage Rochetti’s video features stories by Freddie Richardson and Tanisha L. Hill.
Once a space of wealth and restriction, this former bank in Brooklyn New York was transformed into a soft, surreal stage. Inflatable structures pressed against the architecture, between floor and ceiling, like swollen memories of security, like the last breath of the institution trying to hold its place in a world that’s moved on. The printed bank boxes hinted at past obsessions with protection and power. They fluttered, flew off with the slightest breeze, turning the walls into living symbols of financial volatility.
Dancers, dressed as bankers, performed a 10-minute ritual at regular intervals— echoing, mocking, and ultimately shedding the gestures of the financial world : Their gestures mimiced the mechanical rituals of old finance: stamping papers, tightening ties, shaking invisible deal hands. But gradually, their movements loosened, their rhythm broke, the suits become costumes rather than uniforms. A farewell to a broken system. A welcoming of creative chaos.
All visitors received a key to the bank box when they arrived at The Bank.
Fordham University – Henrik Vibskov- The Bank Is Dead – Victor Jeffreys II – mode PR
Presented in partnership with Fordham’s Art & Engagement & Fashion Studies programs and the Center for Community Engaged Learning. Fordham partnership organized by Catalina Alvarez, in conjunction with April 29th event “Iridescent Worlds“.
Who is Henrik Vibskov?
Henrik Vibskov is a renowned and award-winning Danish fashion designer, artist, curator and musician.
Although commonly associated with fashion and the twisted yet tantalising universes created around each collection, Henrik’s creative practice covers multiple platforms.
Working in the intersection between art and design, his work ranges from fashion collections to installation, performances and exhibitions, always exploring creativity without limits and adapting the design approach to the changing contexts.
Since his graduation from Central St Martin’s in 2001, he has produced more than 40 fashion collections and exhibited in several international design fairs, festivals and museums all over the world, including MoMA in New York, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa and the ICA in London, to name a few.
Next to the biannual fashion collections, he has also designed costumes for numerous operas and performances, including collaborations with Hotel Pro Forma, the Oslo Opera House, The Swedish National Ballet and the Brussels Opera House.
Most recently he designed the costumes for the ballet “Hammer” by Alexander Ekman at the Gothenburg Opera in Sweden. As a musician, Henrik keeps himself occupied as a drummer currently with his band Luksus, who are to perform at Syd For Solen Festival 2023 in Copenhagen. He has also played with Hess is More, his own project Mountain Yorokobu, Mikael Simpson and Trentemøller, who he toured the world with for 6 years.
EMBODYING THE RECORD at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art ?>
On October 12, 2023, UnionDocs collaborated with Fordham University and our Center for Community Engaged Learning and Visual Arts Program, to ask how we might embody found histories.
Fordham students and Lincoln Square community members display collages they created through a workshop with Crystal Z Campbell the day before.
Workshop participants included Helen Cahill, Luisa Coutinho Gazio, Dana Ebralidze, Nicole Estelami, Matthias Lai, Nicole Miceli, Manpreet Singh, Marie Stephen, Herbert McMillon and Michael Nelson.
Beforehand, students had read excerpts from After 1921: Notes from Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and Beyond, a collection of poems, essays, and images edited by artist Crystal Z Campbell and co-published by their Archive Acts (archiveacts.com) and VSW Press.
UnionDocs hosted Crystal Z Campbell and Catalina Alvarez to present work that approaches embodiment and performance of underknown or erased histories. Crystal Z Campbell shared and unpacked their concept of “underloved archives” while Catalina Alvarez shared sequences from Sound Spring, a film that shares resonant overlaps and methodologies.
At this multimedia event in collaboration with Microscope Gallery and UnionDocs, Fordham students taking “Intro to Art and Engagement” showed work in a program together with internationally acclaimed experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris, on March 12, 2024.
The video installation and performance by Fordham students featured interviews, field recordings, and images of historical documents related to the destruction of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and Lincoln Square community in the 1950s.
The performance was followed by a presentation of God Bless the Child, Christopher Harris’s first autobiographical work.
In God Bless the Child, Harris draws directly from his experience as a foster child. Combining photos, records, and other materials from his personal archives with 16mm film footage he recently shot in Senegal, Harris situates “the carcerality of the social welfare state and child services in relation to Black childhood in the U.S.” within the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade and the French Catholic Church’s colonization of West Africa and the Americas. His hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, is presented alongside Saint-Louis, Senegal, as fraternal colonized twin cities.
The presentation was followed by an open conversation and Q&A with the audience.
The day before, Christopher Harris had lectured on abolitionist filmmaking for various classes taught by Alvarez, as well as Fadi Skeiker’s, THEA 4050 Arts, Social Justice, and Human Rights: Foundations:
These programs were supported by a Fordham University Faculty Challenge Grant and an Interdisciplinary Research Grant.
This isn’t oral history (learning from the library) ?>
On Wednesday October 23, 2024, in the Lipani Gallery and the adjacent seminar classroom at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, there was a quiet and short multimedia installation by students and their interviewees studying the “art of the interview”.
