The magazine of the Columbia Daily Spectator

The GateKeeper


It’s warmer than I had expected it to be this morning—one of those fall-to-winter transition days when the sun is out and people do homework on the lawns. I’m holding my coat as I walk past The Curl, Clarence Meadmore’s slick abstract sculpture that resembles, to me, an enlarged Hot Wheels race track. It sits alone on the grass between Low Library and Uris Hall. Though people are milling about, I notice I’m the only student looking at it.

I enter Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Anna Hyatt Huntington’s Cranes Rising hides behind the sleepy undergraduate wearing earbuds who nods when I scan my school ID to enter.

I walk straight ahead, down the stairs, and toward several rows of bookcases containing bibles of architectural history and volumes on Hispanic art. Finally, I drop my things at the base of a Praxiteles-inspired bust of Hermes near the office of Roberto Ferrari, Columbia’s curator of Art Properties. I’m early for this interview, so I wait, standing next to Hermes.

I’m here to learn more about Columbia’s Art Properties, which became a hot button topic when our campus was embroiled in the Henry Moore controversy last spring.

At the beginning, part of the protest focused on the way in which news of the installation of the Moore sculpture, Reclining Figure—which was to be situated directly in front of the entrance to Butler Library—had initially been delivered to the student body: in an easy-to-miss blog post post titled “New Public Outdoor Sculpture by Henry Moore… Coming Soon!” authored by Ferrari on his blog, the Public Outdoor Sculpture Blog.

A group of three students and one alumnus published an inflammatory op-ed in Spectator opposing the installation of the sculpture. The authors infamously accused the sculpture of being aesthetically disruptive (“a poorly formed pterodactyl” and “chewed wad of gum” are some of their memorable descriptors) and completely at odds with Columbia’s neoclassical design.

But at its heart, the issue was borne from the fundamental mishap in communication between Columbia’s undergraduate student body and the gatekeepers of Columbia’s art archives, where Reclining Figure had been waiting for 20 years to surface.

Columbia’s art archives is a collection of about 10,000 works of donated art, many of which are stored in temperature and humidity-controlled, confidentially located vaults. Last semester, in the midst of the Moore controversy, I did not know we had such a collection. I soon learn that I was not alone.



So curiosity is part of what has brought me here, next to the bust of Hermes in the Avery stacks. What are these archives like? How do they operate? What do they contain

I continue to wait here, not yet aware of the fact that one or more of the vaults storing Columbia’s artworks hides somewhere within Avery Library, where I stand now.

What I’m really hoping to understand is why, until a few months ago when I began reporting for this story, I did not know this art existed.

Ferrari welcomes me warmly, and I sit down across from him at his desk. The walls of this space are sparse, save for one decoration—a darkly hued oil painting of a man in red robes and a tall black hat. The man gazes out into Avery Library. There is something incongruous about its placement. Mounted above filing cabinets and a stack of manila envelopes, it represents some uncomfortable, irreverent intersection between administration and fine art.

I start off by asking about Ferrari’s background. He tells me he is a New Yorker, born and raised between here and New Jersey. He earned his Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York in 2013 and started working at Columbia as the curator of art properties the same year.

Ferrari answers my questions in lengthy, expository lectures. He does not converse—he presents.

He opens with some groundwork: The archives are handled by the Department of Art Properties, which was born in the 1960s when Columbia hired its first curator to handle the influx of donated artwork that came with the University’s bicentennial celebrations.

Most of the pieces—Ferrari estimates about 95 percent of the collection—were donated to Columbia, and mostly by alumni. Moore’s Reclining Figure, for example, was donated by David and Laura Finn, the parents of a Columbia graduate.

If it still seems somewhat unclear what exactly the department oversees and what exactly the art collection contains, that is because Ferrari does not have extensive information about many of the works in its collection.

But there are some “knowns.” For example, Ferrari knows the collection has two notable strengths: a very large American art collection and, since the 1960s, a large collection of East Asian and ancient Eurasian art donated by the famous collector Arthur Mitchell Sackler. Some specific collection highlights are a series of Polaroids by Andy Warhol and paintings by American modernist Florine Stettheimer.

Another known fact is that about 65 percent of the paintings in the collection are portraits, many of which depict Columbia faculty members past and present.

I ask Ferrari approximately how many of the archived works have been researched.

“Admittedly,” he begins, “one of the great fun challenges has been that as the single curator for an entire university art collection, that I, you know, wind up engaging with everything from Chinese neolithic pottery to contemporary photography.”

Ferrari doesn’t confirm the extent to which the archives have been researched definitively.

His responses, however, about his department’s ongoing projects and mission are direct. “The mission for the collection is education. Curricular education, education programs, research, and study. That is always what, at its core, it has been.”

Although Ferrari’s goals are based in educating the Columbia community, it seems like few people are currently aware of the archives. In an effort to make the contents of the collection more accessible, for example, Ferrari is working on documenting the collection through Columbia Libraries Information Online, or CLIO, through a project he calls “Description to Discovery.” Currently, 18 percent of the archives have been documented online.



“Its the first wave of what we perceive as the long term release of information, meta-data, as well as digital images to everybody.”

Ferrari hopes to upload 500 new researched works onto CLIO every six months. He admits this is optimistic. “It takes time, and it takes a lot of money.”

“I’m not kidding you when I tell you we are literally keying this in from scratch,” Ferrari says of the online information.

And there’s another impediment to the rapid digitalization of this information: The department currently consists of only two people, Ferrari himself and Lilian Vargas, the administrative assistant. A man named Larry Soucy worked as the department’s art handler for 42.5 years, but he retired last June.

“I won’t deny that not having an art handler for six months has been extremely taxing on our staff,” Ferrari says, explaining that they hope to replace Soucy “very soon.”

Before the department can even consider projects related to exposure and engagement, Ferrari says, “We have to continue to get full intellectual control of the collection.”

“Do you plan to acquire works of art forever?” I ask him.

“As far as we know,” he says, “that’s the intent.”

The interview wraps up. Ferrari shakes my hand and tells me to follow up with further questions if necessary. I leave somewhat unsatisfied by what felt like an Intro to Art Properties class.

Breaking Into the Vaults


Emma Lesher-Liao, a junior at Columbia College studying visual arts and anthropology, pulls a strange object from her backpack: two fused tubes that form the shape of a T.

