Hot off the press—the 2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions book by Amanda Asciutto, Catherine Cain, Ashlinn Casey, Laura Foley, Alejandra Garcia, Mack Hurstell, Bawila Idris, Jesse McBrearty, Elizabeth McLaughlin, Vittoria Orlando, Sofia Riley, Justin Schwartz, and Julia Taylor is now available. Edited by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock with a fantastic cover design by Natalie Norman-Kehe. 142 pages of amazing work by our graduating artists!
2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions: Small Square, 7×7 in, 18×18 cm, 142 pages is available to preview and purchase here.
Highlights: Selections from the Senior Seminar in Visual Art ?>
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.
The Fordham University Galleries 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 a new exhibition, Political Engagement Posters, simultaneously in both the Lipani Gallery and the Ildiko Butler Gallery.
Objective: we gave our students in the Graphic Design and Digital Tools class the assignment to design a poster that engages their peers in the voting process. Result: the task’s response was so enthusiastic that the posters have filled the Lipani Gallery walls and necessitated installing additional posters in the Ildiko Butler Gallery atop a preexisting exhibition.
We hope that these inspirational, educational, and provocative posters remind our community of their privilege and civic duty as we approach election day. The eye-catching and informative posters on display will undoubtedly encourage participation in the democratic process and foster an appreciation for clear, effective design.
Currently, the Fordham University Galleries are closed to the public in response to COVID-19. However, the Ildiko Butler Gallery and the Lipani Gallery are still open to Fordham University students, teachers, and staff. Our gallery website will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the world of contemporary art and different areas of study offered in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for our online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.
The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the second installment of the Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series with Doug Clouse’s Gravestone Lettering. 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 in response to COVID-19. 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 increased 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.
Doug Clouse Gravestone Lettering
The reason I usually give for my interest in gravestones is my love of lettering and type. I’m a graphic designer, so it is hardly surprising that I am fascinated by the “type” (it is almost always lettering) on gravestones. In addition to their lettering, there is much more to justify research in gravestones: their endless variety of sculptural shapes, their texts, and the connections they maintain to individuals long dead. Each memorial is a micro-history of a person, place, and time.
Cemeteries are packed with life and full of meaning, from the contours of the landscape to the style of lettering on the stones. To read cemeteries and gravestones requires sensitivity and humility. One can learn much about living communities by exploring their cemeteries first, such as whether a town is rich or poor (and when; a community’s economic history is displayed in the scale of its memorials), its cultural ambitions, the skill level of its craftsmen, its ethnic origins, and the calamities it endured. Also, a community’s emotional tone can be gauged by the expressiveness of its memorials; their pathos or restraint indicates whether individuals felt at liberty to express themselves or not.
We tend to think of cemeteries as sad places, and interest in them as somewhat morbid. In a cemetery with expressive memorials, the pathos can tug at you, inviting contemplation of one’s insignificance, the fragile nature of physical satisfaction, and our short-lived connections to others. While respecting the expressions of grief (with the humility mentioned earlier), I resist their gravity by maintaining a sturdy conviction or delusion that I will not be joining the silent throng any time soon. Even inscriptions that speak directly to the living and remind us of our inevitable end, like this well-known one:
Remember me as you pass by, As you are now, so once was I, As I am now, so you must be, Prepare for death and follow me.
don’t oppress me, as I am distracted by speculation about why a gravestone client would choose to remind us of death. Were they angry their time was up? Or perhaps reluctant to forgo one last attempt to exert influence in the world?
Lettering and typography have given focus to my research and interest in gravestones. That research has taken place primarily in two locations: Kansas and New York City.
Kansas In 2013 and 2014 I made two trips to Kansas to research and photograph gravestones around Wichita, Kansas. My father’s family is from this area and I had noticed well-lettered gravestones on a family visit years before. The lettering looked similar to the nineteenth-century printing style that was the subject of my 2009 book The Handy Book of Artistic Printing, and I wanted to explore the connection between printed typography and inscriptional lettering.
