Two of the grads also had solo shows running at New York and Philadelphia galleries this fall.

Teresa Baker, FCLC ’08, whose piece Sunset Turns South was part of “Amarcord,” had her first New York City solo show open at Broadway Gallery in September. “Mapping the Territory” featured her large-scale, asymmetrical paintings, many of which featured the use of natural materials like deerskin and willow branches, in a nod to Native American traditions.

Amie Cunat, FCLC ’08, contributed Sparkler II to the alumni show. An assistant clinical professor in the Fordham visual arts department, she recently had a solo show titled “West McHenry” running at Philly’s Peep Projects, where her colorful abstract work ranged from small acrylic paintings on linen to large mixed-media pieces meant to evoke cross-sections of houses. 

Vincent Stracquadanio, FCRH ’11, an adjunct professor of visual arts, curated the alumni show, which spread out across the Ildiko Butler Gallery, the newly renovated Lipani Gallery, and the Hayden Hartnett Project Space in the Lowenstein Center. 

“A big thread with all the artists in the show is that they came to Fordham and found either a class or a professor here that just kind of swept them away, and it’s this path that they’re still on,” Stracquadanio said. “They left fully changed as an artist because of the teaching at Fordham.”

If you walk through the “Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—on view through July 28—you might be struck by many paintings and sculptures in their own right. But as you pass from gallery to gallery, you may also feel like you’re being guided through a conversation with everything you see.  

That kind of conversation—between works of art and viewers—is one that Fabiana Weinberg, FCLC ’07, hopes to facilitate in her role as senior exhibition designer at the Met.

“For me, it’s always a question of how do you breathe new life into these things every single time and provide the space for a dialogue with them?” Weinberg says. “I like the permanence of material culture, but also the ability to constantly think about it and marinate on it.”

The Harlem Renaissance exhibit gives people plenty to think about, including how to bring a “still-neglected art history out of the wings and onto the main stage,” as New York Times critic Holland Carter put it. The exhibit does that by featuring Black American artists from the 1920s to the 1940s like William H. Johnson, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Aaron Douglas—whose 1934 large-scale painting, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, inspired the soft color palette for the gallery walls—along with portrayals of the African diaspora by European artists like Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso.

“This show is really exciting because there are a lot of paintings but also ephemera and magazines and books and sculpture,” Weinberg says. “It’s a really immersive experience going through the galleries. A lot of these works are on view for the first time, and it’s really about expanding the canon.”

Weinberg majored in visual arts and art history at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and after graduating in 2007, she earned a master’s degree in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. She uses all that academic training to think broadly about the aesthetic and design choices that go into museum exhibits—from sketching design ideas, to using 3D-rendering software to move pieces of art around in a virtual replica of a gallery, to collaborating with tradespeople to build out the physical walls and cases and with curators to decide how to best showcase their selected works.

Her way of thinking about how people engage with art, though, began much earlier.

An Artistic Childhood and an Ideas-Driven Education

Weinberg grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As a kid, she trained to be a dancer, and her parents—a mother who was a photographer and a Fordham grad and a businessman father who became a high school teacher after earning a Fordham degree—frequently brought her to museums and exposed her to a wide range of performing arts.

At Fordham, she initially focused on natural sciences, but something clicked when she took an art history course—she decided to change majors. She says that Fordham’s core curriculum also gave her a foundation that added texture to her studies. “One thing I really always liked about Fordham’s approach is it was always ideas-driven, like, ‘What are you trying to say? What are you trying to do?’ And what it looks like—that comes later.”

After finishing her master’s in 2012, Weinberg moved back to New York and worked a variety of jobs across the design landscape, from scenic design to lighting design. The following year, she saw a posting for an exhibition designer position at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea. Although she had no experience in exhibition design, she heard back from the Rubin’s head of design, John Monaco, a former sculptor who saw promise in her application. She went on to spend four years at the Rubin before moving on to the Met in 2017.

‘Every Single Thing is a Decision’

In her time at the Met, Weinberg has designed or co-designed several premier shows, including 2020’s “Making the Met,” which looked back at the institution’s 150-year history; 2021’s Alice Neel retrospective; and “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” an Afrofuturist period room that opened in 2021 and remains on display.

Last December, she gave a group of Fordham alumni a private, behind-the-scenes look at “Africa & Byzantium,” which highlighted the artistic connections between these two geographically distant ancient civilizations. Before seeing the exhibit, which was darkly lit and made use of striking gold wall text, the alumni gathered in a conference room in the museum’s design department, where Weinberg demonstrated the Vectorworks 3D design software she and her colleagues use to plan out exhibitions.

“There’s still nothing like having a drawing that you see in your mind and then spatialize in a 3D model and then go into the gallery and see it being built,” she says of the work. “It’s thrilling.”

For the Harlem Renaissance exhibit, Weinberg says she tried to give viewers a sense of scale from room to room—and offer a contrast between some of the more esoteric written pieces on display and other sections with bursts of color and city life.

