One of the tools that the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) uses to ensure that is curb extensions, which reduce crossing distances, relieve sidewalk crowding, and provide space for “street furniture” like benches or plantings.

It’s easy to take them for granted as you rush to your next appointment, but a lot goes into planning these sidewalk expansions. Before they’re built, a long list of design choices needs to be made—from where they’re placed and what they’re made of to whether they can accommodate, say, a bike-share station. 

All of these specifications can be found in the Street Design Manual, a 312-page book that the DOT first published in 2009.

The manual, most recently updated in 2020, is the focus of an exhibit co-sponsored by the DOT and Fordham’s Department of Visual Arts and currently on display at the Lincoln Center campus’ Ildiko Butler Gallery through Feb. 2.

Abby Goldstein, exhibition curator and professor of visual arts, said the manual is key to understanding how New York City made the city safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, and anyone not driving a car. She’s seen the transformation firsthand on bike rides to Prospect Park accompanied by her friend Wendy Feuer, assistant commissioner of urban design, art, and wayfinding at the DOT. It was this friendship that spurred her to propose that Fordham and the DOT team up to create the exhibit.

“Wendy really is visionary. She’s been instrumental in the way that the city has moved to develop areas for public use that incorporate art, music, dance, theater, sitting, relaxing,” she said.

Creating a Manual That Was Both Appealing and Informative 

When the manual was first introduced, it was meant to be a resource for construction managers and a guide for local leaders. But it was also meant to appeal to civic-minded New Yorkers who might want to know what goes into the design of a conventional bike lane, a protected bike lane, a two-way bike lane, or a grade-separated bike lane. This meant paying close attention to elements of graphic design to make it appealing to the average reader. Goldstein said there is precedent in this, in the Sweets Catalog System, which was devised in the 1950s by the graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar as a way to organize a seemingly endless number of industrial products.

“The design of the street manual reflects not only the care and organization and easy referencing, but it also elevates the design from just a catalog to something of beauty,” she said.

“Pure+Applied, which is the design firm that originally worked on it, did an absolutely exquisite job of coming up with a design that reflects that.”

The exhibit at the Ildiko Butler Gallery focuses both on graphic design, which is showcased on mounted posters, and the end result of years of reimagining public space in New York City. Just as the streets have been redefined in recent years as spaces for more than motor vehicles, the gallery has also been reimagined as a space where one might stop and linger. There are four table-and-chair sets, complete with street manuals for perusing.

Nicholas Pettinati, deputy director of urban design at the DOT, said graphics have long allowed the agency to communicate complex design ideas to as many people as possible.

“The audience for this manual is always a big question. For the most part, we really try to make it as broad as possible, and the graphics do a lot to make that accessible,” he said. 

“One of the things that we wanted to do was make sure that that the exhibit grabbed you and pulled you in. The bold colors certainly come from the manual, and the graphics on the floor, the crosswalk—these are all things that you see out in your environment. So, the hope is that it will make people curious to learn more about how this exhibit got here in the first place.”

Pettinati noted that while a lot of work that goes into any change on city streets, the manual has served as a critical place to help streamline that process to make it easier to do at a much broader scale across the city. That’s become even more important recently, as calls for equity have cast a light onto areas of the city that have not received attention.

Goldstein said that although she knew a lot about the manual from her friendship with Feuer, what impressed her most when she was working with the DOT was “the poetics of how they use language to break down the different areas.” For the exhibit, panels were created that highlighted both the goals and the design of the book. That’s something that students from fields such as art, urban studies, and political science can really benefit from.

“I originally thought, ‘OK, you’ve got concrete, you’ve got asphalt, you’ve got lamps, and you have the different elements.’” she said, adding that she soon realized there is so much more to the process.  

“The fact that they highlighted in the display panels the words ‘safe, contextual, sustainable and resilient, vibrant, balanced and inclusive, cost-effective and maintainable’—you’re not going to find those in the book. Those are not the chapters. That is the thinking process that really is embedded in what they do.”

A Document That ‘Has Life’

At an opening reception for the exhibit on Nov. 28, DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez praised the manual as a document that, like the U.S. Constitution, “has life.” 

“The street design manual was a vision that represented New York City when it came to the present in 2009, as well as the future,” he said.

“The first manual used photos from different cities, from different countries that we wanted to look like. In 2022, all the photos are from New York City. We reversed it in a way that other cities are now looking at how we are doing things.”

On Feb. 2, Fisher, a professor of theology, used his final address to his colleagues to tell his own families’ story.

“I was determined not to do one of those ‘My family is crazier than your family’ kind of histories, because I wouldn’t know how crazy anybody else’s family is,” said Fisher, who is retiring in May to spend more time in California with his son Charlie, who is autistic.

