New York City, on the other hand, has the Metropolitan Opera, world-class museums, and Shakespeare in the Park. And of course, Rockefeller Center, home of the popular show 30 Rock.

For six Italian exchange students who have been studying at Fordham since August, that’s no small matter. Visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art have allowed them to take in the ways in which a young country like the United States treats items of antiquity, while living in lower Manhattan has brought pop culture of New York City into sharper focus.

“It’s like living a dream, because we’re very obsessed with American culture. We grew up with American culture, movies, and TV series,” said Marco Cataldi, a native of Calabria, Italy.

“When you experience things in person, its completely different because you can actually feel the realness of something. It can be a little overwhelming.”

Marilena Simeoni, a native of Avezzano, likewise marveled at how the pace of life in New York is dramatically faster, noting that “every day you have something to do, something to see, to visit.”

Cataldi, Simeoni and four others studying at Fordham this semester are the inaugural cohort of World Cultural Heritage Studies, a three-year long partnership between Fordham and a consortium of six Italian universities that was signed last year by Fordham president Joseph M. McShane, S.J., and Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., Fordham’s late provost.

Next fall and spring, Fordham graduate students studying the humanities will likewise be invited to study at the Università di Bologna, Università di Chieti-Pescara, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Università di Roma Roma Tre, or Università per Stanieri di Perugia.

Education without Borders

Jo Ann Isaak, Ph.D., Fordham’s John L. Marion Chair of Art History and Music, said the goal is to emulate the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students  program. Since 1987, ERASMUS, as it is commonly known, has essentially eliminated borders for European students.

“Every year, students freely come and go to other universities and attend classes and have their classes accredited in their home university. This fluidity is so important,” she said.

“I taught classes in Italian universities, and in my classes, I would have students from all over, not just Italian students. So, it’s very familiar for me, and I can clearly see its advantages for American students. We are a little isolated in America, it is good to see how things are done in another country.”

In addition to Isaak’s class Contemporary Art in Exhibition, the Italian students are taking classes such as Urban Film Video Production by Mark Street,, Ph.D., associate professor of visual arts, and Rewriting the Mediterranean by Francesca Parmeggiani, Ph.D., professor of Italian and comparative literature and Making Early Music by Eric Bianchi, Ph.D., associate professor of music.

In August, the Italian exchange students along with Fordham graduates were treated to a two-week long immersion course that included trips to major landmarks and sites like Belmont’s Little Italy. Other Fordham students have also taken them on more informal outings, including one to Governor’s Island.

Simeoni said the Cloisters Museum impressed her because the displays there showed a level of attention to medieval objects that is often lacking in Italy. A visit to the African Burial Ground National Monument in lower Manhattan was also particularly moving, she said.

“It was very shocking, seeing it. We study these things in Italy, but it seems far. Here, I can perceive so much, and see how American people try to remember history in the right way,” she said.

“It’s a difficult thing, because telling history is difficult, and it should be done in the most objective way. I saw that here.”

The students in Isaak’s class worked alongside their American counterparts to put on an exhibition as well, Art for Arctic’s Sake, at the Ildiko Butler Gallery on the Lincoln Center campus. At the show’s opening on Nov. 7, students who’d organized the exhibition, the show’s post card, posters, website, and written the catalogue essays, greeted visitors while wearing buttons that said “Ask me about the art.”

Study in Italy

As part of the exchange, Fordham graduate students will have the opportunity to study for a term in Italy. Isaak encouraged students interested in courses such as Everyday Life in Pompeii, Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Novels as Travel Guides, and Magic in the Middle Ages in Italy to consult with their advisors and the dean’s office of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The Italian graduate students have been really fantastic to have in my class, and I’ve been happy with the ways our own students have taken on the role of host and introduced them to New York,” Isaak said.

Following the development of the automatic pinsetter in the 1950s, bowling became a cultural phenomenon in America.

“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.”

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

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.”

