There is a visual arts program for Fordham students with a passion for social engagement. The “Art and Engagement” program, established fall 2022, is an area of study of the visual arts major with an emphasis on community-engaged creation.
Headed by Catalina Alvarez, a filmmaker, performer and visual arts professor whose classes VART 2222 “Art of the Interview” and VART 1111 “Intro to Art & Engagement: Protest, Participation, the Public and other Performance Practices” explore the principles of the Art and Engagement program.
The “Art of the Interview” class being taught this fall is the second iteration of VART 2222 (previously called “Archival Reenactments”) — it was first held in fall 2023. That class culminated with four original oral histories recorded by Fordham students.
The class being held fall 2024 is a Community Engaged Learning course building on the relationship established last year between Fordham University, Good Shepherd Faith Presbyterian Church and residents of Amsterdam Houses, a New York City Housing Authority project, all of which are located in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square neighborhood.
The urban renewal project displaced thousands of families who lived in neighborhood tenements, as detailed on the Lincoln Center website, including many lower class families of color, and fractured family businesses, friendships and countless lives.
A major theme of the class is the history of the Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Project created by New York city planner Robert Moses. In the 1950s and 60s, city government razed six city blocks in the name of “slum clearance” to build Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Fordham’s Lincoln Center (FLC) campus. The destructive process of urban renewal, or as it was called by the people who lived there, “urban removal,” completely reshaped the landscape of Lincoln Square, and marked the end of the San Juan Hill neighborhood.
San Juan Hill was a cultural center for decades, home to many Jazz legends including Thelonious Monk and Benny Carter, as well as the iconic “Charleston” dance and many other bastions of performing arts, according to lincolncenter.org. During interviews conducted by students last year, many longtime residents spoke of a neighborhood teeming with life, community and thriving local businesses. A recurring theme in those oral histories was the diversity of the neighborhood and the myriad ways people of different cultures learned from and supported each other.
The urban renewal project displaced thousands of families who lived in neighborhood tenements, as detailed on the Lincoln Center website, including many lower class families of color, and fractured family businesses, friendships and countless lives.
The community engagement fostered in “Art of the Interview” is one aspect of that process, as Fordham students build relationships with the people who lived in Lincoln Square before and during the destruction of San Juan Hill.
“Art of the Interview” is an exploration of how art can be a part of the process to preserve history. Fordham University was one of the institutions that benefited greatly from urban renewal, and it is a fraught legacy which both Fordham and Lincoln Center are still working through how to address.
According to Alvarez, “Art of the Interview” is an important class to offer students because it allows them to “notice all the injustice around us and also want to make art, so they are interested in finding the overlap between art-making and addressing social issues.”
The community engagement fostered in “Art of the Interview” is one aspect of that process, as Fordham students build relationships with the people who lived in Lincoln Square before and during the destruction of San Juan Hill, learning the history and personal importance of that neighborhood from before Lincoln Center and how the construction of those institutions altered the neighborhood.
In her book “The Power of Place,” which is examined in “Art of the Interview,” urban historian Dolores Hayden argues that “The kind of public art that truly contributes to a sense of place needs to start with a new kind of relationship to the people whose history is being represented.”
This new system emphasizes open-minded collaboration with the community over the established structure of galleries and private funding for artists, according to Hayden.
The Art and Engagement program is working toward this by establishing real relationships between creators and the bearers of New York’s nearly forgotten history, resulting in collaborative artistic expressions which are made rich through the meeting of otherwise disconnected worlds.
The Amsterdam Houses are located just across the street from FLC. However, due to the fraught nature of Fordham’s arrival in the area, there hasn’t been a strong relationship between the two institutions. “Art of the Interview” begins to build that bridge by tapping into the rich histories of longtime residents of the Amsterdam Houses in freeform interviews about their experiences growing up in the rapidly changing neighborhood.
These recorded histories, which are accessible on the Fordham Research Commons, contain stories of a bygone neighborhood in New York City, and speak to the destructive impact of Urban Renewal. A recurring theme in the stories is the diverse and tight-knit community that was once prevalent in Lincoln Square before urban renewal.
“Art of the Interview” seeks to build on these established connections by continuing to produce new oral history recordings, as well as other collaborative artworks which center around the personal and community histories of elderly residents of Lincoln Square.
Professor Alvarez is also teaching VART 1111 “Intro to Art & Engagement: Protest, Participation, the Public and other Performance Practices.” The course develops the fundamental ideas of the Art and Engagement concentration: “‘engaging’ as an art form.” Students will explore how acts of engagement — such as lecture, debate and conversation — can be framed as performance. The tagline “Protest, Participation, the Public and other Performance Practices” highlights the potential for critical making to bring about social change.
“I want students to work with social themes in ways that are formally exciting,” Alvarez said.
Other Art and Engagement courses being offered in the fall include VART 2055 “Environmental Design,” VART 2099 “Ethics in Architecture and Design” and VART 2424 “Art and Action on the Bronx River.”