After brief talks from representatives of Landmark West! (Executive Director Sean Khorsandi) and Good Shepherd Faith Presbyterian Church (Michael Nelson, Ronald Woods and Neal Matticks) on topics ranging from urban renewal to urban removal, students presented research talks they had developed with the help of New York Public Library staff (thanks to Mia Brunner of the NYPL General Research Division for her tremendous support, as well as her colleagues in the Picture Collection of the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs and the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History, and Genealogy).
The installation in the Lipani Gallery included this video by Fordham alumna Nikki Estelami, made with student field recordings and collages made by students and interviews from archival research at NYPL and Fordham University Special Collections.
This isn’t oral history featured presentations by Fordham students Junhan Zhao, Tanvi Shah, Ash Wang, Bhavika Yendapalli, Eric Bishop, Meena Kabbani and Morgan Mueller.
The classes of Professors Fadi Skeiker and Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock attended, along with several other individual guests.
This isn’t oral history was presented by Fordham’s Departments in Theatre and Visual Arts, Anthropology and American Studies.
(Intro to Art & Engagement: Protest, Participation, the Public & Other Performance Practices)
A very temporary installation
Monday December 16, 2024 | 2-3pm Butler Gallery | Fordham College at Lincoln Center | 113 West 60th Street New York
Through a workshop with beck haberstroh and Mira Dayal, authors of Camera of Possibilities: A Workbook Towards a Carrier Bag Theory of Photography, students taking VART 1111 “Intro to Art & Engagement” were asked to think about the ways that text can serve as an invitation for engagement. They considered how invitations might serve as an incentive for someone to join in, and indicate who is invited to participate, how they participate, and what they can expect when they do. At Loops & Loops, our very temporary installation, students used simple prompts to invite the public into challenging and abstract conversations.
Film photos by Suchi Jalavancha:
Artworks by VART 1111 students Suchi Jalavancha, Isis Poulose, Shamia Rahman, Veni Rosales, Michelle Rosas Garcia, Pradanya Subramanyan, Elizabeth Weldon and Janson Zheng.
Presented by the Department of Theatre & Visual Arts. Special thanks to Nikki Estelami, Materials for the Arts, and Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning.
The Fordham University Visual Arts Program would like to announce this memorial exhibition, The Muse was Life; the Medium Was Film: Films by our charming resident contrarian Ross McLaren and his students in our Lincoln Center Visual Arts Complex Susan Lipani gallery.
Ross McLaren died in November of 2023, days short of his 70th birthday, after suffering a stroke earlier in the summer. Ross was a Canadian-born filmmaker, curator, colleague, teacher, and mentor living in New York who taught at Fordham University since 1986. This memorial exhibition highlights Ross’ dedication to the film medium and his influence on generations of Fordham University film & video students.
We miss his presence and take solace in the many memories he leaves behind. If Ross were here today, he would be holding court, telling stories, quick to share a toast, and likely one of the last to leave. There was only one Ross, unique as each of his films. In life, there is an endless continuation of frames; we thank Ross for sharing the ones he pulled from it.
Three monitors in the gallery space present Ross’ work. On monitor #1 is his infamous 1977 (27.75 min) film Crash ‘n’ Burn, shot on 16mm black & white film with an overdubbed soundtrack, documenting the Toronto, Ontario, Canada punk rock scene. On monitor #2 is Sex Without Glasses,1983, (12.75 min), a color, 16 mm film “starring a preverbal somnambulist floating between word and object.” –RM. And on monitor #3 is a selection of films that Ross admired from other filmmakers, including a range from Chris Marker’s La Jetée to cartoons about Porky the Pig.
Monitors #4 and #5 display nine short works (eight by Ross’ students over the years, one by a colleague): Spencer Balter, 5 am Thoughts at 3 in the Afternoon; Masha Bychkova, Gag; Alex Chambers, Cameraless Animations; Matt Gioia, Quick Sand; Liam Kenny, Joy, and Love for All Things in the Garden; Luke Momo, The Stamp Collector; Booch O’Connell, Affirmations; Glen Redpath (friend), Ross’s Rooftop Garden; Koty Vooys, Leaving NYC.
Fully circling the gallery and connecting Ross with his students are his used Super-8 film cartridges, a further reminder of Ross’ continued love of the film medium since the early days when he founded and was the first director of the Funnel Film Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
A memorial event in the Susan Lipani Gallery will occur on Friday, February 16, at 6 pm.
The Visual Arts Program would like to thank the Filmmakers’ Coop, who provided the 16mm print of Crash ‘n’ Burn and a digitized version of Sex Without Glasses, and special thanks to FCLC Dean Auricchio and FAS Dean Hume for funding the memorial event.
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Joseph Lawton arranged this memorial with the assistance of Gallery Programmer Vincent Stracquadanio. Anibal Pella-Woo and Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock oversaw digitizing Crash ‘n’ Burn. Student films were collected and organized by Slav Velkov, Colin Cathcart, Eamon Redpath, and Glen Redpath, who assembled the list of Ross’ favorite movies, and Wilson Duggan installed the exhibition.
