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.
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.
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.
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.
Landscape Photographs Featuring work by Gabriel Blankenship and Brian & Gareth McClave Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Fordham University is proud to present a new exhibition, Landscape Photographs, which brings together work from American artist Gabriel Blankenship and British artists Brian & Gareth McClave. This exhibition’s straightforward title might lead one to presume images that conform to traditional expectations for landscapes—beautiful, transcendent, or sublime; moreover, accessible and understood within the genre’s history. The landscapes depicted here are undoubtedly related to the world we know, although the information is translated and parsed in potentially unfamiliar ways. Both Blankenship and the McClaves observe and take inspiration from the world around us, then process and present their information in carefully managed integers.
With Gabriel Blankenship, we see an array of ordinary suburban rooftops, clouds, powerlines, and foliage with different croppings and color schemes. On the one hand, these views are somewhat general, appearing related to a loose snapshot aesthetic filtered through video game technology. Yet, they are engineered and controlled at the smallest decision-making level, and selectively built up pixel by pixel into iconic images. A tension exists between the extreme control exercised during the image construction and the deceptively casual results. Ultimately, these scenes distill and precisely articulate some of life’s quotidian details.
Brian & Gareth McClave utilize computer technology as Blankenship, though their images are abstract in a different manner. The digital slow-scan software that they developed records a picture over time and presents vertical slices of imagery. We view each image both in its entirety as well as chronologically when moving through the image bands from left to right. What might appear initially as a form of digital interference, or potential file corruption, turns out to be discreet stages in the construction of the image. The increments of a time-based narrative are visible, as well as the event in its entirety.
Gabriel Blankenship Suburban Roof
Around 2009, I found myself back at home in rural Pennsylvania unexpectedly. I had been studying photography at Fordham, and had grown accustomed to bringing my camera everywhere. At home, I found myself shooting less, despite carrying a camera, and sometimes didn’t bring my camera at all. Allowing myself to be more present was freeing in a way, but not without tension. I kept finding myself wishing I had taken my camera with me, or would catch myself composing a shot, with nothing to record it.
When I returned home, it was to a development its builders had intended to ensure residents’ privacy, despite a very close proximity to each other. The result was instead isolation, and overall detachment from the surrounding community. Neighbors remained strangers, and I instead became familiar with the mid-90s, suburban architecture of their houses, as seen from my third-story bedroom window.
As I began exploring pixel art, I found the same ideas I was drawn to as a photographer cropping up in my work. Moments I thought I had missed were “developing” in 8 and 16 bits. These are “photographs” I wish I had taken.
Bio Gabriel Blankenship is a multi-disciplinary artist, specializing in photography, installations, and digital works. He studied photography at Fordham University from 2006 to 2009 and started making pixel art as The Pixelsmyth around 2010 on a shared family computer running Windows XP. Drawing inspiration from early personal computer user interface design, and desktop publishing software, he is interested in exploring ways to bring pixel art off the screen, and into physical space. He works both individually and together with Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based collaborative fourhead.
What is pixel art?
While the aesthetics of pixel art are firmly rooted in the low resolution graphics of video games and computer software of the late 20th century, the mechanics are ancient. Using similar principles to mosaic tilework, textile weaving, and embroidery, each pixel is individually placed, economically expressing form, color, and value. Limited memory and processing speeds restricted early video game and computer graphics designers in resolution and palette, leading to works like the simple, tile-based designs of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros for the NES, and Susan Kare’s approach to the graphical user interface of Apple’s Macintosh. As computing power increased, image resolutions increased, eventually eliminating the technical need for such an efficient design language. Pixel art has maintained popularity through vibrant internet communities, producing work ranging from simple 8-bit compositions, to full photorealistic renderings.
Brian and Gareth McClave Digital Slow-Scan Photographs
The photographic work of Brian and Gareth McClave represents several years of development of a new photographic process that captures reality in a slow scanning motion across a scene. To do this the brothers developed new software that can take a visual slice through thousands of sequential images of a scene to generate an image that reveals the passing of time as the viewer’s eyes pan across the final photograph from left to right. This is a new twist on the traditional photographic long exposure, whereby the moments of time do not all merge together on top of each other but rather line up in sequence. This offers up the narrative of the scene in the same way as a line of words in a sentence whereby we can gain meaning and insight as we read from left to right across the page.
From a technological perspective the combination of time-lapse photography and digital sampling present a kind of visual encryption of a scene. The image invites the viewer to decode what is presented as a strange, alienating and futuristic environment back into something familiar. The given titles offer clues but no answers. On an aesthetic level the images invoke modernist paintings where individual points of colour, converging perspectives, or drips of paint are collected on the canvas to create an overall effect that distances the viewer from the subject by revealing it in a different light. It is the way that this different light is collected and then redistributed across the print that points to the photographic heritage from which the technique is drawn.
