Creative types often break the mold. The poet William Carlos Williams famously worked by day as a doctor. Albert Einstein was a passionate violinist. And here at Fordham, there are a surprising number of artistic professors and administrators whose work, at first glance, seems unrelated to the arts. Meet some of your creative colleagues.
The Urban Anthropologist Who Makes Public Art
Aseel Sawalha, Ph.D., is on sabbatical this semester, putting the finishing touches on a book about creative refugees from Syria and Iraq who have transformed the culture of Amman, Jordan. But when she returns in the fall, she will have completed another major work: her first-ever public art sculpture. Using her signature medium—discarded academic textbooks whose pages she rolls and crimps into sculptural forms—she is building a 13-foot-tall tower of cascading books, supported and protected by metal, that will be installed in Riverside Park at West 145th Street as part of a program with New York City’s parks department and the Art Students League.
“My idea was to use books for the sculpture and let it deteriorate and disintegrate in the park because books come from trees,” said Sawalha. The public art program required a more permanent structure, which led her to add an entirely new medium—metal—to her project. “I started taking welding, and now I’m in love with metal art. It was not on my map at all.”
This April, her book art will also be part of a show in Montclair, N.J., gallery called The Space, featuring other Arab-American artists. “Art is a place of healing for me,” said Sawalha. It is also influenced by her childhood in Palestine, where she grew up watching her mother embroider and women roll grape leaves, two practices that have manifested themselves in her work. “I don’t do political art. But my background comes into my art,” she said.
The Scientist Who Draws from Science Fiction
“All artists have a conduit inside them, to let what is inside flow to the outside,” said Daniel Kohn, Ph.D., a biochemistry lecturer at Fordham and self-described “scientist who loves color.” Though he went to art school to tap into this conduit fully, he decided at the time that he “didn’t quite have enough to say.” But that compulsion to draw and paint never disappeared. “I love chemistry and being a student of the natural universe. And I love painting just as much and I can’t drop it—it would be like cutting off an arm.”
The slightly askew world of science fiction is a major influence for him, and you can see its traces in his oil paintings, which often include text or numbers presented upside down or human figures melding with creature forms. “Science fiction changes the world in one minor aspect that gives a rotation on the world that we’re familiar with—in a sense, I’m looking for that kind of thing in my art.”
The Sociology Professor Who Learned to Improvise
On the fifth floor of Lowenstein, a grand piano sits unplayed in the early mornings—except when sociology professor Jeanne Flavin, Ph.D., sneaks in a few minutes before class to practice her jazz chords.
“It is just such a source of delight and so different from what I usually spend my time thinking about,” said Flavin, who also plays a keyboard in her office.
She returned to the instrument she played as a teenager after picking up the guitar in 2003, when she was glued to news coverage of the Iraq War. “I had always wanted to learn how to play guitar, so I told myself, I could only watch television if I was practicing my scales and learning the fretboard and chords.”
Exploring a new instrument encouraged Flavin to revisit the piano using the improvisational style that the guitar taught her. Along with that freedom to experiment came a new appreciation for learning.
“It reminds me of what we’re constantly asking of students, especially their first year of college—‘Hey, let’s throw a whole field at you that you’ve never been exposed to! Please show up and trust that you’re going to learn something that will be useful and meaningful to you and stay with it, even when it’s hard.'”
The Provost Who Was Called Back to Painting
Though Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, was a chemistry and physics double major in college, music and art have always found a way back into his life, particularly in the last 20 years. He’s circled back to painting on the weekends or evenings at home, sometimes completing as many as three or four paintings a month.
“I do think there’s a lot of bridging between science and the arts, and many people who are drawn to the sciences have also, I think, an artistic side of their brain.”
He likens the inspiration he gets for a painting to the cravings of an accomplished cook. “I could imagine someone who has a taste in their mouth going out and making that particular food. That same thing happens in my art,” he said. “I’ll always have some sense in my mind of the direction I’m heading, and once that is in my mind, I can’t get it out, so I have to express myself in that way.”
His style veers from abstract paintings that evoke his dreams or spiritual beliefs to landscape paintings of his travels to stunning locales like Iceland. Many hang in his office and the President’s office.
The Executive Secretary Turned Art Student
For Linda Negron, art is a family affair. The executive secretary in the Graduate School of Education took painting and photography classes at Fordham alongside her children, who studied here as undergrads when she was completing her bachelor’s degree in psychology.
With her daughter, she took a painting class at Rose Hill. “Painting turned out to be a great stress reliever for me,” she said. “A blank canvas lets me put down my ideas, my dreams—whatever I feel.”
In the photography class she took with her son at Lincoln Center, she learned to develop black-and-white film in a darkroom and mix her own chemicals. Now, she uses her iPhone to photograph the city and street art that reminds her of growing up in the Bronx during the heyday of graffiti. “I love capturing how neighborhoods change over time.”
The Storyteller Who Loves to Perform
On a good week, you can find Francesco “Franco” Giacomarra rehearsing for a musical, writing his own theater productions, and composing songs for an upcoming show, all after his work as a writer in University Marketing and Communications. “It’s what makes me happy,” he said of his multiple pursuits. “It’s the only thing that makes me feel settled.”
The multitalented Fordham alumnus—he was a Class of 2019 theater major with a concentration in playwrighting—considers himself a writer above all. But performing is also a major passion.
“I love the collaboration with other people, and with live performance, I love the energy exchange with the audience.” (You may have even spotted him on the big screen—he appears as an extra in the opening scenes of In the Heights.)
His love of science fiction and fantasy helped inform the musical that he co-wrote and starred in, Planet W, about a couple forced to save Earth after an alien abduction. Following its one-night run at Arsnova last summer, Giacomarra and his co-creators are currently meeting with producers in the hopes of staging it again soon.
Being immersed in storytelling by day for the University feeds his ability to invent stories, too. “I love talking to people and learning their stories—I find it really energizing.”
