Featuring: Cat Applebaum, Spencer Balter, Julia Boberg, Sara Lockett, Arina Medvedeva, Madison Nash, Erin Newtown, Booch O’Connell, Caroline Wong
The Fordham University Galleries December 6, 2023 – February 7, 2024 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Every fall, Visual Arts majors persuing their thesis projects work together in the Senior Seminar course to discuss and develop their work – and to support one another in realizing a solo or two-person exhibition in the spring. This show presents a selection of the works produced, to date, by those students.
The poetic exhibition title was conceived of by the students. It reflects both the overlap and the differences in their projects, which come together to touch on themes of loss, chance, movement, memory, the unspoken, trauma, obfuscation, and, as one student wrote in her statement, “the loud and incessant beauty of living.”
“the loud and incessant beauty of living” comes from the statement of BoochO’Connell
Featuring: Catalina Alvarez, Amie Cunat, Aseel Sawalha, Vincent Stracquadanio
Reception December 1st – 6:00pm to 8:00pm
The Fordham University Galleries Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Fordham University and the Visual Arts Department is pleased to present Just a House, a group exhibition featuring the work of four faculty members.
How do we form feelings of beloning? Are there boundaries that describe the contour of these notions? What histories are they made from? Just a House explores ideas of displacement, familiarity, comfort, and connection through sculptural installation. Each artist uses a domestic material or motif, along with an element of suspension from the gallery’s ceiling to prompt conversation about the complicated, sometimes precarious nature of belonging.
Within Catalina Alvarez’s intimate installation, a grouping of two birch stools (by Peter Blasser), a wooden table (by Daniel Fishkin), a rocking chair, and animal skins invite a visitor to watch two chapters from her anthology film, Sound Spring (Seq. #5 & #7), projected onto a centralized plinth. Unfolding in a series of eight vignettes, Sound Spring explores the history of Yellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents in comical scenes: one interviewee rollerblades and reads the village’s water meters, another stands on his head in a breakdancing freeze. The villagers describe American history—their ancestors’ settlements after slavery, a friendship with Coretta Scott King, and Ohio’s Trail of Tears— among other more personal details of village life. By interacting with their own previously recorded media, villagers uncover layers of time and storytelling.
In Days I’ve Spent, Times I’ve Tried, Vincent Stracquadanio paints sequential rows of Coliseum-like archways on a bed sheet to describe a liminal space between structured architecture and soft installation; between positive and negative space; between conscious and dream worlds. With imagery that draws from Sicilian folkloric traditions, Etruscan frescoes, and Giallo horror films, Stracquadanio frequently uses patterns, gestural abstraction, or archetypical forms to flatten or expand space. The artist generates a purposeful lack of solidity and definition –as if ghostly forms are departing and floating through a dreamlike miasma—offering expressions of grief and longing.
Central points of tension acknowledge and defy the gravity of Aseel Sawalha’s objects. Lantern contains a multitude of hand-folded, paper shapes, which are connected by a system of crocheted netting that cascades from the gallery’s ceiling. The organic entanglement of the vermillion thread contradicts the sharpness of the geometric elements it binds.Passages and Spooler are made of reformations of discarded Fordham books and other found objects (Christmas tree stand, discarded mail tubes).The artist’s work is informed by ethnographic fieldwork research with Bedouin tribes, post-war Beirut, New York City women artists and the art scene in Jordan and Palestine. Meticulously constructed, the sculptures are hybrid restructurings of found books and print matter modified by hand rolling and quilling, weaving, and paint, which mesh forms from modern and post-modern visual arts with techniques from traditional Arabic and Palestinian handicrafts.
Made from paper materials and paint, Amie Cunat’s structure –with ubiquitous siding on its façade and a hunter green interior—resembles an excerpt from a Midwestern ranch-style home. Assumptions about its locale and reference are complicated by its construction. Influenced by unnamable sentience within horror movies like the The Blob, The Thing, and Them! and false front architecture, Cunat’s object contains two Crappie gills that disrupt the logical continuity of its domestic container. Window and Gills, Tatami Tan is both alien and familiar; animal and built.
For the first time in three years, the Visual Arts Department will be running our summer course in Rome, and applications are now open for VART 3500 Documentary Photography, a Summer Session 1 course, is open to all students, so feel free to invite your non-Visual Arts Majors/Minors friends.
