Visual Arts

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 Rail, Burnaway, 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.

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.

For further information on the exhibition, please contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.

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.

For further information on the exhibition, please contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.

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 Red Line Archive
The Gotham Center—The Red Line Archive: An Interview With Walis Johnson

For further information on the exhibition please contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.

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.