Color, collage and creativity: Inside Northeastern’s New York City campus
Outside of Northeastern University – New York City, a typical slice of city life unfolds. But inside, through a pair of double doors and over the turnstile, appears a world of art.
NEW YORK – Outside of Northeastern University – New York City, along an apartment-dense block on the Upper East Side, a typical slice of city life unfolds amid the din of street traffic.
But inside, through a pair of double doors and over the turnstile, appears a world of art, a sea of color and collage — unmistakable signs of inner life and imagination.
Visual art by students and professional artists alike adorn the walls in either direction. The first-floor spaces house the Hewitt Gallery and its three wings: the main Esplanade, the Black and White West and the Black and White East portions. Collectively, they turn the main campus’ entrance and hallways into a permanent exhibition space. A nearby Corridor Gallery showcases student work year-round.
The galleries are a core part of the art and design pedagogy for which the college is best known, said Hallie Cohen, an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University – NYC, and director of the Hewitt Gallery of Art.
“The first floor when you walk into the Northeastern New York City campus … is alive with creativity, invention, hopes, dreams,” Cohen told Northeastern Global News. “There are a lot of spaces where we present art, as many spaces as we can.”
An artist and longtime curator, Cohen has taught at Northeastern NYC, which officially merged with Marymount Manhattan College in July, for more than five decades. In her own studio, she’s been working on very large “cinematic watercolors” based on Roman landscapes and iconic scenes from films by famed directors Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Paolo Sorrentino. These projects were realized, she said, across multiple residencies at the American Academy in Rome.
Cohen has directed the Hewitt Gallery of Art since 2013, helping to organize the various senior exhibitions and faculty and professional shows each semester. She and her colleagues, including Julia Gran, a graphic designer and children’s book illustrator, are gearing up for a December exhibition that will feature student work in design, sculpture, printmaking and photography around letter forms (the aesthetics and design of letters themselves) and visual messaging, Cohen said.
Those cross-disciplinary works will appear together with and alongside paintings and iconic designs by Paula Scher, renowned graphic designer and longtime partner at the prestigious design firm Pentagram.
Students have credited the gallery program with helping them find their voice as artists — but also providing greater exposure to the broader art world.
Sienna Fusaro, who is finishing her final year of her Bachelor of Fine Arts, has had art displayed in the Hewitt Gallery across three different shows. Their latest work and senior thesis, “Houses for Make Pretend,” is currently displayed in the ongoing student exhibition.
The piece comprises three oil paintings that feel at once familiar and surreal — the stuff of René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist known for his dreamlike transpositions of the ordinary into otherworldly scenes.
One painting portrays a scene that is both balletic and biblical: four faceless, white-clad, tutu-wearing figures are shown gathered beneath a robed woman, reminiscent of a classical Madonna, or an artistic depiction of the Virgin Mary. The group are surrounded by fragments of domestic life: a passing vista of a suburban neighborhood glimpsed through a rearview mirror, and an upside-down RV stationed oddly at the top of the canvas.
Another painting similarly transposes scenes of domestic life into something strange: a sleeping girl, a dog above her baring its teeth, a white bird and a string of glowing lights in a dimly lit room. More upside-down imagery, including what appears to be a New England-style home.
Three of Fusaro’s paintings hung in the Hewitt Gallery in the days leading up to the start of the fall semester, Northeastern – NYC’s first as part of the global university system. The 22-year-old said that their involvement in the exhibition “was an essential point of growth” for their art, and that they depart Northeastern NYC “with valuable knowledge about my own practice and how audiences perceive my work.”
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Anna Hagopian, an interdisciplinary artist, just began a master’s program in art therapy, and has a fairly large piece on display in the Hewitt Gallery that incorporates acrylic, gel prints, found objects, clay and cardboard.
Hagopian, 22, works in mixed-media assemblage, cobbling together drawings with newspaper clippings and other repurposed materials to create striking collages that are geometrically sharp, moody and colorful. She described having her work exhibited at the Hewitt Gallery as “positive and rewarding,” adding that it gave her the confidence she needed to move forward with her career.
Asked about her hopes for the galleries moving into a new era for the campus, Cohen said she is keen to take advantage of the university’s global reach and hopes to build connections with colleagues across Northeastern’s campuses and draw on their ideas as the space evolves.
“I believe in what I’ve started here, but I am sure I will hear from other people,” Cohen said. “I can only assume there’ll be other needs and other demands.”