“At the beginning,” she explains, “there’s an introduction to the thinkers of the time, and we really wanted to create intimacy with these figures that really set the stage for what you’re going to see later. And then we have another gallery about city life that we wanted to open up. … So, using paint color and proportions of the space and dimensions, [we] give those different senses of scale between the intimacy of more domestic spaces and then more open, larger spaces.”

Weinberg says the breadth of her experience—from childhood museum visits to her understanding of space through dance—has helped her develop her eye for design. And while museum exhibition design wasn’t something she consciously thought about on all those childhood trips, it’s now front of mind for her. “When I go to museums, I can’t unsee how the spaces are designed,” she says. “Every single thing is a decision.”

But Mejia said she couldn’t choose art as a career. A degree in the fine arts was too costly, especially for a first-generation college student with limited financial resources like herself. 

After exploring different options across the world, Mejia found a home at Fordham. Last February, she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, magna cum laude, from the School of Professional and Continuing Studies. This summer, she will complete her master’s degree in public media from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 

“I’ve always been interested in media, especially since I started studying political science. This is public media, which is even better because I’ll be working for a good cause,” Mejia said. “And I can find a way to integrate the arts.” 

‘Art Was My Escape From Reality’ 

Mejia was born in Medellín, Colombia, in the early ’90s—one of the most dangerous periods in the country’s history. Her city was recovering from many years of internal conflict, especially drug trafficking, and it wasn’t easy to find jobs, said Mejia. When Mejia was a toddler, her mother made a difficult decision. 

“My mother, whom I deeply admire for her bravery, moved to the U.S. with her sister in the hopes of providing a brighter future for me and my sister. She worked several jobs, including as a waitress. She saw that this was the only way for her to support us,” said Mejia, who left her father, aunts, and grandparents in Colombia as a teenager to join her mother, whom she had lived apart from for most of her childhood. 

Mejia said she struggled to adjust to her new life. 

“We imagine New York as that little piece of Times Square that’s so brilliant, beautiful, and perfect, like Disneyland. Then you realize that there’s so much more. I first lived in the Bronx, which did not look exactly like what I had seen in the movies. I liked living in The Bronx, but it was a big cultural change for me,” Mejia said. “I would sit with my sketchbook and paint and draw. Art was my escape from reality.”

Her temporary escape became a permanent passion. As a student at Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York, one of the oldest independent art schools in the U.S. For two consecutive summers, she also participated in a program at the Museum of Modern Art, which featured her artwork. In addition, one of her paintings was selected as a first runner-up in a national high school art competition. 

“My painting was inspired by the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.’ That song just made me so happy,” said Mejia, who submitted a painting of a woman with flowers in her hair to the 2011 Congressional Art Competition. “My painting reflected this moment in high school when I was starting to learn English, make friends in New York, and feel like I was finally part of a community.”

A Reality Check 

But Mejia said she realized that a career in the arts wasn’t feasible. Everything about it was expensive, including fine arts school tuition and supplies, and she couldn’t afford the long-term investment. Instead, she spent years working in retail, saved money, and then returned to school. In 2018, she earned an associate’s degree in communication studies from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, while working a full-time job. 

“Communications studies is so broad that I thought it could lead back to the arts,” Mejia said.  

Over the next two years, her personal life took her across the world: to Sweden, where she studied political science at Stockholm University, and to Paris, where she continued her education at the Paris Institute of Political Studies until the pandemic. She returned to New York, where she found Fordham and completed her bachelor’s degree in political science. 

Mejia is now pursuing her master’s degree in public media so she can become the person she wishes she had when she was a young artist, she said. 

“What I’ve realized after living in New York City, Colombia, and around the world is there are so many scholarships and opportunities for artists, but so little information about them unless you are well-connected. There’s a lot of aid out there that’s not being marketed effectively. But people who work in public media can spread the word about these opportunities,” Mejia said. 

Mejia said she is considering becoming an immigration lawyer. Although she was able to become an American citizen, she saw many immigrants struggle to have a brighter future. She said she wants to be able to assist those who are chasing their dreams through academics, especially Dreamers. 

“It’s not about the diploma. It’s about the challenge and fulfillment that you feel along your journey,” Mejia said. “You are not alone. There are many students like you who are paving the road for others.”

As such, Fordham University in London will be offering a series of virtual lectures and classes next semester that will reflect both traditional and contemporary aspects of the city, the U.K., and Europe, said Mark Simmons, interim head and director of academic affairs there. The offerings will be available to all full-time Fordham undergraduates.

“We will be creating an immersive experience, a multidisciplinary approach to what London is about today, one that ranges from subjects on gender and identity in modern Britain to a Bollywood take on Shakespeare to parallels of Brexit in U.S. politics,” he said.

The array of 3-credit courses includes several English courses that delve into the Romantics as well as the Modernists; a history course on 20th-century Europe; a political science course on European politics; and business courses on ethics, legal frameworks, and global investments, as well as a marketing class on global sustainability. There will be virtual tours of the city’s modern and contemporary architecture, and another tour that looks back at the Victorian era. Virtual internships will continue to be on offer next semester.