Joe Coffee was crowded, so Lesher-Liao and I have wandered upstairs to a fairly isolated part of North Campus, where we sit on a wooden staircase.

“What is that object?” I ask her.

“Oh, it’s just two tubes,” she answers. “I was going like this”—she knocks the tubes against the edge of her shoe—“and I thought it made a really funny noise.”

Lesher-Liao has been learning to weld, it turns out, and the fused tubes are products of her most recent lesson. She points out small errors—the parts that she welded herself—and juxtaposes them with the smoother parts that her teacher helped her with.

Lesher-Liao is a board member of the student-run gallery space Postcrypt, which operates out of the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel. She makes it clear, though, that she is not speaking to me as a representative of the group.

Recently, she and her peers at Postcrypt had the idea to collaborate with Columbia’s Department of Art Properties to put up a show. Lesher-Liao arranged a meeting with Ferrari hoping to engage him in a back and forth of ideas. She hoped Ferrari would be able to tell her a bit about the contents of the collection, so she could begin to think more concretely about how to present them.

But Ferrari didn’t say anything specific about the collection itself. Instead, he suggested she consult CLIO and get back to him later. Lesher-Liao didn’t know about the Description to Discovery project on CLIO at the time. She is quick to accredit that “to my own not being organized.”

Ferrari didn’t remember this encounter when asked about it.

When Lesher-Liao did look at the documented archives online afterward, she didn’t find anything that could have worked with the concept she had in her head, which she admits was undeveloped. I have scrolled through CLIO myself. It provides information on the material, country of origin, and sometimes the artist themselves, on 2,079 works of art, but few or no visuals accompany descriptions.

The incident speaks to the way that the art archives exist in relation to Columbia undergraduates—namely, that even students who engage closely with art and its material production and are closely involved with the on-campus art community have only a vague sense of what the art vaults might hold.

A couple of weeks after my conversation with Ferrari, I find myself sitting at another desk, this time across from an art history professor named Robert Harrist.

A specialist in Chinese art, Harrist is well known in his department for utilizing Columbia’s archives in his classes. A few years ago, for example, students from one of his seminars on Chinese art had the opportunity to engage with Arthur Sackler’s donations from ancient East Asia.

Throughout our conversation, Harrist refuses to stay put. He sees an object here and there—a colorful painting by Russian abstractionist Ary Stillman, or a book about Arthur Sackler’s collection, or drawings by Columbia’s own Meyer Schapiro—and goes to fetch it or motions toward it as he speaks. His tactile tendencies, his obvious desire to closely engage with artwork, remind me of Lesher-Liao.

When he starts to tell me about East Asian Ink Painting, a class he is teaching with Art Humanities Director Matthew McKelway, he begins shuffling through files next to his desk.

“On Mondays,” he begins, pulling out several sheets of very thin paper, “we have this artist, a very distinguished painter, who comes in and teaches us how to paint.”

These are Harrist’s own ink paintings; he is excited to show them to me.

In Harrist’s eyes, close engagement with artwork is important. A believer in object-based learning, he once allowed students in his Chinese art class to handle ancient bronzes, to hold them, to feel their weight. He says, “I had never seen students so assertive in claiming their research topics.”

As such, he believes that the Columbia art archives is an invaluable resource. In the spring of 2017, he will teach a course with Ferrari on public sculptures at Columbia—all of which falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Art Properties.



Harrist himself admits that as a teacher, let alone as the former chair of his department, access to Columbia’s and New York City’s fine arts resources hasn’t been too difficult.

The same can be said for Daniel Ralston, a teaching assistant and student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences studying art in 18th and 19th century Spain and Latin America. Ralston tells me that he got in touch with Ferrari around a year ago. At the time, he was working as a TA for Jonathan Crary’s class on 19th century art and pursued the archives out of curiosity, thinking that maybe his students would benefit from seeing these objects firsthand, rather than in a photograph or on a slide.

Even with easy access to the archives, though, Ralston abandoned the efforts. He accepts responsibility for what ended up being a relatively fruitless experience in the archives: He ultimately chose to walk away from them because he lacked a clear pedagogical goal in utilizing them. “I felt sort of bad imposing on [Ferrari] to bring down this group of students for a not very specific purpose.”

I press him on this, though—is trying to access the archives to supplement what is being taught in class an imposition? Is pedagogy not cited as the purpose of the archives?

Ralston is quick to assure me that inaccessibility is not the biggest concern when it comes to the archives. “I think anyone would agree with me that the problem is that there’s no display space,” he says. “It’s easy to access the stuff when you want to.”

Ferrari, too, assures me that students in the Columbia community have easy access to the art collection, that the process of viewing art is fairly simple—a student needs only to fill out a form online, indicating which piece they are interested in. They will be brought into a viewing room several days later, where they can handle the work with supervision.

My reporting, in many ways, supports this assertion. Those I speak to who have tried to access the collection assure me that it was a straightforward, albeit a little bureaucratic, experience.

But Ralston reinforces something I’ve begun to sense coming out of my conversations with other students: Gaining physical access to a piece of art from the collection is not the issue. The problem is that even students who are engaged with art and art history don’t know these archives exist, and if they do, they feel intimidated by the collection.

Ferrari maintains that he is reaching out to students to the best of his ability.

Emily Shoyer, a Barnard senior studying art history, has just come from her curatorial internship at the Whitney Museum of American Art when we meet. She is still wearing her ID badge.

Shoyer notes that archives can seem intimidating on their surface. “There’s a lack of awareness about what [archives] are. And [they seem] really elitist—kind of confusing—something that might just not be something for everyone.”

Shoyer worked at the Archives of American Arts at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. this past summer, which was an experience that helped her demystify the experience of trawling through archives.

Why, then, has Shoyer never engaged with Columbia’s own art collection?

She believes that the task of demystifying the archives falls to professors, who should act as liaisons between their students and on-campus resources like those in the art archives. “If professors aren’t explaining to students what they have access to when they’re doing research, I don’t think the students know.”

I think about Harrist, who is doing his best to surface works from the collection to the advantage of students.

Everyone has someone or something else to blame—Shoyer blames professors, who neglect their duty as liaisons. Ralston blames the absence of exhibition space on campus.

But as of December 4, according to Columbia’s course directory, no students had enrolled in Harrist and Ferrari’s course on public sculpture.

