A cinematographer tells stories with a social conscience

In April, David Quateman filmed a documentary about a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires where patients are encouraged to express themselves to the outside world. They take part in a patient-run radio show and paint street art on the walls—“a radically different approach” compared with methods in the U.S., Quateman says.

Quateman loves to connect audiences with realities far different from their own by shooting documentaries. He first pursued this calling at Fordham, where he double-majored in visual arts and communications, and got a break last year when adjunct professor Anibal Pella-Woo invited him to contribute to an exhibit on asylum seekers in New York City.

Helping to make a video for the exhibit, Quateman interviewed several refugees, including a 19-year-old survivor of the Egyptian revolution and a Nigerian man who hadn’t seen his wife and young daughter in three years. “It was amazing having the privilege to watch these people and try and understand what they are going through,” Quateman says.

After graduating, he teamed up with Alexander Fish, a Princeton University student, for a project on mental health treatment methods in South America. They traveled to the hospital in Argentina and to Peru, where they filmed a healer in the Amazon who uses ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic mixture, to help patients transform their thinking. They spent days on a boat in 100-degree heat to get the story.

“I like seeing the worlds people live in that they don’t talk about forthrightly,” Quateman says, “and try to observe and be in those mental spaces and bring them back for other people.”

—Michael Blanding

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

This year’s installment features the works of Colin Cathcart, an associate professor of architecture; Joseph Lawton, an associate professor of photography; and Fordham artist-in-residence Casey Ruble.

Ruble’s collages are focused on historical race riots, including the Knoxville Riot of 1919 and the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. Through a set of eye-catching collages, which were created using handmade silver impregnated paper, Ruble explores how we process some of the most contentious events in American history.

Lawton had a similar idea. The 12 black-and-white photographs exhibited chronicles more than two decades of his work in 10 different countries, including Italy, Indonesia, Turkey, and Vietnam.

“I show pictures that are not just from last year, but many years, to inspire in students that you don’t just take photographs for a couple months, or one or two years,” he said. “If you’re interested in it, this is what you do throughout your life.”

Documentary Photography: Japan, a visual arts class taught over the winter break by Fordham Artist-in-Residence Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, introduced undergraduates to the booming metropolises of Tokyo and Kyoto.

Students were tasked with developing an emphasis on generating documentary projects focusing on the people, culture, and architecture of Japan. Their 10-day trip will be further documented in a professional-quality book that will include essays detailing the richness of their experience abroad.

It was equal parts pep rally, comedy show, and religious revival in the Rose Hill Gymnasium on Friday evening, Sept. 14, when Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, joined Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, for “The Cardinal and Colbert: Humor, Joy, and the Spiritual Life.” The discussion—moderated by James Martin, S.J., author of the book Between Heaven and Mirth (HarperOne, 2011)—drew a rousing crowd of more than 3,000 spectators, mostly students, prompting The New York Times to call it perhaps “the most successful Roman Catholic youth evangelization event since Pope John Paul II last appeared at World Youth Day.”

The conversation had more than its fair share of zingers—Dolan: “Do you feel pressure to be funny all the time?” Colbert: “Do you feel pressure to be holy all the time?”—but the theme that emerged was quite serious.

“Lord knows there are plenty of Good Fridays in our lives,” Cardinal Dolan said, “but they will not prevail. Easter will. As we Irish claim, ‘Life is all about loving, living, and laughing, not about hating, dying, and moaning.’”

One of the highlights of the evening was an animated cartoon created by Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Tim Luecke, a visual arts major and an honors student. The video, screened at the start of the event, shows the participants on campus, where Cardinal Dolan and Colbert get chased by the Ram, and Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, has the last laugh.

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.”

The competition is soliciting design proposals for orientation elements to point pedestrians toward their destinations as they exit from below-grade subway stations or descend to the street from above-ground platforms at 16 locations in The Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The proposals will include a full-scale mock up; a site plan illustrating the proposed location; visual documentation (drawings, renderings, photographs or footage of proposal located at site); and research, including a description of site and community and copies of any surveys or interviews.

Between 6 and 10 students from the “Graphic Design II” class will have their proposals ready in November, says Abby Goldstein, associate professor and head of the design concentration at Fordham. The project started in Goldstein’s “Graphic Design III” and Colin Cathcart’s “Design and the City” classes last fall. There will be an exhibition of the proposals, and they will be judged by some of the most prestigious designers in New York, according to Goldstein.

Fordham is the model for the project, Goldstein says, and is one of the few Universities invited to participate. In November 2008 the top proposals will be reviewed, and winners selected, by officials from the Business Improvement Districts in which the 16 subway stations are located. The temporary compasses are scheduled to be installed sometime in spring 2009.