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 ensemble work is now featured in an exhibition that runs through Sept. 30 at the Ildiko Butler Gallery on the Lincoln Center campus, titled What This Journey Breeds. The project was not connected to any class, though students met in seminar with artist Amie Cunat, FCLC ’08, Fordham artist-in-residence Carleen Sheenan, and photographer Anibal Pella-Woo, lecturer in the visual arts program.

The students collaborated with the Refugee and Immigrant Fund (RIF) on the project. With concentrations in graphic design, painting and drawing, photography, architecture, and film and video, the artists put a human face to an abstract subject in this unnerving, yet hopeful, exhibition.

David Quateman, FCLC ’16, and rising junior Eamon Redpath interviewed several refugees in a short video—including Julian, a gay man from Malaysia who describes having a gun pointed at his face by the Malaysian police.

Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA) sponsored several events. Students met with a lawyer from Catholic Charities, civil servants, fellow students working with refugees, and other artists that make socially conscious artwork.

Students took field trips to Brooklyn Grange, where RIF brings refugees to rooftop gardens as a respite from the stressful process of seeking asylum in the United States. Once there, James McCracken Jr., PCS ’16, shot stark black and white portraits of the asylum seekers.

A video diptych by rising senior Anabelle Declement juxtaposes two scenes: one that’s a mashup of testimonials used in the documentary, and another that presents the natural serenity of Brooklyn Grange.

The grange inspired a range of other works, including plant sculptures by rising senior Emma Kilroy and a fruit- and vegetable-stained textile created by rising senior Francesca Aton. The grange also inspired a second garden on the Lincoln Center campus designed and built by Danielle Serigano, FCLC ’16. All fruits and vegetables harvested at summer’s end will be donated to RIF. Serigano also maps a metaphorical journey through the campus garden, presented on post cards at the gallery. Student and faculty volunteers will maintain the garden through the summer.

Through architectural renderings created by Nicholas Eliades, FCRH ’16, one can imagine future meeting spaces for RIF clients. Rising senior Margaret McCauley’s collages include text, culled from the interviews, expressing why such a safe space is needed.

“Mommy thank God,” reads one. “If you didn’t leave for America, now you would be dead.”

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.”

But the old adage of “what’s old is new again” holds true even in digital era, as a new show at the Ildiko Butler Gallery illustrates.

“Ladislav Sutnar: Pioneer of Information Design, 1941-1960,” is curated by adjunct faculty member Patricia Belen and Greg D’Onofrio, founders of thisisdisplay.org.

The exhibit runs through Tuesday, Dec. 14, with a closing reception a week before on Tuesday, Dec. 8 at 6 p.m.

“Sutnar is basically designing the page to control your eye and the flow of information so that it becomes more accessible, easier to digest, and easier to read,” said D’Onofrio. “Those are principles that we are thinking of today: someone lands on your website on a mobile device and you want them to easily be able to navigate, so the idea is the same, but this is with print in 1940.”

Sutnar was born in Czechoslovakia in 1897 and emigrated to New York City during World War II. A graphic designer by trade, he seamlessly made the transition from the politically bent graphics of Eastern Europe’s constructivist movement to the more commercial environs of mid-century America.

He became the art director at Sweets Catalogue Service, publishers of industrial catalogues. He and his team of designers, writers, and researchers translated extraordinarily dense catalogue information into digestible visuals and text.

“They set the standards for what we’d call information design today, but the ideas were basically the same in that we also design for space, typographic hierarchy, and visual flow,” said D’Onofrio.

Sutnar’s designs fell out of favor in the psychedelic 1960s, said D’Onofrio, but not without recognition of their impact. In 1961, the American Institute of Graphic Arts recognized his work in the landmark exhibition, “Sutnar: Visual Design in Action.”

The Butler Gallery show is the first show in the United States since the 1961 exhibit, though there have been recent shows in Prague.

“I do think its important to understand that the work is not glamorous; it’s utilitarian,” said D’Onofrio. “He’s designing for the client, he’s not designing for designers. He’s thinking about how to make the design effective to sell. These could be considered dry products, but Sutnar makes them visually exciting.”

But that’s what Jean Laughton was 12 years ago when she left her established career to eventually become a rancher in the Badlands of South Dakota and take photos from atop her horse.