Before I thank Harrist and leave his office, he gets up from his seat one more time. He returns with a black dish and what seem to be long, bamboo brushes. He fills the dish with water, then hands me these things. He wants to show me how to paint bamboo leaves.

He demonstrates for me. “As you can see, it’s very, very sensitive—it’s like a seismograph.”

I try. The leaf I paint is fatter than his, and inkier.

He encourages me to keep practicing. These things take time, he says.

Our Art on the Surface


I sit down at my desk to talk to Anne Higonnet, an art history professor at Barnard, over the phone.

Last year, I took Introduction to Art History II with Higonnet. The friend I sat next to in lecture, an art history major, came to class each day with a new scarf tied around her neck in a good-natured effort to mimic Higonnet’s style.

I realized, early on, the extent to which she was venerated by Barnard’s art history majors. And it was easy to see why. When she discussed Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, some students in our class were driven to tears. She frequently dedicated long, swirling odes to all kinds of artistic masterpieces—things like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or royal ivory heads sculpted in 15th century Benin, or Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

So when we speak on the phone, I am surprised by her terseness. Her responses contrast with Ferrari’s long ones in both their brevity and their candor.

Her answers only begin to elongate when she starts telling me about her experience studying art history as an undergraduate at Harvard. With 250,000 works of art, Harvard’s collection is the largest in the Ivy League.

Columbia’s is one of the smallest.



Regular tours of Harvard’s museums while on her way to class—at the time, she explains, the classroom building was a museum—supplemented Higonnet’s own undergraduate education. She describes a game that she and her peers would play on the way to class: They had to pick a work of art they they would choose to salvage if the building caught fire.

I ask if there was a consensus. “Oh, everyone had a favorite,” she responds, “but the point was that they had a favorite because they had been walking past all this stuff on the way to class. And the assumption that went completely without saying was that you would never try to escape the building, if there was a fire, without taking an artwork with you.”

The passion Higonnet remembers feeling for the treasures flaunted by her alma mater starkly juxtaposes the total lack of student engagement with the objects that are stored here, underground, in vaults.

Columbia has no dedicated university art museum, though it does have the Wallach Art Gallery in Schermerhorn Hall. But our gallery doesn’t have its own collection from which to pull, while those of many other universities do.

I walk to Schermerhorn to meet with Deborah Cullen, curator at Wallach Art Gallery. Her office is on the ninth floor of Schermerhorn, and I’m early again, so I walk down one flight of stairs and go stand at Wallach’s dark wood double doors of the gallery. It’s all I can do; the gallery is closed right now. I note the hours on the door: Wednesday through Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. It’s not open often.

I knock on Cullen’s door a few minutes later. She answers with a phone pressed to her ear. When we finally sit down at a table in her office, she jokes that you never want to turn down a phone call with an artist, because there’s always a chance you’ll never reach them again.

She brings up Wallach’s lack of involvement with Columbia’s art archives before I even have a chance to ask about the relationship between the two. “It’s interesting that there’s an art holding that is a collection, the old-fashioned sense of the word, and doesn’t have a venue to show it. And then there’s a gallery that doesn't have a direct obligation to use that collection.”

Cullen’s description shows that Wallach doesn’t fulfill the role of the ideal display space for Columbia’s artwork that Ralston believes is integral to our engagement with it.

Instead, Wallach mainly borrows art from places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hispanic Society of America. It draws from Columbia’s own collection only occasionally. In a 2014 exhibit, for example, Cullen worked with Higonnet to curate an exhibit of Anna Hyatt Huntington’s work, which included Columbia’s Cranes Rising, a 1934 bronze sculpture depicting the ascent of several cranes, one on top of the other.

When we talk, Cullen seems more interested in exploring Columbia’s relationship to the community around it than in strengthening the gallery’s connection with the Columbia-owned archives.

In fact, one of the reasons she accepted the position as Wallach’s curator in 2013 was to oversee the gallery’s move uptown to the Manhattanville campus next April.

“It will be in a very front-facing, publicly accessible, easy-to-find purpose-built space. Here, we’re on the eighth floor of Schermerhorn Hall, which is lovely in a sort of an antique way, but it’s harder to find. It’s harder for the public to access.”

Wallach’s move is one example among many of the ebb and flow of Columbia’s resources into the metropolitan community that engulfs it.

But the move does mean that our only art presentation space is moving away from the hub of student life on campus, and I still don’t have a clear answer as to why Columbia, unlike many of its Ivy League peers, lacks a purpose-built display space for its art collection.

Ferrari says the project would be too much for the University to take on in its current state. “We could never open a museum right now, no. There’s not enough staff. Just the logistics of having infrastructure in place in terms of security, or having people in the galleries.”



And there’s also that age-old issue of space, or lack thereof. “I don’t know where they would actually do it,” Ferrari says.

An issue with Ferrari’s story is that he himself has fought for a museum in the past, according to a Columbia Magazine article. The plans fell through, though. New York City has plenty of museums, the administrative argument went. Any on-campus museum would pale in comparison.

New York City, then, turns out to be both a resource and an impediment.

... In the City of New York


I have given myself an hour to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I board the bus—my MetroCard is sufficiently topped up, thankfully—and take one of the horizontally facing seats in the front. I open my notebook on my lap; in it, I’ve begun to write down questions for Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide and Jeffrey Munger, two of the Met’s curators, specializing in French, English, and Dutch furniture, and European ceramics and Asian-export porcelain, respectively.

Higonnet referred me to the two in an email, explaining that they have assisted in Columbia’s efforts to fuse the more cerebral aspects of its art history departments with the real-life viewing experience that a museum allows by teaching classes to students that take place at the Met.

Higonnet has little desire to see a museum spring up on campus precisely because of Columbia’s relationship with institutions in the city, and she knows that Columbia’s art collection faces little pressure to grow for the same reason.

“Columbia has never collected in the way that other colleges, other great universities do, because why bother when you have the Met and the Frick and the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Guggenheim and the Whitney and the Modern?”

When I get to the Met, I am met by Kisluk-Grosheide and Munger, two very tall, well-dressed, cosmopolitan people. The two work together at the museum and have published a book together. Kisluk-Grosheide uses her identification card to let the three of us into the balcony room of the Met. It’s a quiet space where important-looking adults chat, raising tea cups on platters to their mouths. Kisluk-Grosheide and Munger explain that these people work at the Met or have sustained memberships there.

