Five new state-of-the-art music rooms will be available to students next year, along with a completely renovated and expanded visual arts wing. Construction will begin this summer and the new spaces will be unveiled in the fall.

Modern, Spacious Facilities for Visual Arts

The visual arts space will see a complete overhaul of its existing classrooms and studios located on the first floor of the Lowenstein Center at 60th Street and Columbus Avenue. The improvements will include updated furniture, more open layouts, and new state-of-the-art lighting fixtures. There will also be a brand new seminar room and a large increase in storage space to support more ambitious and varied exhibitions. The space will be anchored by the Lipani Gallery, which features solo and group exhibitions of student work as well as work by professional artists, architects, and designers.

Improvements like these will vastly enhance the opportunities available to all students and allow the gallery to operate at a professional level, according to Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, associate clinical professor of photography and head of the visual arts program.

“Creativity is one of the major aspects that people of the future need in order to discern opportunities, where others do not see anything,” he said about the benefits of access to the arts. “When you put artists, actors, and musicians all in proximity to one another with an espresso machine, something’s bound to happen.”

The Father Grimes Music Center

The music department will also be joining the updated wing, with a suite of five brand new rooms that will make up the Father Grimes S.J. Music Center—named in honor of Robert Grimes, S.J., the dean emeritus of Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

“It enriches the life of the community so much,” Grimes, a former professor of ethnomusicology, said by phone about the increased footprint of music on campus. The project was funded in part by private donors and alumni, who were eager to honor Grimes’ contributions to music at Fordham.

The plan features two private practice rooms, two ensemble rooms for bands and small groups, and one large rehearsal room that will house Fordham’s performance ensembles as well as specialty courses like the Fordham Composers Workshop.

These enhanced facilities will also be outfitted with recording capabilities and technological updates like the Wenger VAE Rehearsal System—a playback process that allows students to change the sound of the room to mimic different environments such as a cathedral, auditorium, or recital hall.

“I’m excited that the school is making an investment in the arts on this campus, and that it is translating directly into something our students can take advantage of,” said Daniel Ott, D.M.A., associate professor of music theory and composition and chair of the art history and music department. “I want the students to feel recognized in that way, and I think this does that.”

For the Whole Community

The project is being spearheaded by Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

When Auricchio began planning for this project by sending out a student survey soliciting a wishlist for new music spaces, she expected a few dozen responses at most.

Instead, hundreds of students answered—and the majority were not music majors.

“Students are interested in music and art, whether as a vocation or not,” Auricchio said. “I truly believe that music and art does have an impact on their well-being. Creative expression is really necessary, and contributes to the mental health of our students.”

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.”

“Jonathon was a caring and compassionate educator who had the kind of multilayered career that one can only marvel at,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, in an email to the University community. “He was thoughtful and creative, with a talent for drawing connections among disciplines.” 

Appels taught in Fordham’s English, African and African American studies, anthropology, dance, history, communication and media studies, Middle East studies, theology, and visual arts departments, as well as the religious studies, comparative literature, and urban studies programs, from 1996 to 2002 and 2009 to 2021. He offered a colorful mix of courses, including “Madness and Literature” and “LGBT Arts and Spirituality: Mystics and Creators,” mostly at the Lincoln Center campus. 

“His mind was eclectic and his education and curiosity was unmatched,” said Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies. “Endlessly curious, he always had a new story of the latest lecture or performance he had attended. He was a wonderful storyteller, with a rich laugh. He took me out to a vegan restaurant once, hoping to encourage me in more healthy habits. He was always cold and wandered the halls draped in wonderful scarves.”

Appels was a scholar, poet, musician, sculptor, and art critic who conducted research in 20 countries, largely in Europe; he was also a member of nine humanities associations. 

“He had a very probing mind, and he was very good at connecting the dots between various disciplines and departments,” said his husband, David LaMarche. “He was a very animated and inquisitive person with strong opinions, but not rigid … a free spirit and sort of counterculture, since the time that we were born in, the early sixties, and a sensitive man who loved every branch of the arts.”

His First Love

But what most academics weren’t aware of, said his husband, was his love for dance.  

“He loved teaching, but his first love was probably choreography,” LaMarche said. 

Appels was a dancer and choreographer who founded his own dance company, Company Appels, in 1979. He performed across the country and the world, from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to international stages in France, Germany, and Portugal. He choreographed modern dances for scores of performers, principally graduates of the Juilliard School, SUNY Purchase, and North Carolina School of the Arts. One of his favorite courses he taught at Fordham was part of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance, run jointly with the Ailey School, said his husband. Even off stage at more casual venues, you could find him dancing.

