At this multimedia event in collaboration with Microscope Gallery and UnionDocs, Fordham students taking “Intro to Art and Engagement” showed work in a program together with internationally acclaimed experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris, on March 12, 2024.
The video installation and performance by Fordham students featured interviews, field recordings, and images of historical documents related to the destruction of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and Lincoln Square community in the 1950s.
The performance was followed by a presentation of God Bless the Child, Christopher Harris’s first autobiographical work.
In God Bless the Child, Harris draws directly from his experience as a foster child. Combining photos, records, and other materials from his personal archives with 16mm film footage he recently shot in Senegal, Harris situates “the carcerality of the social welfare state and child services in relation to Black childhood in the U.S.” within the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade and the French Catholic Church’s colonization of West Africa and the Americas. His hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, is presented alongside Saint-Louis, Senegal, as fraternal colonized twin cities.
The presentation was followed by an open conversation and Q&A with the audience.
The day before, Christopher Harris had lectured on abolitionist filmmaking for various classes taught by Alvarez, as well as Fadi Skeiker’s, THEA 4050 Arts, Social Justice, and Human Rights: Foundations:
These programs were supported by a Fordham University Faculty Challenge Grant and an Interdisciplinary Research Grant.
On September 16, 2024, students in the “Intro to Art & Engagement” course visited Materials for the Arts (MFTA), New York’s largest creative reuse center, to collect their art supplies. Everything at MFTA is free, as it would otherwise be discarded and end up in a landfill!
Afterwards, Education Coordinator, Will Niedmann, led students in a zine-making workshop, using found materials.
On Wednesday October 23, 2024, in the Lipani Gallery and the adjacent seminar classroom at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, there was a quiet and short multimedia installation by students and their interviewees studying the “art of the interview”.
After brief talks from representatives of Landmark West! (Executive Director Sean Khorsandi) and Good Shepherd Faith Presbyterian Church (Michael Nelson, Ronald Woods and Neal Matticks) on topics ranging from urban renewal to urban removal, students presented research talks they had developed with the help of New York Public Library staff (thanks to Mia Brunner of the NYPL General Research Division for her tremendous support, as well as her colleagues in the Picture Collection of the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs and the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History, and Genealogy).
The installation in the Lipani Gallery included this video by Fordham alumna Nikki Estelami, made with student field recordings and collages made by students and interviews from archival research at NYPL and Fordham University Special Collections.
This isn’t oral history featured presentations by Fordham students Junhan Zhao, Tanvi Shah, Ash Wang, Bhavika Yendapalli, Eric Bishop, Meena Kabbani and Morgan Mueller.
The classes of Professors Fadi Skeiker and Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock attended, along with several other individual guests.
This isn’t oral history was presented by Fordham’s Departments in Theatre and Visual Arts, Anthropology and American Studies.
In VART 2222 Art of the Interview, students record interviews with elders who recount the history of the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which was demolished in the 1950’s to build Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and other developments.
On Saturday December 14th, the Fall 2024 class presented artworks highlighting various stories at Good Shepherd Faith Presbyterian Church, where many interviewees are members:
Ash Wang created this animated collage video highlighting a story from an interview with Ronald Woods.
Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, by the way, is the last standing church to predate the Lincoln Center urban renewal project that demolished the rest of the neighborhood, and has a rich civil rights history.
Meena Kabbani and Bhavika Yendapalli created this piece from this interview with Michael Nelson, Harold Thomas, Debra Washington and Ronald Woods.
Eric Bishop features another Ronald Woods interview in this piece
Video by Morgan Mueller and Tanvi Shah, featuring a story told by Michael Nelson, Harold Thomas, Ronald Woods and Debra Washington
Here is Junhan Zhao’s video featuring stories told by Ronald Woods, Michael Nelson and Debra Washington.
(Intro to Art & Engagement: Protest, Participation, the Public & Other Performance Practices)
A very temporary installation
Monday December 16, 2024 | 2-3pm Butler Gallery | Fordham College at Lincoln Center | 113 West 60th Street New York
Through a workshop with beck haberstroh and Mira Dayal, authors of Camera of Possibilities: A Workbook Towards a Carrier Bag Theory of Photography, students taking VART 1111 “Intro to Art & Engagement” were asked to think about the ways that text can serve as an invitation for engagement. They considered how invitations might serve as an incentive for someone to join in, and indicate who is invited to participate, how they participate, and what they can expect when they do. At Loops & Loops, our very temporary installation, students used simple prompts to invite the public into challenging and abstract conversations.
Film photos by Suchi Jalavancha:
Artworks by VART 1111 students Suchi Jalavancha, Isis Poulose, Shamia Rahman, Veni Rosales, Michelle Rosas Garcia, Pradanya Subramanyan, Elizabeth Weldon and Janson Zheng.
