Faculty Spotlight 2022
Faculty Spotlight: Joseph Lawton, Casey Ruble, and David Storey
September 26 – November 5, 2022
Reception: Wednesday, October 12, 5 – 7pm
The Visual Arts Program at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2022 installment of our annual Faculty Spotlight exhibition. Each year three members from the Department of Theatre and Visual Art are asked to share a sampling of their creative production with the Fordham community. This year brings together work by Joseph Lawton, Casey Ruble, and David Storey.
Joseph Lawton contributes a series of black-and-white photographs of the New York State fair in Syracuse, the oldest state fair in the nation. Drawing over a million visitors during its roughly two-week run in late August and early September, the fair marks the last hurrah of summer and the start of fall for residents of Central New York. Lawton attended the fair with his family as a child, worked at one of its food concessions as a teenager, and has gone back to photograph it since the early 1980s. “Over the past forty years, regardless of where I might be, I return to Syracuse and try to go as many days as circumstances allow,” Lawton says. “The photographs here are a small selection printed this summer from a growing archive.”
Casey Ruble offers an artist book and selection of ink-on-paper paintings from her series Red Summer: A look at, and away from, America’s deadliest year of interracial violence through a re-rendering of the forty-seven portraits from that year in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Supported by a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, this series re-renders every object in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery from the year 1919—the deadliest year of white-on-Black violence in U.S. history and, coincidentally, the year planning began on the museum—but with the sitter redacted, leaving only a ghostly outline. The National Portrait Gallery’s mission has been to display portraits of people who have made “significant contributions to the history, development, and culture of the people of the United States,” yet all of the subjects in the museum’s works from 1919 are white. By erasing those subjects and focusing instead on their surroundings, Red Summer implicitly asks: Whom have we been missing?
Since moving to New York from California many years ago, David Storey has made paintings that live on the wildly permeable boundaries of image and abstraction. He arrived in New York with a love of picture making, anecdote, and exuberant color, which were key elements of the Bay Area regionalism that shaped his work as a young painter. He continues to make abstract configurations that function as unique images while simultaneously presenting a non-literal and compelling theater of paint, color, and space. “Painting is the proper forum for the implication of an entire world,” Storey says. “These worlds can offer an endless, timeless vista seeming to have solid boundaries but presenting none. My paintings completely occupy a regenerated ‘present’ with every viewing.”
From abstract painting to street photography, experimental film to community-engaged projects, installation to institutional critique, design of the built environment to design of the page, Fordham’s Visual Arts faculty produce work in the wide range of creative practices and approaches that continue to make New York City one of the most vibrant art centers in the world—and Fordham an ideal place to study it.
For more information on this exhibition, contact Casey Ruble at ruble@fordham.edu.