“He loved disco dancing and he loved to dance, even into his sixties. If we ever went to a gala party or something like that, he’d always be on the dance floor, wild,” said LaMarche, a pianist who first met Appels at a dance class in San Francisco. 

Appels’ passion for the arts was recognized worldwide. In 1998, he was awarded a Fulbright to teach modern dance at the National Dance Academy in Hungary. (He received another Fulbright to study the archives of a famous philosopher in Belgium in 1991.) In addition, he received an artist fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and a William Como Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. 

In a 2014 reflection, a Fordham alumnus praised Appels for showing him the beauty of dancing through his course called Lincoln Center Arts. 

“I never considered dance to be very interesting, running the other way when friends would suggest going to the ballet … I now found myself discussing Balanchine, Paul Taylor, and Dance Theater of Harlem with anyone who would listen,” wrote Jason McDonald, who took the course as a Ph.D. student.

‘Now Keep That Big Smile’ 

Appels was a thoughtful instructor who wanted his students to take away something meaningful from his classes, said Thomas O’Donnell, Ph.D., co-chair of Fordham’s comparative literature program and associate professor of English and medieval studies. 

“Jon really wanted his students to become exposed to very different ideas. He was a very curious and open-minded person, and it seemed that his lessons as a result were full of that same spirit,” O’Donnell said. “He cared about his students very deeply. For every student that I would talk to him about, he had some story or insight about their biography and who they were. He really wanted to get to know the students so he could help them better.”

He loved speaking with students about their work over the phone, said LaMarche. Before their calls ended, he left them with a unique message. 

“He ended almost every phone call with a student by saying, ‘Now keep that big smile,’ which I thought was so cute,” LaMarche said, chuckling. “You can’t see someone smile over the phone, but he would always say that to them.” 

An ‘Off-the-Grid Educational Experience’ 

Appels was born on May 17, 1954, in Falfurrias, Texas. His father, Robert C. Robinson, was a sales executive for oil companies and a financial planner; his mother, Patricia Robinson, neé Hosley, was an elementary school teacher. When he was a child, his family frequently moved because of the nature of his father’s job, said LaMarche. He lived in Nigeria and Libya and later settled in California. 

“He was exposed to a lot of different cultures as a youngster … He got his B.A. at Western Washington University at a college called Fairhaven College, which was a very experimental educational institution at that time,” said LaMarche. “That started his off-the grid educational experience.”

Appels earned a bachelor’s degree in art and society from Western Washington University, a master’s degree in music from Mills College, a master’s degree in poetry from Antioch University, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York. 

Outside of Fordham, he taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University, Cornell University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and his alma mater Western Washington University. He enjoyed yoga, pilates, gyrotonics, acupuncture, and other forms of Eastern medicine and healing. Instead of ironing his shirts and wearing a suit jacket like many professors, he preferred a loose and casual style, LaMarche said. He was a spiritual man who loved nature, especially walks through the woods and summers spent with LaMarche in Ithaca, where they swam in waterfalls, gorges, and lakes. He disliked technology, especially computers—in fact, he never owned one, said LaMarche, who managed his husband’s online accounts.  

In addition to LaMarche, Appels is survived by his father, Robert; brother, Robert H. Robinson and his partner, Ilona Robinson; and his sister, Carol House, her husband Roger House, and their son Josiah. A memorial service will be held for Appels sometime early next year, said LaMarche.

Hughes, who earned a B.A. in studio art and English at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and an M.F.A. in painting at the University of Chicago, exhibits her work frequently, including at the recent I Contain Multitudes show at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. That exhibition invited viewers to “consider how multiculturalism impacts their lives, and how it relates to the issues of immigration and diversity in today’s society.”

She spoke with FORDHAM magazine about her own background, her artistic process, and how people’s stories inform her work.

In a statement about your work, you wrote about the idea of blending in terms of your own multicultural background. What is that background, exactly?
My father is an immigrant from India. My mother is German, but she was born here. So, German Indian.

An American family.
An American family. Two religions. I’ve always felt that I’ve had that duality in my world, and I kind of straddled both religions, the cultural differences. But also my mother grew up on a farm, my father grew up in the city. I currently live in a more pastoral setting, but I have my studio in the city. And I think I gain energy from both of those environments, and I like to bridge them.

How does your own sense of multiculturalism inform what comes out in your work?
I think it’s probably the heart of my work. It’s become the heart of my subject matter dealing with relationships between people, and how we get along, and how we form community, and how we understand each other. My Common Threads series is really about that, using the threads as a natural metaphor for shared experiences as we discuss things and start to unfold who we are and where we’re from, and find those links.