Presented by the Department of Theatre & Visual Arts. Special thanks to Nikki Estelami, Materials for the Arts, and Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning.
The Fordham University Galleries Ildiko Butler Gallery November 25, 2024 – January 17, 2025 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
The Visual Arts Program at Fordham University and the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs are please to present The Intimacy of Prayer, an exhibition of Chester Higgins’ photographs of various forms of devotion taken across the Untied States, Africa, and the MENA region.
Photographer and author Chester Higgins was born in Alabama in 1946 and was formally educated at Tuskegee University, graduating in 1970. Experiences with his family’s church community, as well as with college campus student protest, were formative in developing the direction of Higgins’s artistic practice. Higgins’s oeuvre portrays the dignity of the African American and African diasporic communities, and this work has brought Higgins all over the world, and to Africa in particular, many times. Higgins worked as a staff photographer for The New York Times from 1975 until 2014, and is the author of several publications, including Black Woman (1970); Drums of Life (1974); Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994); Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging (2000); and Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey (2004).
Higgins’s work has been the subject of many international exhibitions and is held in notable collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Higgins lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
The Fordham University Galleries Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
The Fordham University Department of Visual Arts is pleased to present, Moments and Time,a final group show of the 2024 Senior Thesis Students.
Featuring work by: Booch O’Connell, Sara Lockett, Gabrielle Gowans, Arina Medvedeva, Maureen Segota, Erin Newton, Spencer Balter, Mila Gras, Julia Boberg, Caroline Wong, and Madison Nash.A closing reception will be on May 15 from 6-8pm.
Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery August 21—October 4, 2023 Performance by the artist and public reception: September 7th, 5:30—7:30 pm Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 Map to the Lipani Gallery fordhamuniversitygalleries
Chilean-born, New York-based artist María Verónica San Martín offers a retelling through performance, book art, and engravings of politically crucial moments of recent Chilean history and their interconnectedness with US experience. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, this exhibition focuses on San Martín’s motif of Dignidad as a connector of different elements of Chilean and US history across time and space, denouncing past abuses and crying out for social justice.
These elements include the coup on September 11, 1973—actively supported by the CIA—as well as other events before and afterward. One is the establishment in 1961 of Colonia Dignidad, an autarchic, fascist compound in southern Chile that aided in the torture and repression of leftist dissidents throughout the seventies and eighties. Meanwhile, in a finely made series of artist’s books, San Martín calls out for the dignity of the people tortured and disappeared by the dictatorship. The exhibit finishes with San Martín’s more recent etchings representing Chile’s social upheaval in 2019, in which protesters against neoliberal scarcity, state-sponsored racism, and police violence rechristened one of Santiago’s central squares as Plaza Dignidad.
The multidisciplinary exhibit—San Martín’s third solo exhibit in New York City—comprises eighteen pieces, including one sculpture, four artist’s books, two video screens showing a series of performances by the artist, and eleven engravings. The pieces are organized chronologically to trace the development of the concept of “Dignidad” over the past sixty years in Chile. There is a series of explanatory texts that contextualize the works within Chile’s history and culture.
These activities will provide an opportunity for three different academic departments at Fordham – Modern Languages and Literatures, Communication and Media Studies, and Visual Arts – to collaborate in an effort to position art, cinema, and literature as ways of working through the trauma of the coup and keeping the memory of the dictatorship’s victims alive.
At the opening reception on September 7, San Martín will introduce her work and do a mini-performance.
The exhibit is part of Chile 1973/2023, a series of programs organized by Fordham, Columbia, Princeton, and New York Universities to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Chile’s military coup through art shows, film screenings, and literary events.
About the artist: María Verónica San Martín (b. 1981) is a Chilean, New York-based multidisciplinary artist and educator who explores the impacts of history, memory, and trauma through archives, artist books, installation, sculpture, and performance. She was a fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and holds an MA from The Corcoran School of Art and Design, George Washington University, Washington DC. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn, NY; Artists Space, the New York Immigrant Artist Biennial, the Queens Museum and Rockefeller Center, all in New York City; at Trinity College, in CT; at the Print Center in Philadelphia, PA; and at the Chilean National Archive, Galería NAC, and Galería Animal in Santiago and at the Museum Meermanno, The Hague, Netherlands. Her work is held in more than 60 collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Watkinson Library, CT; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. María is currently working on a commission for NMWA’s Holding Ground: Artists’ Books for the National Museum of Women in the Arts project while preparing her first solo exhibition in Canada at The Goethe-Institute in October. She teaches at Parsons, The New School, NY; the Center for Book Arts, NY; Penland School of Craft, NC; The University of Miami, OH, and is part of the education program of Booklyn Art as well as an artist and board member.
Exhibition curated by Carl Fischer, Professor and Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Fordham University
