Artist Talk with Leigh Davis
Artist Talk with Ian Burnley
New Portfolio: Ya-chu Kang
The Department of Visual Arts is pleased to present the Fordham University Galleries Online first installment of 2021, a portfolio of projects by Taiwanese artist Ya-chu Kang. 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.
Ya-chu Kang is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on the relationship between humans, nature, and their intersection with social issues. Her ongoing textile cultural history research highlights the rich connection between craft and physical labor and its junction with trade and social structures. Kang’s projects often question how contemporary circumstances influence our understanding of tradition, affect economies, and impact natural environments. Both travel and residency experiences implicitly shape her perception, and exhibition themes strategically reflect site-specific concerns of materials, processes, and community-based collaborations.
Kang is a recipient of the 2007 Freeman Fellowship Program of Vermont Studio Center, the 2008 Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Program, the 2014 Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation Fellowship Program, and numerous AIR Fellowships for her research. Since 2006 she has exhibited works locally in Taiwan and internationally in Japan, Europe, North America, and South Asia. Kang has researched textile culture in Japan, Peru, Thailand, and India with her publications, including Textile Map Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Image: Dirt Carpet #9 – Taitung, 2020, Mountain dirt
The concept of this installation originated from the Taitung city’s location, which is surrounded by mountains and faces the sea where one can see the first sunrise from the Pacific Ocean. It is a stunning natural landscape, a traditional settlement of aboriginal cultures, and a rich natural resource that has attracted land development company interest. The ongoing construction process has caused ecological concerns and controversy, indirectly destroying the beaches and marine environment.
Dirt Carpet #9 is dirt and crushed stones shaped into repeating and symmetrical patterns. The sun and rays of light in the center mimic the warp yarns of the backstrap weaving loom. This type of loom uses two beams to hold the warp yarns, which attach to a strap passing across the weaver’s back and are fixed at the waist. This weaving method is popular among many indigenous cultures in various countries.
Patterns include daylilies, sugar apples, bonito fish, pottery wheels, and agricultural artifacts unearthed from the prehistoric ruins, in addition to construction-related images. The installation incorporates unpredictable external forces as time passes, how life responds to action, and intervention changes patterns. Location: Taitung Art Museum, Taitung, Taiwan. This series has been presented in Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Portugal, UK, and Hong Kong. It utilizes the shift of patterns and materials to tell a story and provide a new physical experience for audiences.
Website
Instagram
For further information 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.
Spring Majors Meeting – Mar 4
Thursday, March 4
11:30-12:30pm
Contact Amie Cunat at cunat@fordham.edu to be invited to this Zoom talk.
Gary Monroe Photographs: South Beach 1977–1986
Gary Monroe Photographs: South Beach 1977–1986
Curators: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock & Joseph Lawton
Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is pleased to present the photographs of Gary Monroe. Exhibited here are twenty-one gelatin silver prints made between 1977 and 1986 in South Beach, Florida, of the elderly Jewish community.
In Gary’s words: South Beach was remarkable when I photographed there, which was almost daily. Actually, it was for a longer period, but that decade constitutes my being committed to making visual sense of life there. It was where Jewish people came to be together in their later years. In its way, it was a sacred place. These were the Jewish of the ‘Greatest Generation,’ Holocaust survivors among them; refugees from the cold northeast; working-class retirees. The average age was well into retirement. Ten years later, the Art Deco movement and other forces, including Miami Vice, and economic development, caused the demise of the old-world traditions long before attrition would have taken its toll. The lifestyle vanished as if it had never happened.
Gary Monroe, a native of Miami Beach, received a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1977. Since 1984 he has photographed throughout Haiti, Brazil, Israel, Cuba, India, Trinidad, Poland, France, Russia, Egypt, and in his home state of Florida. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Florida Department of State’s Division of Cultural Affairs, Florida Humanities Council, and the Fulbright Foundation. Gary’s publications include The Last Resort, Florida Dreams, Life in South Beach, Miami Beach, and Haiti. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters, Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman, and Silver Springs: The Underwater Photographs of Bruce Mozert. Recently he has been photographing the impact of corporate-driven planning on the Florida landscape.
Image credit: Gary Monroe, Sixth Street by Washington Avenue, 1978
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.
Art Making in Hell’s Kitchen and Beyond
Art Making in Hell’s Kitchen and Beyond Link
Featuring:
Jazmin Ali
Caitlin Bury
Ally Cali
Ethan Coughlin
Valeria Deminova
Emma Giroir
Shannah Harris
Meah Nizan
Tori Pante
Leeza Richter
Evelina Tokareva
Organized by Professor Mark Street
Students were invited to respond to the neighborhoods around FCLC by taking photographs, shooting digital video, painting, and drawing, using posters and text, recording sound, making architectural sketches, or engaging in site-specific performances. Given the vagaries of the pandemic, some chose to focus on locales closer to where they live. Each student is working on both an artistic and a service project and presenting documentation of either or both.
Photo by Leeza Richter
Political Engagement Posters
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.
For further information on the exhibition, please contact Professor Abby Goldstein or Professor Patricia Belen.
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.
Visual Arts Majors Meeting
Wednesday, October 21, 2:30 – 3:30pm
Contact Amie Cunat at cunat@fordham.edu to be invited to this Zoom talk.
Celluloid Series #1
Features 5 short films rented from the illustrious and irrepressible Filmmaker’s Coop. Remembrance of a Portrait Study is a haunting portrait of the filmmaker’s mother. The Floor of the World explores the ephemera of yesteryear and invites uncanny, dreamlike associations. Stranger Baby explores the word ‘alien’ with all its xenophobic baggage, and Harbour City takes us to the vibrant colorful world of Hong Kong streets. American Hunger travels from Philadelphia to the slave forts of Ghana to explore collective memory. Thanks to the Arts and Sciences Deans Faculty Challenge Grant.
Link to Screening
vimeo.com/showcase/celluloidseries
password: fmcoop
Join us for a Zoom discussion on Wednesday October 7 at 6 PM
Please email MStreet@fordham.edu or rossgmclaren@gmail.com for a Zoom invitation.