The course requires no prior experience with photography, and digital cameras will be provided to participants; however, it will be up to you to eat all that delicious gelato. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, so please set up an appointment with either myself or Professor Lawton to speak more about the course if you are interested. The attached PDF shows examples of the previous student photography books, which are the culmination of the class and become a part of the university library collection, as well as some of the exhibitions of student work.
Ciao, Stephan and Joe (Stepahno & Giuseppe)
Program Fee $3,600 + 4 Credits Summer tuition
What is included:
Local Transportation and group pick-up from the Airport
Student Housing
Welcome Dinner & Farewell Dinner
Classroom space, Monday through Thursday, for 15 hours a week (for critiques and Italian film screenings)
Fordham Summer Study Abroad ScholarshipCompleted applications must be submitted by February 15. Scholarships are applied toward the summer course tuition for summer study abroad programs offered to undergraduates by the International & Study Abroad Programs Office. Award amounts will range from $500 to $1,500 and will be awarded based on financial need, academic merit, and your study abroad application essay responses.
The Fordham University Galleries Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Dan Fig, not so much the pessimist as the anxious doubter, stares the Gorgon in the face: if our consciousness is being molded by GUIs (graphical user interfaces), he proposes, wide-eyed, to let into the same space a whole host of different realities. The result is an orbit without anchor point, a web of relativity, a sui generis game of self-cancelling logic. Play is a method here as well: a way of channeling the energy (terror) of life in times of clip-art overload, but without faith that any revelation will ensue. From a surfeit of pictures, a tight grid emerges.
The paintings endure this tightening stoically. It’s worth noting that for the Stoics, the goal of indifference was freedom.
Projects selected and created by BALCONY: International Network of Curators Participants: Raya Bruckenthal, Manuela de Leonardis, Richard Demarco, Drorit Gur Arie, Felice Hapetzeder, Michael Lazar, Paul Malone, Tomasz Matuszak, Anibal Pella-Woo, Fabrizio Perozzi, Doron Polak, Nicola Rae, Maayan Tsadka, Jan Van Woensel, Jaroslav Vančát, Joyce Yahouda, Dzintars Zilgalvis, Kriss Zilgalvis Organizer: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Fordham University is proud to present a new exhibition in the Lincoln Center Campus Lipani Gallery, ARCHIVUM, which brings together twelve curators from nine countries to select over thirteen artists. Through various forms, including book, installation, photography, sound, and video, this exhibition’s contributors explore what might constitute an archive. With that question as the starting premise, the works on display provide a range of interpretations of places, events, and institutions and raise numerous questions about research, commerce, history, translation, and memory.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida stated that the question of archives is not a question of the past. It is a question of the future, a question of response, of promise, and a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive has become raw material and inspiration for many artists over the previous decades. Artists develop different levels of relationship with personal, familial, and public archival material. They move in a flexible space of history and cut across the depths of time. They decompose archival materials, disrupt and reference them, and create new narratives from concrete or imaginary archives. The archival memory they control, mark, and limit starts a conversation in which the artist decides who will enter the gates of memory.
Balcony: International Network of Curators was set up by Drorit Gur Arie, Doron Polak, and Michael Lazar in April 2020 as a network of independent international curators. The platform establishes connections between art curators to exchange professional information and initiate joint projects.
This exhibition, ARCHIVUM, is sponsored by Fordham University’s Department of Visual Art and is organized in New York by Professor Apicella-Hitchcock.
Featuring: Lu Aubin, Alexandra Chambers, Bryson Clark, Alyssa Daughdrill, Molly Frank, Katherine Heaton, Anna Koch, Chloe McGee, Maggie McNamara, Amelia Medved, Angela Payne, Dino Romano, Slav Velkov, Schuyler Workmaster, John Zahran-Colon
The Fordham University Galleries December 9, 2022–January 31, 2023 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
*Outside visitors must show proof of vaccination and booster to enter the school.The Fordham University Department of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the current exhibition in Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery, notes. (Highlights from the Senior Seminar: Studio Art). This exhibition brings together the fifteen artists who participated in the 2022 Senior Seminar: Lu Aubin, Alexandra Chambers, Bryson Clark, Alyssa Daughdrill, Molly Frank, Katherine Heaton, Anna Koch, Chloe McGee, Maggie McNamara, Amelia Medved, Angela Payne, Dino Romano, Slav Velkov, Schuyler Workmaster, John Zahran-Colon. The work on display represents a snapshot of their endeavors thus far and provides a glimpse into their upcoming senior thesis exhibitions beginning in March 2023.