I was very lucky that some Kansas gravestone makers signed their work because I soon discovered the Wichita firm of Kimmerle & Adams, the designers of many of the stones that appealed to me. This firm stimulated my research by focussing my exploration of many small cemeteries in southeastern Kansas and also broadening it to include the social history of Wichita and Kansas. I wanted to know more about Kimmerle & Adams and how they brought a sophisticated style of lettering to a young, raw place like Kansas in the 1800s. Besides cemeteries, I visited local museums and historical societies to learn more about the area.
When I encounter fascinating historical design, I’m compelled to make something of or with it. In response to the Kansas gravestones, I took many photos of them and made rubbings of the most visually appealing. The rubbings are basically relief prints that are part historical record, part aesthetic object. They were made quickly with colored wax on gravestone rubbing paper, though when that ran out I used sheets of thin newsprint torn from a roll.
Back home in New York, I compiled my research into an illustrated talk about Kimmerle & Adams that I gave at Cooper Union and also at Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Wisconsin in 2015. I had high-res photos made of the large rubbings, designed a print of scans of rubbings of the word DIED in many different styles, and made postcards and stickers to give away at my talks.
New York City I live in New York City, where there are millions of graves, marked with memorials as varied as the population. Cemeteries are larger, richer, and more closely administered than in Kansas, so I only recently discovered places to make rubbings of gravestones. Mostly I have explored and photographed the lettering styles at two famous cemeteries, Woodlawn in the Bronx, and Green-Wood in Brooklyn. Because of its location and funding, Green-Wood is much better known than Woodlawn, but Woodlawn boasts a greater variety of lettering styles and a darker, more disheveled landscape. In 2020, I co-hosted a virtual lettering tour of Green-Wood, using photos that I took with my business partner, Angela Voulangas. As I had in Kansas, at Green-Wood I focussed on connections between inscriptional lettering and printing typography.
At Woodlawn, my most exciting discovery related to design has not been the lettering, but rather the unmarked grave of a famous graphic designer, E. McKnight Kauffer. His flat, grassy plot, an obvious gap in a row of gravestones from the 1950s, carries more pathos than any pat inscription, and inspires reflection on the arc of creative careers. Kauffer’s work is celebrated and collected and his home in London is marked with a historical plaque, but he died in poverty and his actual physical remains are nearly forgotten. For several years I have wanted to design and install a memorial for Kauffer, but have not moved beyond getting permission to do so from his descendants in England.
My latest gravestone project in New York City has been to make rubbings of 18th and early 19th-century stones in abandoned cemeteries in Staten Island. Some of the gravestones are disintegrating, so my business partner and I have decided to make rubbings of what we can. Like the Kansas rubbings, these prints are historical records and also images of beautiful things, made in a beautiful way.
The Staten Island gravestone rubbings have inspired rubbings of other historical objects from Staten Island: antique bottle fragments found on the shore. Staten Island has a long industrial history and some of it still washes ashore onto polluted but fascinating beaches. I have been collecting sherds and making rubbings of ones with text on them. These feathery rubbings of broken glass also begin to tell stories of our ancestors’ lives.
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 Doug Clouse/The Graphics Office website: click here For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here
I am pleased to announce to you the completion of a project that is very dear to me. Clocking in at 438 pages with over 4500 images, Case Study Tokyo 2020 by the Gabelli School of Business is finally here!
Take one part working methodology from the influential 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, combine with the megacity of Tokyo, add Fordham University Gabelli students, stir for ten days in Japan and what do you get? You get direct acquisition of knowledge through experience with a small team, realized in a hardback research volume focusing on branding, sensory marketing, architecture, design, photography, and urban planning.