“But the complementarity of [mine and Charlie’s]cognitive systems is such a positive thing, I started to get much more positive feelings about my own family’s history. I wondered about people who may help me understand who we are.”

He discovered, among other things, that his great grandfather moved from Brooklyn to Panama in 1906 to work as a plumber on the Panama Canal. There, he became Chief and Senior Sagamore of the fraternal organization the Improved Order of Redmen.

“They wanted to transplant all the putative virtues of white American Christian Republicanism to this utopian community on the Isthmus of Panama. The Improved Order of Redmen was one of these kinds of organizations,” Fisher said, noting dryly that membership was not, in fact, open to Native Americans.

“I had to readjust the longevity of my father’s side of the families’ devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. I’d been off by 12 to 15 centuries. My great grandfather was nobody’s idea of a Roman Catholic. He was in fact, a pagan.”

He died under mysterious circumstances, and Fisher’s great grandmother moved back to Brooklyn, where Fisher discovered she lived in Vinegar Hill, next door to William Sutton, the infamous bank robber who was credited with saying he did it, “Because that’s where the money is.”

His family, which would also later call Woodbridge, New Jersey, home, also belied the popular model of Catholic immigrants flocking to parishes to create a sort of “old world communal setting.”

“My father’s family presented itself as the ultimate exemplar of just that model, but empirically it was not true. They lived where the work was; they lived on the waterfront in Brooklyn, Manhattan and North Jersey,” he said.

And although his grandparents experienced the terror of a resurgent of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, they did just fine in the end.

“They were homeless in the 1930’s. By 1946, because of the war, my grandfather worked up in his job, and sent their sons to the University of Notre Dame—the eighth wonder of the world for American Catholics,” he said.

Fisher’s talk was part of Arts and Sciences Faculty Day. This year, honorees included
Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, who was honored for excellence in teaching in science and math;

Jim Fisher, Ph.D.,professor of theology, who was honored for or excellence in teaching in arts and humanities

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, who was honored for excellence in teaching social sciences;

Maryann Kowaleski, P.h.D., Joseph Fitzpatrick SJ Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies, who was honored for excellence in teaching in graduate studies.

The evening also celebrates 12 members of the arts and science faculty who have been chosen to work together to discuss innovative teaching techniques. The group, which includes graduate students and cuts across campuses and disciplines, meets five times a semester for two semesters to share recent scholarship in the field of teaching stories, and techniques. This year’s cohort includes:

Emanuel Fiano, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Abby Goldstein, associate professor of visual arts

Henry Han, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer and Information Science

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry

Jesus Luzardo, Ph.D. candidate of philosophy, Graduate School of Arts and Science

Jason Morris, Ph.D, associate professor of biology

Meenaserani Murugan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications

Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., professor of history

Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Margaret Schwartz, Ph.D., associate professor of communications

Richard Teverson, assistant professor of art history

Dennis Tyler, Ph.D., assistant professor of English

Alessia Valfredini, Ph.D., lecturer of Italian

Leave Me Alone With the Recipes: The Life, Art and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles, an exhibit featuring high quality digital prints of the famed designer and illustrator’s long-lost cookbook project, will be on display through Jan. 21, 2018.

In the 1940s, the Austrian-born graphic designer became the first female art director for Condé Nast and helped launch Seventeen Magazine, thus creating a new media category dedicated to young women. Andy Warhol once called her his favorite art director.

But unbeknownst to many, she was also privately painting vibrant gouache illustrations, in the pages of a sketchbook she kept at home, for her mother’s Eastern European Jewish recipes.

For reasons that are not clear it was never published, said the show’s curator Abby Goldstein. But writer Sarah Rich and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton found the sketchbook for sale through an antiquarian book seller. They teamed up with Maria Popova of the blog Brain Pickings and Debbie Millman of the podcast Design Matters to co-edit the book and get it published this month from Bloomsbury press.

When Goldstein, an associate professor of visual arts and a professional acquaintance of Millman, got wind of the project, she jumped at the opportunity.

“I said ‘Anything with Cipe Pineles, I want to be involved in,’” she said.

“Even as late as the 70s, women just didn’t have roles that were top tier. It’s not like today, where you have a woman in charge of The New York Times’ art department.”

Pineles has a compelling personal story, having immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1921 when she was 13. As such, Leave Me Alone With the Recipes also features notable biographical moments—from her 1942 marriage to William Golden, a designer most famous for creating the CBS eye logo, to her branding and design work for Lincoln Center to her influential teaching positions at Parsons School of Design, The Cooper Union, and Harvard University.

Her hand-drawn illustrations have a playful, personal feel to them that make them “just sing,” said Goldstein.   