Their chosen mediums range between architecture, film/video, graphic design, installation, painting & drawing, and photography. Accordingly, their styles and topics vary; however, their attention to craft, concept, and message is consistently deliberate and thoughtful. Please be certain to follow our talented emerging artists as they exhibit throughout the spring semester in our Ildiko Butler Gallery and the Susan Lipani Gallery.Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, co-curator, 2023
ILDIKO BUTLER GALLERY Fordham University 113 W 60th Street New York, NY
The gallery is open to the Fordham community 9am – 9pm seven days a week. Outside visitors should call ahead to inquire about current admission protocol.
Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is pleased to present Aysha Hamouda: print(“Hello, World”). Through the use of ultraviolet light, ultraviolet-sensitive paint, and florescent yellow string, this site-specific installation investigates the idea of “collective dissociation” — a term Hamouda uses to describe the physiological and psychological effects of technologies related to the Internet, information, and the virtual world.
The artist states: “The allures of the Internet are created by algorithmic poems that project/manicure/curate custom realities for each user under the accepted and untamed credo of A Better,(Hyper) Individuated Experience. The web, prized for its global networking, has also come under heat for its main source of capital — its users’ devoted attention or DATA. Meanwhile, the web’s growth of information — factual, fictional, personal — is relentlessly on the rise. The result is a growing Virtual Collective: a cluster of hyper-individuated realities dissociated from one another and yet becoming, somehow, whole.”
Recalling work from the Light & Space movement, Hamouda’s installation plays with optics: The strings and painted wall appear, at certain vantage points depending on the viewer’s height, to flatten into a glowing blue two-dimensional rectangle behind a dense set of yellow horizontal lines. (The effect is even more pronounced when the installation is viewed head on through a camera lens.) From this perspective, every element of the piece exists in a form of controlled unity. However, as the viewer moves physically to other points of perspective, the installation reveals itself as a chaotic web with unexpected depth and complexity.
Titled after Brian Kernigham’s 1972 book A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B., which first introduced “Hello, World” to illustrate variables within programing, print(“Hello, World”) (a Python version of “Hello, World”) explores viewers’ perception of a kinetic, fragmented “whole” and poses the question: How do we construct a sense of grounding when confronted with the groundless? By giving physical form to the primordial skeleton of the virtual world — the rectangle, its pale bluish light — print(“Hello, World”) lays bare our innate human desire to impose structure, systems, and order on a reality infinitely more complex and in constant flux.
Aysha Hamouda (she/they; b. 1991, Switzerland) is an installation and multimedia artist based in the U.S. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Germany, Switzerland, China, and the United States. In 2019, she was part of Wavelength Reset, an international platform and traveling exhibition based in Shanghai, China. As part of that project, her work Input/Output was shown at the Times Art Museum in Beijing and the Artron Museum in Shenzhen. Hamouda received a BFA from Lyme Academy College of Fine Art in 2014 and an MFA from Syracuse University in 2018.
Sarah Hirzel:Overburden June 3 – September 23, 2022 LIPANI GALLERY
The gallery is open to the Fordham community 9am – 9pm seven days a week. Outside visitors should call ahead to inquire about current admission protocol.
Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery is pleased to present Sarah Hirzel: Overburden, an exhibition of thirty-five digitally altered, pigment-printed drawings of the stuff we make, use, and leave in our wake in our time on this planet—hatchets, hairbrushes, computers, high rises, oil rigs, musical instruments, fireplaces, drainpipes, cars, boats, bones, furniture, roads, garbage—and of the organic matter that grows up among it.
Hung salon-style in an eclectic array of frames found by the artist in attics, thrift stores, and other out-of-the-way corners, the pieces in this show are by turns poignant, poetic, humorous, dark, and sometimes just simply odd, bringing together the mundane and the momentous in a kind of landfill logic both chaotic and stratified. In one piece, mounted in a small frame of carved black roses, a computer chip sprouts grass; in another, a battle between trumpets and leaf blowers rages; in yet another, the New York skyline morphs into a purple crystal.