Those images created with a static camera collect the movement of the subject through the frame as each line is triggered, like a Muybridge frame, to capture and reveal an aspect of a scene that might otherwise be missed. This is especially insightful where natural elements such as the movement of the tides are seen to ebb and flow through the course of the day-long exposure and therefore across the duration of the print. On the other hand, when the camera is moving and capturing the landscape through which it passes, the image simultaneously portrays time and distance. This can leave the viewer in a quandary as the constantly changing viewpoint and the constantly changing viewed are combined into a single, sometimes chaotic image. But the chaos suggests or creates something new: a chronographic representation of time that captures the pace and instability of an increasingly mobile age.
In offering a view of a day, or a week, or a year, in a single, but complex, glance, these images allow us to take a step back from the daily densities of our lives and provide an opportunity to lose ourselves in these strange but familiar, calm and cryptic, abstract journeys.
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 Fordham Galleries Online third installment, Roei Greenberg: English Encounters. Every other week the gallery features a body of work by a contemporary artist, alternating with our Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series, in which our talented adjuncts share 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 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 coming this fall as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.
English Encounters Statement: The rural walk is a well-known English cultural practice. Though it may be civil, the act of walking itself is rooted in ideology from my cultural background; to walk the land is to know the land, and therefore suggests belonging entitlement and ownership. I begin to survey the English countryside, becoming familiar with the island’s geography, an act of mapping that refers to imperial and colonial histories.
Pertaining to Romanticism, I appropriate the visual rules of the picturesque, traditionally used to create an illusion of social and natural harmony. The dramatic light and weather conditions combined with forensic attention to details and on-site interventions intend to provoke the ambiguous feelings of seduction and alienation. Poetic and alluring yet tinged with irony, the images seek to disrupt traditional modes of representation in a place where land ownership and social hierarchy have shaped the form and perception of the landscape for centuries.
Roei Greenberg Bio London based – Israeli artist (b.1985)
I grew up on a Kibbutz, located on the northern Israeli border with Lebanon. In 2009 I moved to Tel Aviv, where I completed a BA Photography in 2013. After years of investigating the Israeli landscape, its geography, historical narratives, and my biography, I left Israel in 2018. In the search for a new subject matter, I found myself once again drawn to questions of land and power, belonging, and legitimacy.
My photographic practice is concerned with landscape as a complex intersection between culture, geography, and autobiography. The effects of human activity on land, political borders, and ecology are amongst the issues investigated in my work. The use of large-format camera and film creates a multi-layered photographic perspective, pictorial and alluring yet seeking to disrupt traditional modes of landscape representation. Website Instagram
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 the Visual Arts Department Website: click here
Christie Neptune Two Miles Deep In La La Land, 2007-2012 Single Channel 16mm Film Transfer to Video TRT 1:28
Two Miles Deep in La La Land is an experimental short film produced by Christie Neptune as an undergraduate in Fordham’s University’s Department of Visual Arts (Lincoln Center). In 2012, The film was given a new context, including dates exploring Neptune’s family’s lineage and a quote by Alice Walker: “I want something else, a different system entirely. One not seen on this earth for thousands of years. If ever.”
Neptune has a B.A. in Visual Arts from Fordham University. Her films and photography have been included in shows at BASS Museum, Miami, FL (2019); The University of Massachusetts Boston (2018); Rubber Factory, New York, NY (2017); A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn NY (2016); and Rutgers University (2015). Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, NY Times, Hyperallergic, and The Washington Post. Neptune has been awarded the Bronx Museum of the Arts: Artist in Marketplace (AIM), Smack Mellon Studio Residency, NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, and Light Work Artist-in-Residence among others.
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
The Fordham University Galleries Online Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Fordham University Galleries Online is proud to present Instant Camera, a portfolio of twenty-five pixel artworks by Pennsylvania-based artist Gabriel Blankenship.
Artist statement: Around 2009, I unexpectedly found myself back at home in rural Pennsylvania. I had been studying photography and had grown accustomed to bringing my camera everywhere. I found myself shooting less at home, despite carrying a camera, and sometimes I didn’t bring my camera out at all. Allowing myself to be more present was liberating, but not without tension. I kept finding myself wishing I had taken my camera with me, or I would catch myself composing a shot, with nothing to record it with.
As I began exploring pixel art, I found the same ideas I was drawn to as a photographer cropping up in my work. Moments I thought I had missed were “developing” in 8 and 16 bits. These “Polaroids” are recalled and imagined landscapes, and photographs that I wish I had taken: details noticed in my peripheral vision, from the passenger seat of a car, or a third-story window. While the aesthetics of pixel art are firmly rooted in the low-resolution graphics of video games and computer software of the late 20th century, the mechanics are ancient. Using similar principles to mosaic tilework, textile weaving, and embroidery, each pixel is individually placed, economically expressing form, color, and value.
Gabriel Blankenship is a multi-disciplinary artist, specializing in photography, installations, and digital works. He studied photography at Fordham University from 2006 to 2009 and started making pixel art as The Pixelsmyth around 2010 on a shared family computer running Windows XP. Drawing inspiration from early personal computer user interface design, and desktop publishing software, Gabriel is interested in exploring ways to bring pixel art off the screen, and into physical space. He works both individually and together with Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based collaborative fourhead.
Image caption: Gabriel Blankenship, Sneakers, 2017–2019 Instagram: thepixelsmyth
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 the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here