“[This exhibit] wouldn’t exist without your participation,” Abby Goldstein, director of the visual arts program, told alumni during an opening reception in the Center Gallery on June 6. “Your work is invigorating and inspiring.”

James Vanderberg (FCLC ’02), an adjunct professor in Fordham’s visual arts department since fall 2007, curated the show, the department’s second exhibition of alumni work in recent years. He also curated the first alumni show, “After School Special,” in 2005.

“As romantic as it sounds, this is really a dream come true—to be back at the place that taught me how to think in a visual way and to express my creative impulses,” said Vanderberg, whose own oil painting, Le Jour sur la Colline, appears in the Push Pin Gallery.

Many of the alumni artists featured in the exhibition have garnered awards for their work, secured positions at museums, publishers, studios and architecture firms, and attended top M.F.A. programs around the country.

“All the work is strong,” Vanderberg said, “and the greatest thing about curating a show is watching how the work speaks to one another on the wall and in the space.

“Certain themes emerge in a unique way, including that of nostalgia, identity, environmental-political conversation and a question of the very reality we live in.”

Carl Gunhouse (FCLC ’99), an adjunct professor at Cooper Union, Montclair State University and Nassau Community College, said that the friendships he forged at Fordham remain strong and keep him connected to his work and the art world.

“It’s like a club. I’ve always enjoyed being at Fordham,” said Gunhouse, who went on to graduate from Yale University’s M.F.A. in photography program in 2003. “It’s nice to have a piece of me on the wall. To see what we’ve come to, it’s impressive.”

Equally impressive, Vanderberg said, is the expansion of the visual arts program’s facilities and curriculum at both the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses.

“The possibilities for students are much greater now [than they were when I was an undergraduate],” he said. “To be a part of that as a professor is very exciting.”

Vanderberg, who received his M.F.A. from Hunter College in May, said he hopes the alumni exhibition will become a biennial affair at Fordham, a way to highlight the successes of the visual arts program while strengthening the network of alumni artists—at home and abroad.

The opportunity to study abroad, Vanderberg said, has been central to his development as an artist and a professor. While at Hunter, he earned a Luetz/Riedel Fellowship to spend a semester at the L’École Nationale Superier Des Beaux Arts in Paris, France. He also studied abroad during his undergraduate days at Fordham, receiving a Susan Lapani Travel Scholarship to participate in a summer arts program in Orvieto, Italy. It was, he said, a “life-changing” experience.

While studying in Orvieto in 2001, Vanderberg reunited with a former classmate, Lauren Portada (FCLC ’00), who had worked with Vanderberg as an artist assistant at Fordham. Portada, traveling with Gunhouse, was visiting the town where she had studied two summers prior.

“James and I had a funny run-in in Italy during the summer arts program,” said Portada, a 2005–2006 Fulbright Scholar to India who is now, like Vanderberg, an adjunct professor in the visual arts department. “We had created a unique community in Orvieto, and so when [James] asked me to be a part of [the alumni exhibition], I said, without hesitation, ‘Sure, whatever you need.’”

Portada’s Untitled (Here Comes the Sun), a vibrant display of gouache paint fanning out from a plastic toilet paper roll cover made in India, is one of the more colorful works in the exhibition.

“The strength of the faculty is represented in the work,” Vanderberg said. “The strength of the work speaks for itself.”

Other alumni artists featured in the exhibit, which continues through July 26, are: Maria Berkova (FCLC ’02), Bosko Blagojevic (FCLC ’06), Dylan Chandler (FCLC ’04), Martha Clippinger (FCRH ’05), Matt Crowther (FCLC ’03), Tiffany Edwards (FCLC ’02), Rich Garr (FCRH ’02), Danielle Jones (FCLC ’02), Katie Latona (FCLC ’03), Caitlin McKee (FCLC ’06), Neha (Mistry) Motipara (FCLC ’04), and Ted Partin (FCLC ’00).

The eclectic exhibition features works from a broad range of disciplines, including painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, graphic design, and film and video. Among the mix of works are cardboard and wood architectural models, sculpture, mixed-media collage, abstract paintings, conceptual and traditional photography and video. A reception for the artists will be held in the gallery space on Thursday, Nov. 8, at 6:30 p.m.

“Faculty shows are a staple of all university galleries,” said Casey Ruble, artist in residence and coordinator of the Fordham galleries. “They allow students a chance to better understand their professors’ individual approaches to art-making. . ., and are a critical part of the department’s [engagement]with the school at large.”

– Janet Sassi