In addition, two learning series will give students a taste of what Fordham London has to offer.

A one-credit weekly seminar titled Britain Today will feature an ensemble Fordham London faculty on subjects that range from modern UK history and government, media’s role in the U.K., London’s arts and theater scene, the landscape of religion in today’s Britain, and London’s role as a world financial capital.

Simmons said that the seminar provides a sampling of courses on offer at Fordham London but would be interesting to others as well.

“For students who wanted to learn about London this would give you a flavor of British society,” said Simons.

The London Business Speaker Series is a certificate program curated by Meghann L. Drury-Grogan, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media management at the Gabelli School of Business. The program will run weekly from Feb. 8, to be held every Thursday around lunchtime in New York. The series will tap into established Gabelli School partnerships, including the London offices of Ernst and Young, Bloomberg, and Accenture.

“The program will showcase the relationships we’ve been able to build here in London with various alumni and other established ties that will give students a global experience,” she said. “There will be a plethora of different perspectives that give students who can’t study abroad, for whatever the reason, a chance to learn about the U.K. Now that we have the opportunity of putting on these virtual events, we hope to continue this into the future.”

Geoff Snell, who teaches the architecture courses, said he plans to prerecord his tours during daylight hours and deliver the lectures live.

“When we had to go live this past spring we learned what worked and what didn’t work,” timing-wise, he said. “We want everyone to be engaged with the material.”

Snell’s course, like those in all the disciplines, includes a healthy dose of the contemporary juxtaposed with the modern. The skyscrapers of London’s business district, such as the Shard and the Walkie Talkie, are featured alongside St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Pancreas Station, and other Victorian masterpieces.

“We’ll be jumping from art deco to Christopher Wren to the Gherkin, all different styles, but like so much else in London, every architectural style has something to do with what went before,” he said. 

Students should register for classes by Dec. 4; those who had applied to study abroad for the Spring 2021 semester have priority for registration.

After the exhibit closed in February, the reproduction was carefully taken down and packed away. In November, it was given a new home in Fordham’s Butler Commons on the Rose Hill campus.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, called the gift a welcome addition to the University’s collection, one that will “touch our hearts, engage our minds, and lift our spirits.”

“It is an honor to once again partner with the Met, one of New York City’s preeminent cultural institutions, and to provide a permanent home to a reproduction of Michelangelo’s most ambitious and stirring masterpiece,” he said.

“Such a work embodies the divine grace of God. Its presence will remind us of our own Catholic heritage.”

The fresco, which Michelangelo painted between 1508 and 1512 at the behest of Pope Julius II, is one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. Among its features are narrative scenes from the Book of Genesis, the Book of Maccabees, and the Gospel of Matthew. One of its most iconic images is the artist’s rendition of The Creation of Adam.

The gift is emblematic of both the Met’s and Fordham’s extensive roots in New York City. Father McShane first saw the fresco during an early morning tour of the exhibit arranged by Fordham Trustee Fellow Edward M. Stroz, GABELLI ’79, and his wife Sally Spooner. They were joined by Erin Pick, then a senior administrator at the Met, and Maria Ruvoldt, Ph.D., chair of the department of art history at Fordham.

He said he knew from the moment he entered the room that it would be a magnificent addition to Fordham’s campus. As chance would have it, the group crossed paths with Carmen Bambach, Ph.D., a curator at the Met who specializes in Italian Renaissance art. From 1989 to 1995, Bambach was also an assistant professor of art and music history at Fordham when Father McShane was dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

 “She looked at me and said, ‘You hired me at Fordham.’ I smiled and said that I had indeed hired her,” Father McShane said.

“After the tour was over, Erin, Carmen, and Maria worked on a proposal that we could place before the Met leadership to see if we could secure the piece for Fordham. Much to my surprise, we were informed a few weeks later that the Met approved our proposal.”

Quincy Houghton, deputy director for exhibitions at the Met, echoed the bond between the museum and Fordham.

“We are pleased that this painting will have a future life at Fordham, as another manifestation of the many scholarly connections between our two institutions, and that it will be widely used as a teaching tool,” he said.

“We look forward to seeing it in its new home.”

Ruvoldt said that although the fresco is among the most famous paintings in the world, it’s often seen in piecemeal fashion, such as the well-known section featuring the nearly touching hands in The Creation of Adam.

“Typically, when students learn about this in an art history classroom, they’re seeing a projection on the wall. They don’t have the experience of the entirety of the composition, and the experience, frankly, of just looking up at it, which sounds a little simple, but was key to the way the painting was meant to be understood,” she said.

“Michelangelo really got that the people who would be looking at it would be looking at it from below. So, it’s a unique experience for students to see it.”