Most people are familiar with the term overburden in its verb form—to load with too many things to carry. Fewer know its definition as a noun—rock or soil overlying a mineral deposit, archaeological site, or other underground feature. The works in this show plumb both meanings of the word, conveying the weight of accumulation yet retaining a sense of curiosity about what remains hidden, waiting to be discovered. Indeed, Hirzel likens her creative process to that of a detective searching for clues in a world that feels upside down, inside out, and still, somehow, strangely beautiful.
Sarah Hirzel is an artist and educator based in Massachusetts where she draws, wrangles a chaotic garden, hangs out with her family, and supports student artists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a founding staff member of MIT’s Voxel Music and Arts Innovation Space and curates the MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Art and Wesleyan University, both located in post-industrial central Connecticut. You can find her in the household accent section of your local thrift shop.
The Fordham University Galleries Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries March 1 – March 20, 2022
The Visual Arts Program at Fordham University is pleased to present MEN CRY, a video series by Fordham alumnus Martin Nuñez-Bonilla (’18). This moving compilation of interviews began with the seemingly simple question: When was the last time you cried?
In the words of the artist:
Four years ago, when I was a senior at Fordham, I spent a month talking to men about their feelings in the studio of the Visual Arts Complex at the school. Those interviews would go on to become MEN CRY, a video series in which people talk about their feelings and experiences with masculinity. What started out as a response to sexism and the violence that comes from emotional repression in men has turned into so much more. The project has reached across the country and continues to build community with people who want to encourage authenticity in a suppressive world. Masculinity is a topic that is so much more nuanced and wide-reaching than I could have ever imagined. This nuance has created the current moment, in which MEN CRY has evolved and I’m trying to figure out what comes next.
Today, four years later, I’ve turned 25, experienced a pandemic, left a 9 to 5 job, and been formally diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety. This big moment in my life has inspired me to take a step back and examine my own habits, mental health, and masculine behaviors. It’s not enough to say the right things and be a “good guy” — I have to also challenge myself to improve.
I am in transition and the MEN CRY project is in transition, too. As I take this time to grow and explore, I also want to take the time to look back and appreciate the folks who have shared incredible stories and demonstrated such tenderness and love. I’d like to give a special thank you to everyone who was brave enough to cry, to laugh, and to feel on MEN CRY. JP Alba-Dennis Dominick Alcantara Jordan Almodovar Daniél Alvarez Miles Ballard Arthur Banach Mik Berry Jason Bost Isabella Breton Michael Cole Jose “Mozo” Cruz Chandler Dean Jack DeWahl Sergio Echenique Kelveen Fabian Maribí Henriquez Doug Horner Amilcar Javier Kyle Kilkenny Lou Knows “Juice” Mackins Luis Mejicanos Tony Quera T Michael Rock José Roldan Jr. Dorien Russell Vincent Rutherford Ian Schafer Given how much love we’ve all put into this project, I hope you can walk away knowing:
Emotions are important.
Mental health is important.
Progress is non-linear.
Tenderness is bravery.
Pink is a kickass color.
Martin Nuñez-Bonilla is an Afro-Latino visual artist and public speaker based in New York City with a passion for masculinity reform, BIPOC equality, and vulnerability. He currently works with organizations, causes, and events on their visual materials and communications. He can be reached at martinnunezbonilla.nyc@gmail.com or via his website (www.mnbnyc.com) or Instagram (@mnbnyc).
MEN CRY is an unscripted video series and digital platform for exploring modern masculinity, sharing stories, and sharing resources for people of all genders. You can watch past episodes on YouTube, check out the Instagram Live series on @allmencry, or learn more at mencry.nyc.
If you are a student struggling with your mental or emotional health, or if you just need someone to talk to about the challenges you are facing, Fordham’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CPS) offers free and confidential services on both campuses. To schedule an initial screening or walk-in appointment, please call or visit one of their offices (at Lincoln Center: 160 W 62nd Street, rm G-02, 212-636-6225; at Rose Hill/Westchester: O’Hare Hall Basement, 718-817-3725). If you are experiencing a mental health emergency during non-business hours, please contact the Public Safety Office at Fordham or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. A representative from the CPS office will also be available outside the gallery from noon to 1pm on March 1, 3, 7, and 11 to answer any questions you may have.