Picasso used to joke that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. Have you always created abstract pieces, or has that developed over time?
I always knew I was an abstract painter at heart. I can show you my very first oil painting, done at 16. But I always struggled with subject matter, what I was going to paint. And, to me, my abstraction has to come from a story. It comes from a place or an experience that I’ve observed, or a story I’ve heard, or somebody I know. So, I never feel good about a work that I’ve done if it’s purely moving color and shape around. It needs to have a place to come from, an origin.

For better or for worse, in America multiculturalism is often defined by color. Your work is all about the interplay of color. Is this metaphor intended?
In my Blends series, it is intentional. The paintings to me are portraits, but they’re simple until you look closer and you see that there are a lot of layers of color. But the color is very important, because they’re blended together in a way that creates, for me, a new beautiful shape. So, all the colors together are important. Each one has a role to play with the other.

When you say they’re portraits, what does that mean?
That, again, goes to that multiculturalism question. I’ve been, for three years now, collecting stories from friends and acquaintances of their cultural and ethnic backgrounds and compiling them in a book. Those stories, of family experiences or things that would be important to an individual in their family’s cultural background, are very important to the paintings. The paintings, then, are a composite portrait of many people, because they’re blended together, blended histories.

So, tell me a little bit about the story behind this painting [Blend 23md] and how it went from being his or her or their story to becoming that visual abstract portrait you created.
I’m going to read you the story, but I’m going to take out names because I always tell the people sharing the stories that they’ll be anonymous.

I’m half Mexican and half Irish. I lived in Mexico as a kid and moved here for first grade. I was back in Mexico over winter break, and I ran into a woman who had not seen me since I was 5 years old. She watched me speaking with my daughter and wife in English and blinked at me with amazement, saying, “The last time I saw you, you didn’t even know how to speak English.” It was a powerful reminder of how my life has changed since moving here. My daughter is a quarter Mexican, quarter Polish, quarter Irish, and quarter Scottish. When we landed in Minnesota after being away, she saw her breath from the cold and said, “This is what home should look like.” We are having very different childhoods.

That’s an example of the stories that I collect, and I like to exhibit the stories with the paintings.

So then how does that story, which is a lovely and charming and American story, actually become that visual representation?
I might choose a color that the story evokes for me at the moment and then build off that color, playing with complements, usually. Most of the time, I know the person who has written the story. I might know their profile or the way they walk or the way they sit, so shapes kind of get dictated by that. And then I start to play with how those different shapes interact with each other on the panel.

But the shapes are not necessarily representative of the story part for part. I don’t think I need to be that literal, because in the end it’s an abstract portrait and it’s open to interpretation. I think colors portray emotion, colors and shapes have presence, and the interaction is important. Some of the stories have tension, some of them have anger, some of them have sorrow. I don’t necessarily want to portray those things; I really want to create a collection of new images.

You make your pieces with resin, which is unusual. What is your process?
I always start out with one color. The medium I’m working with starts to cure in 45 minutes, it starts to set up, so I have a very quick open time with it. I have to know what I’m doing to control the shapes. It’s still moving when I leave, but the shape that I make is really important to me. Then I let it cure before I do the next color. So I build them up in a series from the back to the top.

Baltimore has a complicated multicultural history. Do you think that that’s likely to, over the course of the years, create an evolution in your work?
I have lived here for a year now, and as an artist, you’re always a little isolated from the place you exist in, because you’re working in your studio. At the same time, I get energy from the place I live in, so I like coming into the city, I like seeing what’s going on, seeing certain people on the street, on the corners every day. It’s just that sort of dynamic place that I enjoy and like to observe, but, as opposed to any other place I’ve lived, I feel like it’s taking a long time and will take longer to understand the city, and I don’t want to make any assumptions.

It’s complicated, and complex.
I wanted to be here. The building itself is cobbled together—it’s old, some of the walls are new, but it’s repaired, you can see things that are screwed down. I painted the floor when I moved in because I needed that sense of serenity, I guess, because my work is complicated, but, as you can see, there are exposed brick walls with remnants of work that’s been done here. I enjoy that; I think that’s important to a place. I like seeing other people’s notes to each other on the wall. Things were made here, which is great to me. I think that Baltimore is a city of people who reinvent themselves, at least in this neighborhood. There’s a creative force, a do-it-yourself mentality here that is vibrant and alive.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by B.A. Van Sise, FCLC ’05.

Hughes’ artwork will be featured in “Layers of Existence,” an exhibition at Walker Fine Art in Denver from Nov. 8, 2019, through Jan. 4, 2020. 