Hearty congratulations to the intrepid researchers: Madison Burkart, Branden Cheung, Kaia Corthell, Alexa Cucchiara, Shauna Fortier, Alexander Gardner, Sekai Kaminski, Fionna Lui, Declan McCabe, Sraboni Paul, Anja Pelkola, Raimundo Sanchez, Amanda Scacalossi, Samantha Schwartz, Joseph Sellmeyer, Polina Yafizova, Kevin Zhang, Yiyun Zheng. Preview the entirety of the book HERE. As well, you can order in softcover or two different hardcover formats. Enjoy!
A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: AN ARCHIVE OF COVID19 ?>
The Visual Arts Program has initiated a partnership between Fordham University and Arizona State University (as well as other schools across the country) to contribute to a remarkable public archive of materials related to how the CoVid19 pandemic is affecting our lives on a local level. You can submit images, text, videos, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram or Snapchat memes, screenshots of the news, emails — anything that speaks to the moment. Here is a link to a fuller description of the project. Here is a link to the archive’s submissions page.
In the “Your name, as the contributor” field, add Fordham University after your name. This will allow us to search for your submission on the back end of the website and publish it more quickly. At some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be a Fordham Featured Collection that contains all Fordham submissions in one place.
In the “Description” field, add #FordhamUniversity.
Important: At the end of the form, check “Publish my contribution on the web.” If you don’t check this box, your submission will remain private and not appear on the website.
To see what other Fordham students have submitted so far, search “Fordham University” in the search bar at the top of the home page. Please contact Artist in Residence Casey Ruble at caseyruble@gmail.com if you have any questions or need help making your submission.
Featuring work by Abby Goldstein, Richard Kalina, Carleen Sheehan
November 25, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Reception: TBD
The Ildiko Butler Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
The galleries are open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except on university holidays fordhamuniversitygalleries.com
The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2019 installment of the annual Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. Each year three members from the Department of Theater and Visual Art are asked to share a sampling of their production with the Fordham community. This year the Painting concentration is represented by both Richard Kalina and Carleen Sheehan with Abby Goldstein representing the Graphic Design concentration. Despite the differences in their mediums and approaches, their works generate a lively dialogue.
Abby Goldstein Deep red by the side of the road, 2019, pigment and matte dispersion on paper, 44″ x 30″
My work is shaped by my surroundings; to what I see, to what I read, what I hear, and how I feel. I begin by setting visual guidelines, e.g.: medium, color, form, and size. I then develop a visual narrative using repetitive shapes, linear marks that transverse the picture plane. Improvisation is integral to my process. Each mark informs the next defining the composition as it develops. I move between representation and abstraction; my objective is to suggest an imaginary landscape that is based on environment, observation, and memory.
Richard Kalina Prospect 9, 2014, 16″x16″, collage, acrylic, flashe on linen
The works in this show are nine out of the twelve paintings in the Prospect series. I began work on them in the early summer of 2014. I had been looking at and thinking about Le Corbusier and visionary, Machine Age architecture. A question arose when I drew and painted these works: were they plans or elevations, diagrams (with rooms and balconies) or fully fleshed abstract images? The paintings are built from a toolkit of components: panels, bars, circles, and complex linear connectors. They are constructed from painted and torn rice paper layered and collaged on linen. There is also a governing, game-like logic — a way of putting a rational order on sets of intuitive processes. In this case, the number of the internal panels matches the number of the color bars (and no color bar repeats) and the circles always come in two of each color. This sounds rather serious, but the paintings are meant to be playful and while they are at it, musical in a baroquely contrapuntal way. Importantly for me, they opened the door to my investigations of abstraction over the last five years.
Carleen Sheehan
detail, Cove (2019), acrylic, gouache, mixed media on canvas, 48″ x 34″
A central focus of CARLEEN SHEEHAN’s work is the intensity of contemporary space, with its accelerated temporal shifts and collaged eccentricities. Recent imagery celebrates the spectacle of the natural, depicting small fragments of ephemera: the movement and density of water, shifts in light, color and atmosphere. The work relies on the inter-connectedness of visual forms and processes across categories and disciplines, and on descriptive qualities inherent to different levels of information.