Among the details one can observe in the full reproduction is evidence that Michelangelo actually realized, halfway through the production, that he’d have to rethink his approach. Ruvoldt said the latter sections feature visible changes in the scale of the figures, and compositions become simpler, so they’re more discernible from below.

Watch Ruvoldt give a guided explanation of the fresco reproduction.

Butler Commons, which is named for the founder of Marymount College and is just one floor above the University’s theology department, is an ideal location for it, she said, because it’s open to all. The University will open it to members of the campus community in January, and members of the public can arrange visits in the same manner they currently use to visit the University’s Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art.

“I picture it as something that not only art history professors can bring students in to look at it, but the theology department as well. The subject matter is the entire story of Genesis, the prophets, and the ancestors of Christ—it could be interesting as well for interdisciplinary investigation.”

The gift is only the latest collaboration between the two institutions. Last year, Fordham lent the Met Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi; the museum restored it and included its July exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque.

Update: While Butler Commons will remain secured, any member of the Fordham community who wishes to view the reproduction can contact the reception desk at Tognino Hall during business hours to have them open the room. During the weekends and after business hours, Public Safety will respond and open the room for any requested viewing. Members of the public can also make arrangements to view the artwork during business hours. No food or beverages are permitted in Butler Commons.

“Due to the efforts of many over the last decades, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Byzantium is now more readily recognized and its culture more often understood as an active power in the world,” she said.

“Presenting Byzantium in the Modern World” was presented by Helen C. Evans, Ph.D., the Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her lecture was sponsored by Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center as its annual Orthodoxy in America lecture.

Byzantium, which became known as Constantinople and later Istanbul, was the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, a continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces, from roughly 330-1453 A.D.

A member of the Met staff since 1991, Evans has overseen the acquisition, study, and interpretation of the museum’s collection of early Christian, early Jewish, and early-to-late East Christian and Byzantine art.

She curated three exhibitions there, “The Glory of Byzantium,” in 1997, “Byzantium: Faith and Power,” in 2004, and “Byzantium and Islam,” in 2012. While exhibitions in the past might have presented Byzantium art as a link between Classical and Gothic styles of art, today it is widely accepted as respectable in its own right, and believed to be from multiple origins.

Evans said she was proud that “The Glory of Byzantium,” which featured 344 objects from 24 countries, was the first exhibit on Byzantine art at the Met since 1977, and played a major role in this change.

“‘The Glory of Byzantium, 843-1261’ grew out of my dissertation research on the middle Byzantine period and my interest in the character of the art of the center, and its interaction with the periphery, as well as my desire to demonstrate that multiple centers [within the empire]produced significant art, not just Constantinople,” she said.

“In all these earlier exhibitions, anything that was really outstanding almost invariably was called a work from Constantinople.”

The idea that Byzantium is more important as a conduit than as a statement of its own culture has had its roots in the beginning of academic studies, she said. It’s integral to the English historian Edward Gibbon’s 1776 tome, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is still influential today.

“I would argue his generation’s approach to the empire and its periphery long dominated, and still influences, our approach to Byzantine art,” she said.

The first art exhibit dedicated to Byzantium, which was held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, set the tone, she said, as a critic wrote afterwards that the pieces were “a means by which Roman architecture, which was itself an offspring of Greece, was transformed into the Byzantine style while in turn, it resolved itself into two remarkable phases, in the Lombard and Norman style.”

As time went on, exhibitions such as one staged in Rome in 1905 focused on the art in the context of the priorities of the countries of origin. The objects selected for the show were originally from countries as varied as Egypt and Russia, but they came from collections owned by the Vatican and others in Italy.

“So, the icon section of the catalogue offered an introduction as to why the viewer should be interested in icons. Because they influenced Italian art,” she said.

A big change came in 1964, when 740 items from 18 countries were brought together in Athens for a show called “Byzantine Art: A European Art.” The curator of that show said “it can be clearly perceived that Byzantine art is European, and the only art between East and West which kept alive that spirit of Greek humanism, now recognized as preeminently the basis of European values.”

Looking to the future, Evans was encouraged by the reception of “The Glory of Byzantium,” which drew an estimated 400,000 visitors. In that show, she noted that she and her colleagues presented the objects as often as possible using the terms of the Orthodox word: “icon,” for instance, instead of “painting.”

“We sought to view the world as if we were standing in Constantinople, not Paris, or London or Berlin. It is a subtle issue, but one that I think added immensely to the sense of being in the empire as one passed through the exhibition, or read the catalogue,” she said.

“One of the side effects was, suddenly newsmakers used the word Byzantine in a more positive context in the United States.”

“In the future, more exhibitions could explore more contacts between Byzantium and others states on its periphery and beyond to demonstrate the active engagement of the empire as a vibrant force of cultural change in its own time, not a static anchor to the past,” she said.

“By doing this, future exhibitions can continue the reversal of the image of Byzantium as a static entity in which people are not really thinking, they’re simply repeating what they’ve known from very distant ages.”

In his remarks afterward, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said Evans’ talk was proof of how the Byzantines, were bridge builders between civilizations.