Street held an artist’s residency at the Navy Yard this past year and used the time to film workers on the docks, in abandoned buildings, and in the flow of the East River. He then mixed the footage with archival images of the once-vital and newly resuscitated complex.

“When it was a navy yard there were 70,000 people working there. Now there’s about 7,000 and the goal is for 22,000 people to be working there by 2030, when they plan to open it up and have a public street that runs through it,” said Street.

With all the waterfront development happening throughout New York, the city seems to have re-embraced its waterways. Just downriver from the Navy Yard, the former Domino Sugar factory has become luxury housing and the massive Brooklyn Bridge Park is now complete. Today, post-Highline New York embraces its industrial past, even going so far as to “fetishize” the old infrastructure, said Street. His film, however, is more a quiet homage to daily activity.

Having documented the Fulton Fish Market’s downtown home before its move to modernized facilities in the South Bronx, Street knows a thing or two about industry that’s adapted to a changing landscape. He focuses his camera on the people, as well as the infrastructure, largely ignoring the high-tech firms that occupy the old warehouse spaces today.

“It’s a place where physical work is still being done in a way that’s being erased in the modern age,” he said. “I wanted to emphasize the tactile, rather than showing a trendy coffee shop or tech firm. I tried to capture grit and use that in the images.”

Street’s own process and choice of media mimic the old and new technologies at work in today’s Navy Yard. He shoots on 16 mm film from a wind-up Bolex camera, as well using Sony’s latest digital SLR. He delved into Navy Yard archives and dug up archival footage of a scuba exploration of a sunken ship nearby. In the film, all of this comes together in a collage that celebrates the imperfections of film processed by hand alongside nearly perfect high resolution from the digital camera.

“I’m in an interesting place generationally,” he said. “People who are older than me don’t know digital and the people who are younger don’t do the film. I’m at home in both worlds.”

Street said he often intentionally veered from digital precision when working on the movie, processing the film in buckets in his basement.

“When I got it home I would unspool it into the bucket: three minutes for development, three-minute wash, and four minutes for the fixer,” he said. “I just plopped it in and played a CD of the Kinks and then took it out when the song was over, because all those songs only lasted about three minutes, which was the standard for radio back then.”

Ultimately, he’d bring the digitized product back to Fordham where students learned from his work in the various media. Most Fordham visual arts students study photography on film, including 16mm, before moving on to digital, he said.

Ultimately, all the media serve as a way to sketch a contemporary portrait, conjuring “ghosts of past technologies and characters,” he said.

“Most of this is shot outside looking at the physical plant, including the shadows of workers from an observational distance,” he said. “It’s a film that’s between the documentary and the experimental. Some may call it avant-garde, and I don’t have a problem with that.”

“People would refer to it as the blue-collar country club,” said senior Emma DiMarco, who is studying visual arts with a concentration in photography at Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Last summer, DiMarco traveled to the Midwest and Great Lakes region to document the decline of bowling alleys in the Rust Belt. Her photographs will be on view at Ildiko Butler Gallery at the Lincoln Center campus from April 25 through May 7.

Approximately 12,000 bowling centers were built in “mostly blue-collar, urban areas of the United States” in the mid-1960’s, according to The Gale Group, Inc., a research and educational publishing company.

By 2011, however, the number of bowling centers dropped to about 5,160.

“[Bowling alleys] are disappearing, along with manufacturing. At the same time, bowling is being repurposed to serve a different class of Americans in trendy bars and restaurants,” said DiMarco.

“I’m fascinated by American culture and how that changes overtime. Bowling alleys are not something that would be considered timeless. They represent something of the past.”

DiMarco received a research grant from Fordham College at Rose Hill to fund her month-long road trip to several states, including Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

“When I started going to bowling alleys and photographing them, I realized that many of them were run-down,” she recalled, adding that some bowling alleys had shuttered or were struggling to stay afloat while a small percentage were experiencing an evolution of the popular American pastime.

In one town in Indiana, DiMarco spoke with a mechanic of 20 years who shared that bowling was no longer a popular activity in his community. But in the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, she met one of the owners of JC’s New York Pizzeria Department who had a different experience. According to DiMarco, the pizzeria/sports bar, which includes amenities such as pool tables and an arcade, saw an uptick in customers when it opened a three-lane bowling alley.

“They had just built the lanes and he said it was booked every single weekend,” she said.

Though DiMarco’s photo project centers on bowling alleys in Middle America, bowling became a “smaller part of a larger story.”

“There’s something to be said about photographers that are creating work that has depth behind it. I want people to look at my work, and say, ‘Wow, this exists.’ I want people to see parts of America that they haven’t seen before.”