I slowly put down my phone, which is covered in gaudy Lisa Frank stickers, to record the conversation. It looks strikingly out of place here.

Mostly, I want to know why Columbia sends its students downtown rather than acting, as Shoyer proposes as liaison between its students and the University’s own resources.

However, Kisluk-Grosheide and Munger say they don’t see students often. Munger explains, “Professor Higonnet is the only one who has reached out to us.”

Maybe sending interested students along to a museum downtown is not a sustainable way to engage them in art.

Munger thinks that campus museums offer benefits of direct engagement that larger, publicly geared institutions simply cannot.

“For people who might be really interested in a curatorial career, if you’ve got the collections there,” Munger says, “there’s a possibility of interacting with them in a way, doing a small focused exhibition that isn’t going to be possible, obviously, even if you’ve got the Met, the Modern, the Whitney, at your doorstep.”

When he was a student at Harvard, Munger remembers that even with other, more impressive museum options in Boston, a campus museum sufficed.

“The Museum of Fine Arts is 100 times the size. And I found that people in my class never went across the river to the Museum of Fine Arts.”

A campus museum, Munger also says, “might be just the trigger” to get students more involved with places like the Met—to “cross the river,” so to speak.

Perhaps assigning the responsibility of artistic education to the city’s institutions relates to our shortcomings when it comes to an understanding of our own art collection and its pedagogical potential.

It’s not just students who go downtown due to lack of resources here at Columbia—pieces from the collection are sent away, too. Columbia partners with NYU’s famous conservation program in pursuit of more information on the artworks it has acquired throughout Columbia’s history.

Ferrari engages in programs like the NYU-Columbia exchange to relieve some of the burden of his time-consuming, expensive task of research.

I speak to Hannelore Roemich, the director of NYU’s conservation program, over the phone. She explains that hers is the oldest degree-granting art conservation program in the country, and that they are the only to offer a dual degree in art history and science and conservation.

Columbia lacks a conservation program. Because the Department of Art Properties doesn’t have a source of Columbia student power, it outsources.

Roemich explains that students in the program receive the works of art with a coversheet that offers preliminary information. I ask her how much information Art Properties typically has on each object.

“Between none and a little, normally,” she says.

Roemich observes that the program is, in theory, symbiotic; certainly, her students benefit from the hands-on work they do using Columbia’s objects. She just hopes Columbia students, professors, and administrators are using the information to their advantage, as well.

Columbia necessarily rests on the resources of New York City. But I wonder if it neglects some of its own in doing so. As much as NYU’s conservation program aids in the collection of information that can be used for Ferrari’s Description to Discovery project, it presents shortcomings: Students lose pieces of their own archives, and art properties simultaneously neglects the potential resource of its own students.

I start to see two problems that, in a way, solve each other. On one hand, Columbia’s undergraduates lack a pedagogical resource in the archives. On the other, the information Columbia has on its own archives is “between none and a little.” Why can’t Columbia’s own students begin to research these objects, fulfilling them pedagogically while lending Ferrari their expertise?

The trope of the New York City school rears its head again: In spite of claims that New York City offers a solution to Columbia’s shortage of resources, it can’t solve our problems.

A Reintroduction


It’s Sunday morning, and Joe Coffee is packed. In the weeks since I began reporting, the weather has gotten chillier, and I would prefer to be indoors. So I find myself walking back to Avery.

I take myself on a tour of the building’s lowest accessible level, wandering through an unlit passageway lined by water pipes and valves, locked door after locked door. I wonder if what I’ve been looking for—the art collection—is behind one of them.

It’s been a few weeks since I spoke to Ferrari. We’ve been emailing, trying to arrange a follow-up interview, but it’s been difficult to find a time. The last I heard from him, he broke it to me that I would not be able to visit the vaults.

As a last-ditch effort before finding a place to sit and work, I go to look down the row of offices. The windows are all dark—it’s Sunday—except for the one at the end of the row.

I poke my head in the door.

“Nora, right?” Ferrari smiles, rising from his seat to greet me.

He is awaiting the delivery of a few new works of art. He mentions that he’s coming down with another cold.

My list of questions has grown longer and longer in the weeks since we last spoke, and I have been frustrated by the irresolution of a problem, or many: Whose fault is our community’s failure to see art, to handle art, to know about our own collections in secret vaults under our feet?

When I confront him with my vexations, he responds, impassioned, “We have done an incredible amount of work in just the last few years to bring all of this [information] out. I mean, it’s the first time in the entire history of the University that people can start searching and finding out what’s in this collection. It’s going to take longer, because this stuff just takes time.”

So it seems we’ll have to wait. Part of the tension I’ve encountered can be distilled to the seeming irreconcilability of long-term, large-scale efforts to make the art available to us and the need to encourage student engagement in more personal, direct ways. Because Ferrari prioritizes “intellectual control” of the archives and their future documentation, an admittedly righteous pursuit, studied works within our vaults suffer obscurity.

With this in mind, I ask Ferrari about the painting hanging behind him—out of curiosity. He seems to brighten, to be excited that I’ve asked about it, and encourages me to take pictures. The portrait is a G.H. Harlow portrait of James Justinian Morier, a British diplomat to Iran. We discuss the portrait for a few minutes, before Ferrari gets a phone call; the new works of art have arrived.

In the end, I don’t get to see the archives; Ferrari, in fact, tells me their locations are confidential and “complicated.”

The closest I get to the vaults comes from my conversation with Harrist, the liaison between students and the archives. “Have you been down there yet?” he asks me at one point, referring to the vaults. I explain that I haven’t, not knowing at this point that I won’t.

“You’ll be amazed. It’s ... amazing things,” he says with awe. “There’s furniture. There’s carpets. There are no ends of bronze busts of old guys with long beards and portraits of long-forgotten provosts and presidents and deans that are sort of part of the history of Columbia.”

More of that, I hope, will be unearthed in a matter of time.

Have fun leafing through our tenth issue, and subscribe to our new weekly newsletter, As We See It!


Written by Nora Mathison
Edited by Maya Perry and Rébecca Ausseil
Illustrations by Isabel Chun
Graphics by Amanda Frame
Web development by Kenny Yuan
Web design by Anna Alonso

The Gatekeeper


It’s warmer than I had expected it to be this morning—one of those fall-to-winter transition days when the sun is out and people do homework on the lawns. I’m holding my coat as I walk past The Curl, Clarence Meadmore’s slick abstract sculpture that resembles, to me, an enlarged Hot Wheels race track. It sits alone on the grass between Low Library and Uris Hall. Though people are milling about, I notice I’m the only student looking at it.

