The 2022 Visual Arts Faculty Spotlight Exhibition

From the New York State Fair Series

by Joseph Lawton

The New York State Fair in Syracuse is the oldest in the nation and draws over a million visitors a year during its roughly two-week run concluding on Labor Day. For central New Yorkers, it marks the last hurrah of summer and the start of fall. As a child, I went to the fair with my family; as a teenager, I worked at one of the food concessions; and since the early 1980s, I have gone with a camera to photograph. Over the past 40 years, I have returned to Syracuse and tried to go as many days as circumstances allow, regardless of where I might be. The photographs are a small selection printed this summer from a growing archive.

John Ferguson Weir, 2018, carbon ink on paper

by Casey Ruble

Supported by a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Ruble’s 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 is a series of 47 small-scale, ink-on-paper paintings, accompanied by an artist book. The project stands as a form of institutional critique, calling attention to the National Portrait Gallery’s lack of representation of people of color and implicitly asking: Whom have we been missing? The 2022 Faculty Spotlight Exhibition includes Ruble’s book and a selection of pieces from the Red Summer series.

Big Sunset, 38" x 45," 2020

by David Storey

I make paintings that live on the wildly permeable boundaries of image and abstraction since moving to New York from California many years ago. I 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 my work as a young painter. I continue to make abstract configurations that function as unique image 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. 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.

Casey Ruble

Casey Ruble works in a range of mediums, including painting, collage, and film. Her work focuses on history, memory, place, and violence, often as they pertain to racial inequity. She is represented by Foley Gallery (New York) and has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, Warhol Foundation (through the residency PARSEnola), Tulane’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and New Jersey Council on the Arts, among others. Her work and curatorial projects have been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Kolaj, and Sculpture Magazine. She has written for Art in America magazine and was a contributor to Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. Raised in rural eastern Montana, Ruble earned a B.A. from Smith College and an M.F.A. from Hunter College CUNY. She is currently an associate clinical professor at Fordham University, where she has taught a range of courses and curated exhibitions for the University galleries for the past 20 years.

More Artwork by Casey Ruble

David Storey

David Storey is a painter who also makes drawings and prints. His works are included in many public and private collections, including the MoMA in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting and was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. He has been in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, on multiple occasions and has also been a resident at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In 2019, he was awarded commission from the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority to produce a series of 14 mosaic murals installed in a station on the N subway line in Brooklyn. David Storey has been teaching painting and drawing at Fordham for more than 20 years. For most of that time, he has been the co-director of the visual arts program at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.