“I came away from this evening with a greater understanding of what a bridge role Byzantium played in the life of the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual life of all of Europe and really now, the new world,” he said. “So I want to thank you Helen. It was a great joy.”

Yet the younger Brown chose Fordham’s McGinley Ballroom for the benefit event on Saturday, Oct. 20, because of one quality that thrives in the neighborhoods and people that surround the Rose Hill campus—diversity.

“We’re trying to shine a light on a story that hasn’t really been told,” said Brown, who conceived the idea for the event, which he dubbed “120 Wooster Street,” with his longtime mentor, Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African American Studies.

“We want to recreate a time period, and show students, faculty, administrators, and people from the [Bronx] community what it was really like in 1970s SoHo, and do it in a way that incorporates art and music.”

Prints and original works by the artist will be on sale at the event; proceeds will benefit the Bronx African American History Project, which Naison directs and where Brown served as a researcher during his time at Fordham.

Shining a Light on the 1970s SoHo Art Scene

Now a graduate researcher at New York University, Brown said the Bronx seemed like a natural fit, since the art, music, fashion, and even food culture of the borough’s black and brown residents are often left out of the larger narrative of culture in New York City.

The same could be said of SoHo’s 1970s art scene, Brown said.

“That era [of the art and music scene has]often been told from a white perspective, but the reality is that the black artists were the creatives, the avant-garde. That was a time and space where black artists were creating the style of the times,” he said.

Frederick James Brown (1945–2012) was a New York City and Arizona-based American artist whose work engaged with American history, music, urban life, and spirituality. He was the first American artist to display his works at what is now the National Museum of China.

Born in Georgia and raised on Chicago’s South Side, he studied art and psychology at Southern Illinois University. He taught for several years in Chicago and Carbondale, Illinois, and traveled to Europe in 1969. In 1970, he moved to New York’s SoHo district to become a professional painter, supporting himself by teaching part-time at the Brooklyn Museum, York College, and the School of the Visual Arts.

Brown’s paintings of the early 1970s were large, bold abstractions based on the abstract expressionist tradition of the art department at Southern Illinois University. In 1975 Brown met the noted American painter Willem de Kooning, whom he would go on to refer to as his “artistic godfather.”

Brown settled in a loft in SoHo during the New York art renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. There, he collaborated with jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton.

It was a return to his formative years, the younger Brown said.

“My father wasn’t musically inclined, but he grew up around it as Southside Chicago was a hotbed for black music,” he said. “My grandfather owned a shoe shine parlor and juke joint. My dad met all those people growing up, such as the folks behind Chess Records, who made Muddy Waters and Etta James the household names they were.”

Thus, his art began immortalizing the jazz musicians, mentors, and colleagues who had exerted the greatest influence on his life.

“He had switched to more figurative work. He and a few others were pioneers of what became figurative expressionism,” Brown said. “Folks may be familiar with Jean Michele Basquiat, but my father had started long before him. And then from there he moved into portraiture of the jazz figures. These musicians aren’t just musicians, but people, and heroes of the American narrative.”

With this Fordham event, Brown wants to continue his father’s legacy of illuminating that narrative.

Honoring a Tradition of Art and Music

A selection of Frederick Brown’s works will be on display at the Oct. 20 event at Fordham, which goes from 6:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.

Apropos of the artist’s work, there will also be music, courtesy of the Dale Fielder jazz quartet, organized by Kunle Mwanga, who once served as manager for Ornette Coleman. Brown also plans to tease a documentary he is working on for his dissertation about SoHo and black creative spaces.

The evening, emceed by Naison, will begin with a talk by the American poet, community activist, journalist, media personality, and politician Felipe Luciano.

“He and my dad were like brothers,” Brown said. “Felipe was coming up as a poet when my dad was painting.”

Brown said that his academic home of four years was a perfect place to cast a new light on the art scene that his father helped to define.

“I think that’s what academia is supposed to do—shift the way that we perceive things,” he said.

In a lecture and Q&A with NPR arts correspondent Lynn Neary, TMC ’71, Cotter took listeners on a decidedly spiritual journey on how he developed his views on art, though he said he prefers the term “emotional” over “spiritual.” The sapientia et doctrina event was sponsored by the Center on Religion and Culture.

Cotter said that several religious motifs surfaced as high marks in his experiences with art. He said the highlight of a recent trip to Mexico City was not the galleries, but seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe–as much to observe fellow pilgrims as to view the work of art itself.

Cotter contextualized his views by providing a candid look at his background and growing-up experience. Born in Weston, Massachusetts, not far from where Henry David Thoreau lived on Walden Pond (and where Cotter’s father on worked as a lifeguard), Cotter said the writer became his early hero.

“[Thoreau] liked to be alone, loved animals,” he said. “He was taking the act of seeing and describing very personally and seriously.”