I enter Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Anna Hyatt Huntington’s Cranes Rising hides behind the sleepy undergraduate wearing earbuds who nods when I scan my school ID to enter.

I walk straight ahead, down the stairs, and toward several rows of bookcases containing bibles of architectural history and volumes on Hispanic art. Finally, I drop my things at the base of a Praxiteles-inspired bust of Hermes near the office of Roberto Ferrari, Columbia’s curator of Art Properties. I’m early for this interview, so I wait, standing next to Hermes.

I’m here to learn more about Columbia’s Art Properties, which became a hot button topic when our campus was embroiled in the Henry Moore controversy last spring.

At the beginning, part of the protest focused on the way in which news of the installation of the Moore sculpture, Reclining Figure—which was to be situated directly in front of the entrance to Butler Library—had initially been delivered to the student body: in an easy-to-miss blog post post titled “New Public Outdoor Sculpture by Henry Moore… Coming Soon!” authored by Ferrari on his blog, the Public Outdoor Sculpture Blog.

A group of three students and one alumnus published an inflammatory op-ed in Spectator opposing the installation of the sculpture. The authors infamously accused the sculpture of being aesthetically disruptive (“a poorly formed pterodactyl” and “chewed wad of gum” are some of their memorable descriptors) and completely at odds with Columbia’s neoclassical design.

But at its heart, the issue was borne from the fundamental mishap in communication between Columbia’s undergraduate student body and the gatekeepers of Columbia’s art archives, where Reclining Figure had been waiting for 20 years to surface.

Columbia’s art archives is a collection of about 10,000 works of donated art, many of which are stored in temperature and humidity-controlled, confidentially located vaults. Last semester, in the midst of the Moore controversy, I did not know we had such a collection. I soon learn that I was not alone.



So curiosity is part of what has brought me here, next to the bust of Hermes in the Avery stacks. What are these archives like? How do they operate? What do they contain

I continue to wait here, not yet aware of the fact that one or more of the vaults storing Columbia’s artworks hides somewhere within Avery Library, where I stand now.

What I’m really hoping to understand is why, until a few months ago when I began reporting for this story, I did not know this art existed.

Ferrari welcomes me warmly, and I sit down across from him at his desk. The walls of this space are sparse, save for one decoration—a darkly hued oil painting of a man in red robes and a tall black hat. The man gazes out into Avery Library. There is something incongruous about its placement. Mounted above filing cabinets and a stack of manila envelopes, it represents some uncomfortable, irreverent intersection between administration and fine art.

I start off by asking about Ferrari’s background. He tells me he is a New Yorker, born and raised between here and New Jersey. He earned his Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York in 2013 and started working at Columbia as the curator of art properties the same year.

Ferrari answers my questions in lengthy, expository lectures. He does not converse—he presents.

He opens with some groundwork: The archives are handled by the Department of Art Properties, which was born in the 1960s when Columbia hired its first curator to handle the influx of donated artwork that came with the University’s bicentennial celebrations.

Most of the pieces—Ferrari estimates about 95 percent of the collection—were donated to Columbia, and mostly by alumni. Moore’s Reclining Figure, for example, was donated by David and Laura Finn, the parents of a Columbia graduate.

If it still seems somewhat unclear what exactly the department oversees and what exactly the art collection contains, that is because Ferrari does not have extensive information about many of the works in its collection.

But there are some “knowns.” For example, Ferrari knows the collection has two notable strengths: a very large American art collection and, since the 1960s, a large collection of East Asian and ancient Eurasian art donated by the famous collector Arthur Mitchell Sackler. Some specific collection highlights are a series of Polaroids by Andy Warhol and paintings by American modernist Florine Stettheimer.

Another known fact is that about 65 percent of the paintings in the collection are portraits, many of which depict Columbia faculty members past and present.

I ask Ferrari approximately how many of the archived works have been researched.

“Admittedly,” he begins, “one of the great fun challenges has been that as the single curator for an entire university art collection, that I, you know, wind up engaging with everything from Chinese neolithic pottery to contemporary photography.”

Ferrari doesn’t confirm the extent to which the archives have been researched definitively.

His responses, however, about his department’s ongoing projects and mission are direct. “The mission for the collection is education. Curricular education, education programs, research, and study. That is always what, at its core, it has been.”

Although Ferrari’s goals are based in educating the Columbia community, it seems like few people are currently aware of the archives. In an effort to make the contents of the collection more accessible, for example, Ferrari is working on documenting the collection through Columbia Libraries Information Online, or CLIO, through a project he calls “Description to Discovery.” Currently, 18 percent of the archives have been documented online.



“Its the first wave of what we perceive as the long term release of information, meta-data, as well as digital images to everybody.”

Ferrari hopes to upload 500 new researched works onto CLIO every six months. He admits this is optimistic. “It takes time, and it takes a lot of money.”

“I’m not kidding you when I tell you we are literally keying this in from scratch,” Ferrari says of the online information.

And there’s another impediment to the rapid digitalization of this information: The department currently consists of only two people, Ferrari himself and Lilian Vargas, the administrative assistant. A man named Larry Soucy worked as the department’s art handler for 42.5 years, but he retired last June.

“I won’t deny that not having an art handler for six months has been extremely taxing on our staff,” Ferrari says, explaining that they hope to replace Soucy “very soon.”

Before the department can even consider projects related to exposure and engagement, Ferrari says, “We have to continue to get full intellectual control of the collection.”

“Do you plan to acquire works of art forever?” I ask him.

“As far as we know,” he says, “that’s the intent.”

The interview wraps up. Ferrari shakes my hand and tells me to follow up with further questions if necessary. I leave somewhat unsatisfied by what felt like an Intro to Art Properties class.

Breaking Into the Vaults


Emma Lesher-Liao, a junior at Columbia College studying visual arts and anthropology, pulls a strange object from her backpack: two fused tubes that form the shape of a T.

Joe Coffee was crowded, so Lesher-Liao and I have wandered upstairs to a fairly isolated part of North Campus, where we sit on a wooden staircase.

