Visual Arts

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.