Cotter’s mother read Emily Dickenson to him and his sister at the dinner table on nights when his father worked late, he said. On Saturdays his parents dropped him off at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where he explored on his own everything from the Egyptian mummies to the Netherlandish landscapes to the Japanese galleries, which were “remote and ultra-quiet.”

“Museums in the 1950s were not like today,” he said. “This was before blockbusters and before museums became primarily social spaces,” he said. “No one was saying to me, ‘Look at this because it’s great, but never mind that.’ … I got a sense of a side-by-side existence of all kinds of art from many different cultures. And just as important I got a sense of the equal value of those cultures. I think because of that immersion no art has ever felt foreign to me.”

He said that as he got older he began to seek out the art of Africa, Native America, and the Pre-Columbian art of South America, found in “ethnology” museums, but not in art museums. That separation from so-called “‘real art’ mirrored American racial politics at that time.”

At Harvard College, the English literature major fulfilled a science requirement by taking an anthropology course called “Primitive Art,” he said, at a time when the study of such art was rare.

“I loved everything about it,” he said of his college anthropology course.

He also recalled the first time he saw “art that ‘did’ something”—a video of a masquerade dance in Mali. He said well before performance art “became a vanguard art here,” it existed in other cultures.

After college, Cotter said he got a hospital job as an orderly. That visceral experience left him with a sense of mortality which profoundly influenced the way he looks at art. It clarified his affinity for art that deals in life and death, such as religious artifacts, African sculpture, or art from the AIDS epidemic.

He came to New York City in the 1970s, when the South Bronx was producing significant strides in art through hip-hop and graffiti, he said. He lived downtown where he “cobbled together a freelance base” to begin writing about art.

In the early 1980s, when “caution replaced creativity” in the art scene, a show at the Japan Society inspired Cotter to visit Japan, touring monasteries and escaping the growing commercialization of the art world.

“That trip was almost entirely about looking at great sculptures,” he said. “Sculptures were used as acts of worship. People left fresh food for the images, and I could see how much they were loved.”

He said the trip confirmed for him that, while he may not have a religious temperament, he did have a “pilgrim’s temperament.” On returning to New York, he got a job at the City University of New York’s computer center. The position allowed him to take graduate courses at Hunter College. Later, he attended Columbia University.

“Graduate school was completely different,” he said. “You’re doing something you want to do as opposed to something you’re supposed to do.”

He delved into the art of ancient Greece, the art of Islam, and of Turkey. He recalled one teacher who showed an hour and a half slideshow depicting mosques from Africa to Queens, New York. She said very little during the presentation, which ended with an image of an elderly couple seated on a sofa.

“These are my parents,” Cotter said she told the students; by showing the image after so many artistic treasures, his teacher reminded students of the humanness of art that sometimes gets lost in a gallery setting.

“Art is made by people,” he said.

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.”

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“We have some great examples of what life really was like for the ancients,” said Michael Sheridan, a member of the Class of 2018 double-majoring in history and art history, and one of the 18 students who took the class. “Most universities don’t have anything like this, so we really are lucky to have this collection here.”

The exhibit ran from May 6 through August 15. Students selected the objects—including imperial portraits, luxury household items, coins, and painted pottery—from the 260-plus antiquities in the museum. They researched the objects’ history, wrote the text to accompany them, and helped design the display in a newly created gallery at the museum.

One of the students in the class, Michael Ceraso, even teamed up with another Fordham student, Michael Gonzales, to develop an app for the exhibit that ran on three iPods in the gallery.

“They were involved every step of the way,” said Jennifer Udell, PhD, curator of university art and the seminar’s instructor, who realized her longstanding idea for the project thanks to a gift from Fordham Trustee Fellow Robert F. Long, GABELLI ’63, and his wife, Katherine G. Long.

01
Askos (flask) in the form of a reclining satyr
Roman, ca. 1st century C.E.
Bronze, l: 5¼ in. (13.3 cm)

02
Oil lamp inscribed “The light of Christ shines for all”
Byzantine, ca. 5th century C.E.
Terracotta, l (from handle to nozzle): 3¼ in. (8.25 cm)

03
Terracotta transport amphora
Greek or Roman, ca. 5th century B.C.E. to 1st century C.E.
Terracotta, h: 27 in. (68.5 cm)

“This jar served a concrete, utilitarian purpose from the time it was made until the day that it finally fell prey to the waves of the wine-dark Mediterranean. The barnacles make for an interesting aesthetic that might grab your attention for a moment or two, but [they also] tell us so much about the perils and realities of life and trade in the ancient Mediterranean.”
—Christopher Boland, Class of 2016, math major and theology minor

04
Patera (shallow bowl) with knob handles
Greek, South Italian, Apulian, red-figure, ca. 340 B.C.E.
Terracotta, d: 22 in. (55.89 cm)

“This particular patera is among the largest objects in the collection, and I, like others, am drawn to this sort of scale. It depicts the Amazonomachy, an ancient battle between the Greeks and the Amazons, a fierce race of warrior women emblematic of ancient feminism and girl power.”
—Maria Victoria Alicia Recinto, Class of 2016, art history and anthropology major