“What is that object?” I ask her.

“Oh, it’s just two tubes,” she answers. “I was going like this”—she knocks the tubes against the edge of her shoe—“and I thought it made a really funny noise.”

Lesher-Liao has been learning to weld, it turns out, and the fused tubes are products of her most recent lesson. She points out small errors—the parts that she welded herself—and juxtaposes them with the smoother parts that her teacher helped her with.

Lesher-Liao is a board member of the student-run gallery space Postcrypt, which operates out of the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel. She makes it clear, though, that she is not speaking to me as a representative of the group.

Recently, she and her peers at Postcrypt had the idea to collaborate with Columbia’s Department of Art Properties to put up a show. Lesher-Liao arranged a meeting with Ferrari hoping to engage him in a back and forth of ideas. She hoped Ferrari would be able to tell her a bit about the contents of the collection, so she could begin to think more concretely about how to present them.

But Ferrari didn’t say anything specific about the collection itself. Instead, he suggested she consult CLIO and get back to him later. Lesher-Liao didn’t know about the Description to Discovery project on CLIO at the time. She is quick to accredit that “to my own not being organized.”

Ferrari didn’t remember this encounter when asked about it.

When Lesher-Liao did look at the documented archives online afterward, she didn’t find anything that could have worked with the concept she had in her head, which she admits was undeveloped. I have scrolled through CLIO myself. It provides information on the material, country of origin, and sometimes the artist themselves, on 2,079 works of art, but few or no visuals accompany descriptions.

The incident speaks to the way that the art archives exist in relation to Columbia undergraduates—namely, that even students who engage closely with art and its material production and are closely involved with the on-campus art community have only a vague sense of what the art vaults might hold.

A couple of weeks after my conversation with Ferrari, I find myself sitting at another desk, this time across from an art history professor named Robert Harrist.

A specialist in Chinese art, Harrist is well known in his department for utilizing Columbia’s archives in his classes. A few years ago, for example, students from one of his seminars on Chinese art had the opportunity to engage with Arthur Sackler’s donations from ancient East Asia.

Throughout our conversation, Harrist refuses to stay put. He sees an object here and there—a colorful painting by Russian abstractionist Ary Stillman, or a book about Arthur Sackler’s collection, or drawings by Columbia’s own Meyer Schapiro—and goes to fetch it or motions toward it as he speaks. His tactile tendencies, his obvious desire to closely engage with artwork, remind me of Lesher-Liao.

When he starts to tell me about East Asian Ink Painting, a class he is teaching with Art Humanities Director Matthew McKelway, he begins shuffling through files next to his desk.

“On Mondays,” he begins, pulling out several sheets of very thin paper, “we have this artist, a very distinguished painter, who comes in and teaches us how to paint.”

These are Harrist’s own ink paintings; he is excited to show them to me.

In Harrist’s eyes, close engagement with artwork is important. A believer in object-based learning, he once allowed students in his Chinese art class to handle ancient bronzes, to hold them, to feel their weight. He says, “I had never seen students so assertive in claiming their research topics.”

As such, he believes that the Columbia art archives is an invaluable resource. In the spring of 2017, he will teach a course with Ferrari on public sculptures at Columbia—all of which falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Art Properties.



Harrist himself admits that as a teacher, let alone as the former chair of his department, access to Columbia’s and New York City’s fine arts resources hasn’t been too difficult.

The same can be said for Daniel Ralston, a teaching assistant and student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences studying art in 18th and 19th century Spain and Latin America. Ralston tells me that he got in touch with Ferrari around a year ago. At the time, he was working as a TA for Jonathan Crary’s class on 19th century art and pursued the archives out of curiosity, thinking that maybe his students would benefit from seeing these objects firsthand, rather than in a photograph or on a slide.

Even with easy access to the archives, though, Ralston abandoned the efforts. He accepts responsibility for what ended up being a relatively fruitless experience in the archives: He ultimately chose to walk away from them because he lacked a clear pedagogical goal in utilizing them. “I felt sort of bad imposing on [Ferrari] to bring down this group of students for a not very specific purpose.”

I press him on this, though—is trying to access the archives to supplement what is being taught in class an imposition? Is pedagogy not cited as the purpose of the archives?

Ralston is quick to assure me that inaccessibility is not the biggest concern when it comes to the archives. “I think anyone would agree with me that the problem is that there’s no display space,” he says. “It’s easy to access the stuff when you want to.”

Ferrari, too, assures me that students in the Columbia community have easy access to the art collection, that the process of viewing art is fairly simple—a student needs only to fill out a form online, indicating which piece they are interested in. They will be brought into a viewing room several days later, where they can handle the work with supervision.

My reporting, in many ways, supports this assertion. Those I speak to who have tried to access the collection assure me that it was a straightforward, albeit a little bureaucratic, experience.

But Ralston reinforces something I’ve begun to sense coming out of my conversations with other students: Gaining physical access to a piece of art from the collection is not the issue. The problem is that even students who are engaged with art and art history don’t know these archives exist, and if they do, they feel intimidated by the collection.

Ferrari maintains that he is reaching out to students to the best of his ability.

Emily Shoyer, a Barnard senior studying art history, has just come from her curatorial internship at the Whitney Museum of American Art when we meet. She is still wearing her ID badge.

Shoyer notes that archives can seem intimidating on their surface. “There’s a lack of awareness about what [archives] are. And [they seem] really elitist—kind of confusing—something that might just not be something for everyone.”

Shoyer worked at the Archives of American Arts at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. this past summer, which was an experience that helped her demystify the experience of trawling through archives.

Why, then, has Shoyer never engaged with Columbia’s own art collection?

She believes that the task of demystifying the archives falls to professors, who should act as liaisons between their students and on-campus resources like those in the art archives. “If professors aren’t explaining to students what they have access to when they’re doing research, I don’t think the students know.”

I think about Harrist, who is doing his best to surface works from the collection to the advantage of students.

Everyone has someone or something else to blame—Shoyer blames professors, who neglect their duty as liaisons. Ralston blames the absence of exhibition space on campus.

But as of December 4, according to Columbia’s course directory, no students had enrolled in Harrist and Ferrari’s course on public sculpture.

Before I thank Harrist and leave his office, he gets up from his seat one more time. He returns with a black dish and what seem to be long, bamboo brushes. He fills the dish with water, then hands me these things. He wants to show me how to paint bamboo leaves.