“They bring to mind home cooking and a real sense of nostalgia of family and history. The colors are just so inviting that they draw you in,” she said.

“Very few people will realize that it’s not computerized, but if you look closely at it, you can tell. There are typefaces that have been made based on this, but this type is just beautifully handwritten. The illustrations are all done from scratch, just like the cooking.”

For more information, visit fordhamuniversitygalleries.com

The works of three visual arts faculty members—Abby Goldstein, Ross McLaren, and Carleen Sheehan—are on display through March 9 in the first-floor gallery in the Lowenstein building. An opening reception will be held Thursday, Jan. 28, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Goldstein’s works—mixed media on paper and oil paint on wood panel—reflect her interest in “how our physical experience of travel, space, climate, and place can be transcribed into a codified visual language within a two dimensional plane,” she said in a statement.

“I like to read local lore and study maps of a region to use as reference material for my paintings and drawings,” she said. “Local lore allows a glimpse into the felt history of the place.”

Sheehan’s work, mixed media on canvas, is drawn from her Nightvision series, part of a body of work that explores “the experience of contemporary space” as well as the form and effect of weather, according to her website.

McLaren created side-by-side displays of video taken in his fish tank, via a GoPro camera, that signify “a school of fish … converted through machine/motion into light energy,” he said in a statement.

Another theme is “school gallery as aquarium,” he said, but added that he meant to leave latitude for viewers to interpret the work.

“The kind of artwork I like (is) not nailed down by the artist’s definition,” he said. “I think any artwork is completed when there’s feedback from the onlooker.”

Three members of Fordham’s Visual Arts Department faculty are featured:

Abby Goldstein’s paintings reference ancient hand-drawn maps and satellite images (center), creating “fictional landscapes” that navigate unfamiliar territories in an orderly format;

Casey Ruble’s small-scale paper collages (top) have been influenced by minimalist literature, late-modernist cinema, documentary photography of the 1970s and true-crime television; and

Carleen Sheehan’s “Convertibles Series” (bottom) depicts fusions of built and natural worlds by combining a range of media into “open-ended narratives of distilled chaos and spectacular abundance.”

Goldstein is an associate professor and head of Fordham’s Graphic Design concentration. Casey Ruble and Carleen Sheehan are both artists-in-residence who teach painting, drawing and visual thinking within the department.

The show will be on display through January 30th, 2012, Monday to Sunday from 9 am. to 7 p.m. It is sponsored by Fordham’s Department of Theatre and Visual arts.

For more information visit www.Fordham.edu/visualarts

—Janet Sassi

When Abby Goldstein, associate professor of visual arts, noticed that her student Lindsay Reichart, FCRH ’11, possessed a passionate interest in modern art history, feminism and design, Goldstein got an idea.

“I suggested that Lindsay curate an exhibition as a senior thesis project,” said Goldstein, who had long noticed a lack of recognition for great women designers.

Over some months, Reichart started out with 75 names and narrowed the field from there, doing research and in-person interviews.

The result, Benchmarks: Seven Women in Design: New York, is now on display in the Lowenstein Center Gallery through Aug. 15. Co-curated by Reichart and Goldstein, the show focuses on a group of prominent New York-based women designers born before 1960 whose work ranges from print to collage to audio-visual installation: Gail Anderson, Eileen Boxer, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Carin Goldberg, Louise Fili, Paula Scher and Lucille Tenazas.

Although much of the artists’ work has been underrecognized, said Goldstein, all the artists have been firmly established and active in New York’s design scene for decades.

“We asked each of them to choose a work that holds special meaning for them, or was a turning point in their approach to their practice,” said Goldstein. “We hope to show exemplary work that also [is]personal.”

Among the works featured are Gail Anderson’s photo collages for Rolling Stone magazine of Axl Rose (2000) and Chris Rock (1997, pictured above left); Eileen Boxer’s conceptual announcement for the Ubu Gallery’s Hans Bellmer show (1995, pictured right); and Paula Scher’s vibrant silkscreen for the Public Theatre’s presentation of “Dancing On Her Knees” (1996, pictured left).

Reichart, who earned a bachelor of arts in art history and music, said she hopes to extend the project beyond New York sometime in the future.

The exhibit is sponsored by the department of theatre and visual arts. For more about the exhibit, visit the department blog, where you can find a link to an interview with the curators in imprint e-magazine for designers.

—Janet Sassi

Speak Out is “a provocative two-floor exhibition featuring artists from across the country and the world who are not afraid to speak out…. This exhibition showcases artists and designers who have taken on the challenge of creating socially and politically charged messages that are responses to and meditations on injustices and atrocities around the globe.”