05
Fish plate
Greek, South Italian, Campainian, red-figure, Late Classical, ca. 340 to 320 B.C.E.
Terracotta, d: 6¾ in. (17.1 cm)

“This plate conveys the fisherman in an everyday life. It is easy to envision a small enclave of aquatic-based communities along the Mediterranean coast, coming home after a day at sea, and cooking the day’s catch. It is easy to imagine the smell of mackerel, sea bass, octopus, and other marine delicacies grilled and served on this plate with the pungent dressing of fresh olive oil, the scent carried away on a sea breeze after a hard day’s work.”
—Owen Haffey, Class of 2019, English major

06
Kernos (vase for multiple offerings with mold made figural protomes)
Greek, South Italian, Campanian, Late Classical, ca. late 4th century B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 6¼ in. (15.9 cm)

07
Kylix (drinking cup with stem)
Greek, Attic, Late Archaic, red-figure, ca. 520 to 510 B.C.E.
Attributed to the Painter of Berlin 2268
Terracotta, d: 10½ in. (26.7 cm)

“I’ve always been amused by these dishes and how they’re used as drinking cups. … This finely made image of Dionysus shows him in a lunge gazing back at his own (possibly empty) goblet. When you finish your wine and are faced with the god of wine himself, it seems like a pretty good sign to fill up your kylix again.”
—Emma Cleary, Class of 2016, chemistry major and art history minor

08
Kylix (drinking cup with stem)
Etruscan, Archaic, black-figure, ca. 530 B.C.E.
Terracotta, d: 41/8 in. (10.5 cm)

09
Athenian tetradrachm
Greek, Attic, Classical, 430 to 413 B.C.E.
Silver, d: 7/8 in. (2.2 cm)

“What originally attracted me to this coin was the fact that it featured the portrait of the goddess Athena instead of a historical Greek ruler. This fact led me to wonder about both the representation of mythological figures and the representation of women on coins. … I wonder who might’ve used this coin and what they might’ve bought with it. It’s fascinating to think that we still read this piece of metal as a coin, but it now carries the monetary value of an ancient artifact instead of its original value as a circulated coin.”
—Katie Fredericks, Class of 2016, art history major

10
Coin of Lucilla
Struck under Lucius Verus, ca. 164 to 183, C.E., Roman
Bronze, d: 1¼ in. (3.1 cm)

“Lucilla was a Roman empress who was executed after she made a failed attempt to assassinate her brother, who was the Roman emperor at the time. Of course the coin was made before she fell out of favor, but how has it survived this long? I assumed the Romans would’ve melted down many coins depicting Lucilla in order to reuse the bronze as they so often did, and I think it’s amazing that we get the chance to get up close to this ancient scandal.”
—Katie Fredericks, Class of 2016, art history major

11
Lebes gamikos (wedding vase)
Greek, South Italian, Apulian, Late Classical, red-figure, ca. 340 B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 14¼ in. (36.2 cm)

“One of my favorite things to do when I’m interacting with ancient artifacts is to imagine the stories of the objects and the people who used them. How were [they] like me and how were they different? Who has touched and used this object? What was the wedding like? Was it a perfect ceremony or did anything go disastrously or hilariously wrong? What was the couple like? Were they in love or was the marriage motivated by other factors? Asking such questions really brings these objects to life for me and lets me look at them in a whole new way.”
—Sarah Homer, Class of 2016, English major and music minor

12
Engraved mirror
Etruscan, Late Classical, 4th century B.C.E.
Bronze, h: 11 in. (28 cm)

“The engraving on the mirror shows three goddesses: Uni, Turan, and Mea, whose Greek names are Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, respectively. Although the goddesses have Etruscan names, they are the same ones involved in the incident which incited the Trojan War. According to the myth, three goddesses were attending the nuptials of Peleas and Thetis, when a wedding crasher, Eris, threw a golden apple with the label ‘to the fairest.’ The goddesses fought over this apple and thus over who was the most beautiful. So the fact that this engraving is placed on a mirror is very interesting, because it is an object of vanity.”
—Jane Parisi, Class of 2019, classical languages major

13
Torso of Herakles
Roman, Imperial, ca. 1st to 2nd century C.E.
Marble, h: 15¼ in. (38.7 cm)

“When I was younger, the legend of Herakles was always one of my favorite tales from antiquity, and this and the presence of drapery are what initially attracted me to this figure. I am taking my fashion minor at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus and, as a student of fashion, the classic Greek drapery and the beautiful form of the sculpture called to me as soon as I saw it.”
—Hans Singer, Class of 2018, art history major and fashion studies minor

14
Hydria (water jar)
Greek, Attic, Late Archaic, black-figure, ca. 520 to 510 B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 19 in. (48.2 cm)