He demonstrates for me. “As you can see, it’s very, very sensitive—it’s like a seismograph.”

I try. The leaf I paint is fatter than his, and inkier.

He encourages me to keep practicing. These things take time, he says.

Our Art on the Surface


I sit down at my desk to talk to Anne Higonnet, an art history professor at Barnard, over the phone.

Last year, I took Introduction to Art History II with Higonnet. The friend I sat next to in lecture, an art history major, came to class each day with a new scarf tied around her neck in a good-natured effort to mimic Higonnet’s style.

I realized, early on, the extent to which she was venerated by Barnard’s art history majors. And it was easy to see why. When she discussed Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, some students in our class were driven to tears. She frequently dedicated long, swirling odes to all kinds of artistic masterpieces—things like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or royal ivory heads sculpted in 15th century Benin, or Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

So when we speak on the phone, I am surprised by her terseness. Her responses contrast with Ferrari’s long ones in both their brevity and their candor.

Her answers only begin to elongate when she starts telling me about her experience studying art history as an undergraduate at Harvard. With 250,000 works of art, Harvard’s collection is the largest in the Ivy League.

Columbia’s is one of the smallest.



Regular tours of Harvard’s museums while on her way to class—at the time, she explains, the classroom building was a museum—supplemented Higonnet’s own undergraduate education. She describes a game that she and her peers would play on the way to class: They had to pick a work of art they they would choose to salvage if the building caught fire.

I ask if there was a consensus. “Oh, everyone had a favorite,” she responds, “but the point was that they had a favorite because they had been walking past all this stuff on the way to class. And the assumption that went completely without saying was that you would never try to escape the building, if there was a fire, without taking an artwork with you.”

The passion Higonnet remembers feeling for the treasures flaunted by her alma mater starkly juxtaposes the total lack of student engagement with the objects that are stored here, underground, in vaults.

Columbia has no dedicated university art museum, though it does have the Wallach Art Gallery in Schermerhorn Hall. But our gallery doesn’t have its own collection from which to pull, while those of many other universities do.

I walk to Schermerhorn to meet with Deborah Cullen, curator at Wallach Art Gallery. Her office is on the ninth floor of Schermerhorn, and I’m early again, so I walk down one flight of stairs and go stand at Wallach’s dark wood double doors of the gallery. It’s all I can do; the gallery is closed right now. I note the hours on the door: Wednesday through Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. It’s not open often.

I knock on Cullen’s door a few minutes later. She answers with a phone pressed to her ear. When we finally sit down at a table in her office, she jokes that you never want to turn down a phone call with an artist, because there’s always a chance you’ll never reach them again.

She brings up Wallach’s lack of involvement with Columbia’s art archives before I even have a chance to ask about the relationship between the two. “It’s interesting that there’s an art holding that is a collection, the old-fashioned sense of the word, and doesn’t have a venue to show it. And then there’s a gallery that doesn't have a direct obligation to use that collection.”

Cullen’s description shows that Wallach doesn’t fulfill the role of the ideal display space for Columbia’s artwork that Ralston believes is integral to our engagement with it.

Instead, Wallach mainly borrows art from places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hispanic Society of America. It draws from Columbia’s own collection only occasionally. In a 2014 exhibit, for example, Cullen worked with Higonnet to curate an exhibit of Anna Hyatt Huntington’s work, which included Columbia’s Cranes Rising, a 1934 bronze sculpture depicting the ascent of several cranes, one on top of the other.

When we talk, Cullen seems more interested in exploring Columbia’s relationship to the community around it than in strengthening the gallery’s connection with the Columbia-owned archives.

In fact, one of the reasons she accepted the position as Wallach’s curator in 2013 was to oversee the gallery’s move uptown to the Manhattanville campus next April.

“It will be in a very front-facing, publicly accessible, easy-to-find purpose-built space. Here, we’re on the eighth floor of Schermerhorn Hall, which is lovely in a sort of an antique way, but it’s harder to find. It’s harder for the public to access.”

Wallach’s move is one example among many of the ebb and flow of Columbia’s resources into the metropolitan community that engulfs it.

But the move does mean that our only art presentation space is moving away from the hub of student life on campus, and I still don’t have a clear answer as to why Columbia, unlike many of its Ivy League peers, lacks a purpose-built display space for its art collection.

Ferrari says the project would be too much for the University to take on in its current state. “We could never open a museum right now, no. There’s not enough staff. Just the logistics of having infrastructure in place in terms of security, or having people in the galleries.”



And there’s also that age-old issue of space, or lack thereof. “I don’t know where they would actually do it,” Ferrari says.

An issue with Ferrari’s story is that he himself has fought for a museum in the past, according to a Columbia Magazine article. The plans fell through, though. New York City has plenty of museums, the administrative argument went. Any on-campus museum would pale in comparison.

New York City, then, turns out to be both a resource and an impediment.

... In the City of New York


I have given myself an hour to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I board the bus—my MetroCard is sufficiently topped up, thankfully—and take one of the horizontally facing seats in the front. I open my notebook on my lap; in it, I’ve begun to write down questions for Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide and Jeffrey Munger, two of the Met’s curators, specializing in French, English, and Dutch furniture, and European ceramics and Asian-export porcelain, respectively.

Higonnet referred me to the two in an email, explaining that they have assisted in Columbia’s efforts to fuse the more cerebral aspects of its art history departments with the real-life viewing experience that a museum allows by teaching classes to students that take place at the Met.

Higonnet has little desire to see a museum spring up on campus precisely because of Columbia’s relationship with institutions in the city, and she knows that Columbia’s art collection faces little pressure to grow for the same reason.

“Columbia has never collected in the way that other colleges, other great universities do, because why bother when you have the Met and the Frick and the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Guggenheim and the Whitney and the Modern?”

When I get to the Met, I am met by Kisluk-Grosheide and Munger, two very tall, well-dressed, cosmopolitan people. The two work together at the museum and have published a book together. Kisluk-Grosheide uses her identification card to let the three of us into the balcony room of the Met. It’s a quiet space where important-looking adults chat, raising tea cups on platters to their mouths. Kisluk-Grosheide and Munger explain that these people work at the Met or have sustained memberships there.

I slowly put down my phone, which is covered in gaudy Lisa Frank stickers, to record the conversation. It looks strikingly out of place here.