Laughton’s photography will be on display throughout the summer at the Ildiko Butler Gallery through Wed., Sept. 30. Titled, My Ranching Life, the show’s black and white prints, framed in polished repurposed wood, seem to leap off the burnt-orange gallery walls, an antidote to the usual gallery white.

Laughton’s art captures the rich landscape of ranching life, historically populated by a few men and hundreds of cattle. For a woman to find her way into such an environment is uncommon, though not unheard of, she said.

“I got into the [cattle-ranching] crew with an old-timer, someone who opened the door a bit, but I still had to earn my way,” said Laughton.

Nowadays she isn’t the only woman in ranching, but they are still by far the minority. For the most part her portraits are of men, though she does photograph women “who are real hands and working cowboys,” like Diana Elwood, whose portrait is in the exhibit. 

Besides intimate portraits, there are dramatic landscapes that echo 19th-century landscape paintings or early photographs of the West. Her photos are taken while she’s at work and on horseback. Her horse’s ears often creep into the frame, adding a contemporary self-awareness to the photos.

“At first it happened by accident, but then I began to like the ears because I’m working and not just a spectator,” she said.

Laughton, a native Iowan, said that she was first drawn back to the West by the wide-open spaces as well as an earlier photo project, but she became quickly rooted to the area.

“I made the move to pursue other photography projects but had no idea about the current project until I got into ranching,” she said. “I was offered a chance to try my hand at ranching and learn to cowboy from an old timer. I started as a complete novice and I now manage the ranch.”

“After being in New York’s art scene, I went for the opposite extreme,” she said. “I’m not a ‘grey area’ kind of person.”

In a digital age, Laughton still shoots with film, and most times with a medium-format camera that creates larger negatives. She said historical photos of the West, as well as the cowboy photographers Erwin E. Smith, L.A. Huffman, and Evelyn Cameron, have influenced her.

Her photography captures art of old-style herding, she said. While nearby ranches may use vehicles to herd, there remains a substantial community of ranches that help each other out on horseback.

“My photographs capture old-time cowboying,” she said.

[doptg id=”19″] ]]> 17989 https://now.fordham.edu/arts-and-culture/suspension-points-through-january-at-the-ildiko-butler-gallery/ Fri, 26 Dec 2014 15:24:18 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=3285 In today’s technology three little ellipses signify that a digital message is in-suspension across the channels of communication and soon to come your way. In that moment of suspension – the sense of waiting for the impending message – there is both the fragile apprehension of what is to come and the insatiable desire for more and faster messaging.

This world of new communication has inspired Suspension Points, a new exhibit at the Ildiko Butler Gallery on display through Jan. 25, 2015 in the lobby of the Lowenstein Center on Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. The show came about through a collaboration among students from Fordham University and Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, who have used different modes of correspondence—from the antiquated to the contemporaneous—to explore the vagaries of communication in contemporary life.

The universities have been partner institutions, said show’s co-organizor Casey Ruble, artist-in-residence at Fordham, and the schools thought it might be a good idea to extend the partnership to the arts programs.

“The show idea came out of the first question Mark and I asked each other, which was: How should we do this? (The implicit options being via email, Instagram, postal mail, etc.),” said Ruble. “It wasn’t too much a leap to then realize that it would be interesting to have the groups of students work in different communication formats.”

Students were partnered across the two hemispheres and 16 time zones based on their compatibility of communication format choices, which included Instagram, Twitter, Skype, Facebook, email, postal mail, and message in a bottle.

“The resulting works sometimes directly acknowledge the communication format used, but other times don’t; we really wanted to give the students full freedom to take the projects in their own directions, and that they did, often to surprising and enlightening effect,” she said.

Across an ocean, some students became close to their partners; others strove for a connection that never materialized. Speaking to both the possibilities and limitations of the ways we attempt to make contact with others, Suspension Points marks a moment in time when distance seems both nominal and vast, said Ruble.

The project was co-organized by Ruble and Mark Pennings, senior lecturer at Queensland University of Technology.

Read more about the project here.

— Janet Sassi