“This is truly a prime example of high-quality Attic vases. The scenes are brilliant and reflect the tendency of vase painters to encapsulate an entire myth through just a few images. Here we have the most popular myth: the 12 labors of Herakles. … Viewers are shown the beginning and the end of Herakles’ story. It’s one complete beautiful cycle.”
—Masha Bychkova, Class of 2018, double major in classical languages and classical civilizations, with a minor in visual arts

15
Portrait of the Emperor Caracalla as a youth
Roman, Severan, 198 to 204 C.E.
Bronze, h: 11½ in. (27 cm)

“I was first attracted to this portrait because it’s bronze, which is rare in ancient sculpture, and also because there are few portraits of Caracalla as a child. It’s not just a portrait of a child but also effectively a portrait of a mass murderer, a delusional religious fanatic, and a mentally ill person. At the same time, it is a portrait of the emperor who would become responsible for the bath houses in Rome and the Edict of 212, which granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. This sculpture gives insight into the human condition. This is a man who lived thousands of years before our time, yet embodies the same emotionality, conflicts, and mortality of humans in the 21st century: family power struggles, envy and insecurity, murderous rage, religious fanaticism and superstition, and celebrity obsession.”
—Olivia Ling, Class of 2017, classical languages major

16
Portrait of a Severan woman
Roman, Severan, ca. 220 to 222 C.E.
Marble, h: 21 7/8 in. (55.4 cm)

“I was initially attracted to the portrait bust of the Severan woman because of my background in working with Roman imperial commemorative statues that were meant to honor prominent societal women. These statues were representative of the changing atmosphere in ancient times, one in which women possessed the ability to honor their status in society as much as their male counterparts. I was also interested in the statue because of its current location in the museum, since it’s right next to the entrance and it’s one of the first subjects visitors see.”
—Simek Shropshire, Class of 2017, art history and English double major

17
Cylindrical krater (wide mouth vessel) and lid
Etruscan, Archaic, white-on-red ware, ca. 650 B.C.E.
Terracotta, impasto, h: 21 in. (53.3 cm)

18
Ossuary and lid
Etruscan, Archaic, white-on-red ware, ca. 580 B.C.E.
Terracotta, impasto, h: 16 in. (40.6 cm)

19 to 23
Antefixes in the form of a kneeling kore (maiden) and of women’s heads
Etruscan, Late Archaic to Early Classical, ca. 500 to 480 B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 11 in. to 20½ in. (28 cm to 52 cm)

“These women represent maenads, who are the servants of the god of food and wine, Dionysus. It is said that Dionysus put these women under a drunken spell and, as a result, they became praised and protective, which is the role they play as they watch those who enter temples. This would bother most feminists, because it indicates a man’s power over women. However, I think that they exude the power and fury of women. Their intense eyes and beauty would force anyone to enter with caution and reverence.”
—Madeline Locher, Class of 2018, art history major

24
Ram’s head drinking cup
Greek, South Italian, Apulian,
mold and wheel-made, Late Classical,
5th to 4th century B.C.E.
Terracotta, l: 7½ in. (19 cm)

“The beauty of [this cup]lies in its simplicity. It’s terracotta and unpainted, and to me this draws all the attention to the ram. … If you notice, there’s no way to put this down if it’s filled with anything, so you best be drinking all night!”
—Christos Orfanos, Class of 2018, economics and classical civilization major, and marketing minor

The series features high-profile scholars from both the United States and abroad, including Israel and Poland, said Magda Teter, PhD, the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies. There are two notable lectures in March to be held at Fordham Law.
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“We’ll be covering a diverse range of topics—from north African Jewish communities to contemporary museum interpretations,” she said.

On Wed., March 2 at 6:30 p.m., award-winning authors Marc Epstein, PhD, professor of religion at Vassar College, and Sara Lipton, PhD, professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, will participate in “Jews in Medieval Art: A View From the Inside and Outside.” The scholars will look closely at the medieval origins of anti-Jewish iconography.

Lipton has researched how medieval Christians’ manner of worshiping the suffering Christ led to negative portrayals of Jews in art, said Teter. Epstein has studied how Jewish art and iconography are complicated because of an “ostensible biblical prohibition against visual representations.” Epstein’s work, like those of other scholars whose work focuses on Jewish art, contradicts the perception that Jews did not represent themselves in art.

On Mon., March 14, at 5:30 p.m., Moshe Rosman, PhD, professor of history at Bar Ilan University in Israel, will discuss how contemporary Jewish museums interpret the Jewish story in the age of smartphones and the trend at contemporary history museums to eschew artifacts in favor of multimedia, said Teter. In “How to Tell the Story: Jewish Museums, Jewish History, Jewish Metahistory,” Rosman will analyze five Jewish historical museums.

Teter said that Rosman has changed the study of Eastern European history in Poland by promoting the study of Jewish history in tandem with the nation’s economic history, as they are both “interdependent stories.”

He also revolutionized the study of Hasidism, she said. The scholarly field was solely dependent on Jewish sources until Rosman included research from the Polish state archive.

“He entirely changed the way we see how Hasidism is organized,” she said.