Mostly, I want to know why Columbia sends its students downtown rather than acting, as Shoyer proposes as liaison between its students and the University’s own resources.

However, Kisluk-Grosheide and Munger say they don’t see students often. Munger explains, “Professor Higonnet is the only one who has reached out to us.”

Maybe sending interested students along to a museum downtown is not a sustainable way to engage them in art.

Munger thinks that campus museums offer benefits of direct engagement that larger, publicly geared institutions simply cannot.

“For people who might be really interested in a curatorial career, if you’ve got the collections there,” Munger says, “there’s a possibility of interacting with them in a way, doing a small focused exhibition that isn’t going to be possible, obviously, even if you’ve got the Met, the Modern, the Whitney, at your doorstep.”

When he was a student at Harvard, Munger remembers that even with other, more impressive museum options in Boston, a campus museum sufficed.

“The Museum of Fine Arts is 100 times the size. And I found that people in my class never went across the river to the Museum of Fine Arts.”

A campus museum, Munger also says, “might be just the trigger” to get students more involved with places like the Met—to “cross the river,” so to speak.

Perhaps assigning the responsibility of artistic education to the city’s institutions relates to our shortcomings when it comes to an understanding of our own art collection and its pedagogical potential.

It’s not just students who go downtown due to lack of resources here at Columbia—pieces from the collection are sent away, too. Columbia partners with NYU’s famous conservation program in pursuit of more information on the artworks it has acquired throughout Columbia’s history.

Ferrari engages in programs like the NYU-Columbia exchange to relieve some of the burden of his time-consuming, expensive task of research.

I speak to Hannelore Roemich, the director of NYU’s conservation program, over the phone. She explains that hers is the oldest degree-granting art conservation program in the country, and that they are the only to offer a dual degree in art history and science and conservation.

Columbia lacks a conservation program. Because the Department of Art Properties doesn’t have a source of Columbia student power, it outsources.

Roemich explains that students in the program receive the works of art with a coversheet that offers preliminary information. I ask her how much information Art Properties typically has on each object.

“Between none and a little, normally,” she says.

Roemich observes that the program is, in theory, symbiotic; certainly, her students benefit from the hands-on work they do using Columbia’s objects. She just hopes Columbia students, professors, and administrators are using the information to their advantage, as well.

Columbia necessarily rests on the resources of New York City. But I wonder if it neglects some of its own in doing so. As much as NYU’s conservation program aids in the collection of information that can be used for Ferrari’s Description to Discovery project, it presents shortcomings: Students lose pieces of their own archives, and art properties simultaneously neglects the potential resource of its own students.

I start to see two problems that, in a way, solve each other. On one hand, Columbia’s undergraduates lack a pedagogical resource in the archives. On the other, the information Columbia has on its own archives is “between none and a little.” Why can’t Columbia’s own students begin to research these objects, fulfilling them pedagogically while lending Ferrari their expertise?

The trope of the New York City school rears its head again: In spite of claims that New York City offers a solution to Columbia’s shortage of resources, it can’t solve our problems.

“You’ll be amazed. It’s ... amazing things,” he says with awe. “There’s furniture. There’s carpets. There are no ends of bronze busts of old guys with long beards and portraits of long-forgotten provosts and presidents and deans that are sort of part of the history of Columbia.”

A Reintroduction


It’s Sunday morning, and Joe Coffee is packed. In the weeks since I began reporting, the weather has gotten chillier, and I would prefer to be indoors. So I find myself walking back to Avery.

I take myself on a tour of the building’s lowest accessible level, wandering through an unlit passageway lined by water pipes and valves, locked door after locked door. I wonder if what I’ve been looking for—the art collection—is behind one of them.

It’s been a few weeks since I spoke to Ferrari. We’ve been emailing, trying to arrange a follow-up interview, but it’s been difficult to find a time. The last I heard from him, he broke it to me that I would not be able to visit the vaults.

As a last-ditch effort before finding a place to sit and work, I go to look down the row of offices. The windows are all dark—it’s Sunday—except for the one at the end of the row.

I poke my head in the door.

“Nora, right?” Ferrari smiles, rising from his seat to greet me.

He is awaiting the delivery of a few new works of art. He mentions that he’s coming down with another cold.

My list of questions has grown longer and longer in the weeks since we last spoke, and I have been frustrated by the irresolution of a problem, or many: Whose fault is our community’s failure to see art, to handle art, to know about our own collections in secret vaults under our feet?

When I confront him with my vexations, he responds, impassioned, “We have done an incredible amount of work in just the last few years to bring all of this [information] out. I mean, it’s the first time in the entire history of the University that people can start searching and finding out what’s in this collection. It’s going to take longer, because this stuff just takes time.”

So it seems we’ll have to wait. Part of the tension I’ve encountered can be distilled to the seeming irreconcilability of long-term, large-scale efforts to make the art available to us and the need to encourage student engagement in more personal, direct ways. Because Ferrari prioritizes “intellectual control” of the archives and their future documentation, an admittedly righteous pursuit, studied works within our vaults suffer obscurity.

With this in mind, I ask Ferrari about the painting hanging behind him—out of curiosity. He seems to brighten, to be excited that I’ve asked about it, and encourages me to take pictures. The portrait is a G.H. Harlow portrait of James Justinian Morier, a British diplomat to Iran. We discuss the portrait for a few minutes, before Ferrari gets a phone call; the new works of art have arrived.

In the end, I don’t get to see the archives; Ferrari, in fact, tells me their locations are confidential and “complicated.”

The closest I get to the vaults comes from my conversation with Harrist, the liaison between students and the archives. “Have you been down there yet?” he asks me at one point, referring to the vaults. I explain that I haven’t, not knowing at this point that I won’t.

“You’ll be amazed. It’s ... amazing things,” he says with awe. “There’s furniture. There’s carpets. There are no ends of bronze busts of old guys with long beards and portraits of long-forgotten provosts and presidents and deans that are sort of part of the history of Columbia.”

More of that, I hope, will be unearthed in a matter of time.

Have fun leafing through our tenth issue, and subscribe to our new weekly newsletter, As We See It!


Written by Nora Mathison
Edited by Maya Perry and Rébecca Ausseil
Illustrations by Isabel Chun
Graphics by Amanda Frame
Web development by Kenny Yuan
Web design by Anna Alonso