Category: Painting & Drawing

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One ?>

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One

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 the 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight exhibition in the Ildiko Butler Gallery. We are fortunate to have so many exceptionally talented Adjunct Professors teaching in our department, in fact, so many that we have had to divide this exhibition into two parts.

The first installment, Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One, will include a sampling of work from the following artists: Zeljka Blaksic, Doug Clouse, Amie Cunat, Patrice Helmar, Matthew López-Jensen, Anibal J. Pella-Woo, Kimberly Reinhardt, and Lesley Wamsley. This group of artists represents the breadth of disciplines offered in the Visual Arts Department, including film, graphic design, painting, and photography. Despite the differences in their mediums, approaches, and subjects, their works generate a lively dialogue.

New Generation, by Zeljka Blaksic, is a short animated video that relies on photographs found in START magazine, one of the most popular newspapers in the seventies and eighties throughout the territory of former Yugoslavia. Her piece utilizes the archive as source material and provides a critical analysis of sexual discourse in the cultural and political context of socialism.

Doug Clouse prints and paints over commercially printed ephemera, coaxing out new possibilities by altering existing images and text. He is a graphic designer in New York City.

Influenced by depictions of nature from Shaker gift drawings, Art Deco, science fiction, and horror movies, Amie Cunat’swork is loud and flamboyant at first read; however, upon closer inspection, her paintings offer subtle play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien.

Patrice Helmar’s Down By Law is a series of photographs examining the American dream’s dark mythology and the timeless story of returning home. The history of photography is rife with work made by visitors that often have little connection to people and places they depict. In Down By Law, the artist is not attempting to document or sensationalize working-class and queer life; instead, she records what she would like to exist about her communities in contemporary culture.

Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based environmental artist, photographer, educator, Citizen Pruner, and community gardener. His projects combine walking, collecting, mapping, and extensive research. He is particularly interested in the relationships between people and local landscapes. Featured in the Lincoln Center’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is a recent walking-based artist project exploring Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The map, completely redesigned by the artist, centers an experience in the landscape around beech trees struggling to survive. The adjacent photographs are some of the trees featured on the map.

Selling Bananas In Ascending Order Of Ripeness is a project by Anibal J. Pella-Woo made up of 90 double-sided photographic prints. Each of the photographs was taken from the front seat of his car while parked at various locations. The texts accompanying the photographs are from overheard talk shows broadcasting on the car radio from when the photographs were made.

The structure for Crystal Gazing Amplifiers, Kimberly Reinhardt’s installation of ten naturally dyed, silkscreened bandannas is inspired by twill weaving patterns and Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall. Relying on the exponential effects of repetition and variation, Reinhardt plays with the transmutation from vernacular utilitarian object to a contemplative device meant to harness and focus the tension that arises between the two.

Lesley Wamsley is a plein air artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY, with a deep commitment to drawing from life. The relationship between observation and documentation is the foundation of her practice, and her work aims to communicate the personal and historical consciousness of place and time. For Wamsley, context is an essential question—how does it feel to experience a place, and how does the broader context shape that experience?

Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

Faculty Spotlight Series: Amie Cunat Drawings ?>

Faculty Spotlight Series: Amie Cunat Drawings

The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present a new summer installment of the Faculty Spotlight Series with Amie Cunat. This selection of drawings shares Cunat’s explorations, which have informed her recent work on canvas, and offer a play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien.

Amie Cunat Drawings is the second publication for Hayden’s Books, a series honoring Hayden Hartnett, a much-loved visual art major. Hayden’s Books focuses on presenting artist projects, research, critical writings, and works in progress.

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 Statement:
In 2018, Amie Cunat began to explore plant-like imagery within her abstract paintings. Influenced by depictions of nature from Shaker gift drawings, Art Deco, science fiction, and horror movies, Cunat’s work appears loud and flamboyant at first read. Whether they are painted from an observed source or the artist’s memory, their exclamatory presence is supplanted and prolonged through charged hue and inventive form. They offer a play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien. The selection of drawings shares her explorations, which have informed her recent work on canvas.

Artist Bio:
Amie Cunat (b. 1986, McHenry, IL) is a Japanese American artist, who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Cunat received her MFA from Cornell University, Post-Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Fordham University. She has had solo exhibitions at Peep (PA), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, Victori +Mo, Knockdown Center, Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill, Outside (MA), The Cooper Union, among others. Recent group exhibitions include Fur Cup at Underdonk (Brooklyn), The Unusual Suspects at DC Moore Gallery (NY), Surreality at Crush Curatorial (NY), The Unlikely Whole at ArtYard (NJ) and Softer but Louder at Geary Contemporary (NY). In 2019, she was awarded a Regional Economic Development Council Grant by NYSCA in collaboration with Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon. Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, ARTnews, Artsy, Artnet News, Vogue Italia, ArtMaze Mag, and Two Coats of Paint.

Book Link
Amie Cunat Website

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Lois Martin ?>

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Lois Martin

The Fordham University Galleries Online
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 the fourth installment of the Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series: Lois Martin. Over the months 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 now open to the general public. As well, our gallery website 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 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 Statement: For many years, I have been creating art about New York City subway riders. The subject compels me; I snatch sketches on the train as I travel, and then put together composites of remembered and imagined scenes in the studio. Children, wry contrasts, and glimpses of drama (whether romance, rage, or camaraderie) are favorite subjects.

I work in a variety of media at a miniature scale. In my mixed media sculptures, I build wire armatures for figure bodies and form heads and hands from polymer clay. The figures are dressed with found scraps, often re-purposed lost gloves or bits of fabric. My watercolor paintings are usually accentuated with gold leaf, and my drawings are executed in silverpoint on prepared paper. I love the way the combination of precious (gold & silver) and commonplace (scraps of paper) seems to reflect the subway setting with its compressed chain of humanity and contrasts of drama and dullness. Smashed up next to a stranger, subway riders don’t know whether their neighbor is a murderer or a Nobel Laureate—or who has just committed a robbery, won a lottery, or been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Sparks of emotion suggest optimistic or pessimistic readings, but there is no overarching narrative.

I work slowly, loading great detail into each compressed image. Often I work in a scroll format, representing a horizontal line of seated and standing figures. Together, the linear format, miniature scale, and richness of detail hopefully pull viewers into this mysterious subterranean orbit.

Image Caption: Lois Martin, Hawaiian Shirt, 2019, watercolor, 6 x 11 inches.

For further information, contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

New book: 2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions ?>

New book: 2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions

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 ?>

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.

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: AN ARCHIVE OF COVID19 ?>

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: AN ARCHIVE OF COVID19

Call for Submissions
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.

Faculty Spotlight 2019 ?>

Faculty Spotlight 2019

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Faculty Spotlight 2019

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.

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

For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here