Now, the University is benefitting too; she recently helped procure a book of 200 photo-offset lithographs by master printer Richard Benson, a donation from Yale University that is one of a limited print run.

The weighty book was produced by the Gilman Paper Company under the direction of Howard Gilman, a descendent of the company’s founder and collector of rare photographs. Largely considered one of the world’s premier photography collections, the Gilman trove of 8,500 photographs was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005.

The donated book serves as an album of the collection’s highlights, said Kismaric.

Kismaric’s professional relationship with Benson, the former dean of the Yale School of Art, facilitated the donation of the book by Yale to Fordham Libraries. He is largely considered one of the best printers in the world, said Kismaric.

The lithographs are particularly significant, she said, in that they match not just the tonality and tone of the original prints, but also their finish as well. In fact, the reproductions are so convincing that MoMA mounted an exhibition of the originals beside Benson’s prints in a 2008 exhibition titled The Printed Picture.

David Freund: Gas Stop, a sampling of 27 black and white photographs pulled from a much larger investigation that Freund conducted from 1978 to 1981, are on display in the Lowenstein Center’s Lipani Gallery now through March 30.

The photos are a time capsule of sorts, from an era when some 200,000 independent full-service gas stations dotted the American landscape. Only half still exist today, replaced by larger, more uniform chain stations operated by corporations.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, artist in residence at Fordham and curator of the Lipani and Ildiko Butler galleries said Freund’s work, which will be published in a forthcoming set of books by Steidl Publishing is appealing on multiple levels. Car enthusiasts can catch glimpses of classic models, architecture buffs can take in a variety of designs of the buildings themselves, and graphic designers can observe hand-made signs that reflect regional differences in 40 states.

“It’s a lovely testament to something that’s really vanished. The idea of the mom-and-pop, local gas station has been replaced by the megastructure with 19 different filling bays,” he said.

“When you look at these photographs, you realize there was an incredible variety prior to the rise of the Texaco stations.”

Apicella-Hitchcock said that Freund, a professor emeritus of photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey, came to his attention in in 2014, when Freund attended the Fordham show Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint at the Ildiko Butler Gallery.

The Lipani Gallery, which is located in the visual arts complex, is the ideal place for the photos’ display, said Apicella-Hitchcock, as they exemplify the kind of original research students are tasked with creating.

“I like this exhibition because of its classic, sober demeanor,” said Apicella-Hitchcock.

“It’s someone going out into the field, methodically researching his subject, finding the results, exploring tangents, finding the lay of the land, and then presenting the information in a large, multi-volume set.”

David Freund: Gas Stop is on display at the Lipani Gallery daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. A reception and artist talk will take place Wednesday, March 22 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Some of the posters are iconic, like Robert Redford in The Candidate, or Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men. Warren Beatty makes a couple of appearances as well, once in a poster for the 1998 comedy Bulworth and again in 1974’s The Parallax View. Directors Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman are there too.

The show, “Politics: Movie Images from Posteritati,” was organized by Mark Street, associate professor of visual arts, and runs through Dec. 1. Street said Posteritati is a SoHo Gallery that sometimes lends out its collection exhibitions—as is the case with the show at Fordham.

“It’s interesting to see real events refracted through spectacular mass culture,” said Street. “In the collection we chose there’s satire, irony, exaggeration, fear, and paranoia. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that a lot of things that were there are in the present elections.”

On a purely visual level, the movie posters are one of mass marketing’s cleanest conveyors of information, he said.

“In the art department, we teach visual literacy,” he said. “More and more we’re in a visual culture, and these posters show that when you telegraph something without words, a short rudimentary graphic is important.”

The undergraduate students—Alexandra Bandea, Andrew DiSalvo, Marisa Folsom, Phillip Gregor, and Erin O’Flynn—spent the month of July in Rome for a Department of Visual Arts course, Photography in the Documentary Tradition. The group visited ancient architectural sites, museums, neighborhoods, and other sites throughout the city practicing basic and advanced techniques of image production. In particular, the students focused on how to craft documentary photos of the people, architecture, and culture of Italy.

“[They learned to] observe, process, and translate life into a rectangular image,” said course instructor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, the visual arts program’s artist-in-residence. “They considered everything as potential photographs, from the glorious Sistine Chapel, to the not-so-glorious Fiumicino Airport.”

The students’ photographs were then compiled into a 68-page book, Documentary Photography: Italy 2016, published earlier this month.

“If most photographs are exposed somewhere around 1/125th of a second, then collectively the exposure time of the images in this book adds up to barely a single second,” Apicella-Hitchcock said. “However, the impressions, both sacred and profane, that Italy has made on the group will certainly last for much longer.”

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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.”