Adelphi Magazine Cover Art Honors Founder Charles Levermore

Faculty artist Carson Fox used her Victorian portrait series to bring Adelphi's first president to our research magazine cover.

We asked Carson Fox, professor of art and art history, to riff on her Victorian portrait series using an archival photograph of Adelphi's founder and first president, Charles Levermore, PhD, who led the University from 1896 to 1912. A Yale and Johns Hopkins graduate, MIT professor and personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson, Dr. Levermore's legacy also includes winning the 1924 American Peace Award and serving as corresponding secretary of the World's Court League, secretary of the League of Nations Union and secretary of the New York Peace Society.

"While creating this portrait of Charles Levermore for the cover of Adelphi University's Academic & Creative Research Magazine, I kept thinking about how remarkable it is that one person's vision can continue to grow for generations. More than a century later, Dr. Levermore's legacy is still shaping Adelphi," said Fox. "As a Department of Art and Art History faculty member of 20 years, it is deeply satisfying to contribute to Adelphi's research magazine, and to present my artwork of Charles Levermore to our newest president, who now carries Levermore's vision forward."

Carson Fox has been a member of Adelphi's Department of Art and Art History faculty since 2006, teaching courses in drawing, printmaking and professional artist practices. She previously taught at Harvard University, New York University, Rutgers University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and lectures widely on printmaking and sculpture across the United States and abroad.

Fox's work relies heavily on the imprint that individual experience has on the artist, and centers on the production of sculpture, installation, printmaking and artist books. Her artwork can be seen in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design (New York City), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts museum, among others. She has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally- to date, she has been part of more than 35 solo and 120 group exhibitions, including shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, the New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, Connecticut), the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, Colorado), and the Jersey City Museum (Jersey City, New Jersey). Fox has created permanent installations of artwork in public and corporate venues, including projects for the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the University of Arkansas and Boston University.

She earned an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a four-year studio certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 2025, she was invited to a six-week artist's residency at the Guanlan Original Printmaking Base, Shenzhen, China, where she created original prints and deepened her knowledge of Chinese printmaking.

Artist Statement

"This series of portraits originated as steel-cut engravings from the Victorian era. The original prints-which feature notables of the era from Union generals to opera singers-were highly stylized with prescribed textures of dots, dashes and cross-hatching to render the picture with striking realism. In my hands, they are enlarged, cropped and made more dramatic. Contemplating these elaborately wrought images compelled me to deeply consider both the printmaker and subject, once so current and timely, now passed into obscurity. My meditation on these objects is physically evidenced through the complex patterns of holes I remove from the surface, as I consider both history's imperfect rendering of the past and its willfulness to recede, while appreciating the irony that as I renew a dialogue with these antiquated images, time is working to erase me, too."