Visual Arts
Continuing through February 18 MFA Imaging and Digital Arts Thesis Exhibition
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents the MFA Imaging and Digital Arts Thesis Exhibition, which features works by graduates of UMBC’s MFA programs in Imaging and Digital Arts. The 2012 exhibition will include work of graduate students in robotics, photography, performance art and trans materials. The work selected represents the culmination of each student's unique experience at UMBC's dynamic and demanding MFA program.
Meghan Flanigan's work, I Will Disappear to You, can be experienced as either a live, one-on-one performance or as a video installation. The performances will occur at the following times, and by appointment. The video installation will be shown at all other times.
Friday, January 27, 12 - 1 pm
Saturday, January 28, 2 - 3 pm
Wednesday, February 1, 12 - 1 pm
Thursday, February 2, 3:30 - 4:30 pm (immediately prior to the opening reception)
Friday, February 3, 12 - 1 pm
Saturday, February 4, 2 - 3 pm
Wednesday, February 8, 12 - 1 pm
Friday, February 10, 12 - 1 pm
Saturday, February 11, 2 - 3 pm
Wednesday, February 15, 12 - 1 pm
Friday, February 17, 12 - 1 pm
Admission to the exhibition is free. The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and is located in the Fine Arts Building. For more information call 410-455-3188.
Image: Gary Kachadourian, Proposal Image for "Apartment Complex."
Visual Art
Continuing through March 22 Passage on the Underground Railroad
The Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents Passage on the Underground Railroad, artwork by Stephen Marc, organized by the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo, New York, and curated by Sandra H. Olsen. The exhibition will be on display from January 29 through March 22.
Stephen Marc's fascinating photographs and digital montages explore the history of freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. With this body of work, Marc combines contemporary images with historic documents and artifacts to create richly-layered objects that bring the past palpably into the present. For seven years the artist photographed the routes traveled by fugitive slaves in their search for freedom, documenting and interpreting his research along the way. In Passage on the Underground Railroad, Marc shares the results of these explorations through eighty-seven thought- provoking, unconventional, and haunting digital images.
Marc uses two types of photographic composites to reveal the history of the Underground Railroad (UGRR): multiple photographs that describe UGRR sites and metaphorical montages that address the larger horror of slavery. Each UGRR site has a story, so individual sites are portrayed inside and out, using several photographs in combination to create visual tours. The companion montages evocatively interpret the South's "peculiar institution" from which slaves were fleeing. These multilayered narratives weave together elements from the landscape of slavery—plantation structures, crop fields, waterways, tools of bondage and agriculture, merchant tokens and bank note currency, newspaper articles, and advertisements—along with UGRR site details, antislavery materials, and contemporary cultural references.
The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 12 noon to 4 pm, on Thursday until 8 pm, and Saturday and Sunday 1 - 5 pm. Admission is free. For more information call 410-455-2270.
On Wednesday, March 7 at 4 pm, Stephen Marc will present a lecture on his work. Please see the Humanities Forum listing on this calendar for additional information.
The presentation of this exhibition is supported by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Foundation and individual contributions. For this exhibition and publication, Stephen Marc has received ongoing support from Olympus Imaging America, Inc., as well as from the National Park Service as a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program.
Image: Stephen Marc, Untitled, Digital montage/archival pigment inkjet print, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist.
Visual Arts
Continuing through February 12 Image Transfer: The CADVC/K-12 Remix
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture celebrates its Fall 2011 K-12 school and community partnerships with an exhibition in the Hall Gallery on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building through February 12. The multi-media display features original artwork by more than two hundred students from four area schools--Lansdowne High School (Academy of Arts & Communication), Benjamin Franklin High School at Masonville Cove, Highlandtown Elementary/Middle School and Hampstead Hill Academy--alongside work by their UMBC student and faculty collaborators. Their artwork responds to the CADVC’s main gallery exhibition Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, which was on display in Fall 2011.
Image: Lizbeth Lobra, Untitled Dream, 2011, mixed media
Highlandtown Elementary/Middle
Baltimore City Public School #215
Visual Arts and Humanities Forum
Wednesday, March 7 Stephen Marc: "Passage on the Underground Railroad and the Black Experience within American History"
The Humanities Forum presents Stephen Marc, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University, who will speak on "Passage on the Underground Railroad and the Black Experience within American History" in conjunction with the exhibition of his work at the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery. For nine years Stephen Marc traveled to over half the states in this country to photograph the routes traveled by fugitive slaves in their search for freedom, documenting and interpreting his research along the way. Marc shares the results of these explorations through his thought-provoking, creative, and haunting digital composite images, which he will place into the context of his previous and ongoing bodies of work that focus on locating the black experience within American history.
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery. Admission is free.
Image: Stephen Marc, Ellicott City, 2009, Digital montage/archival pigment inkjet print, 9" x 26" (22.5" x 37.5" framed), Courtesy of the artist.
Visual Art
March 29 - April 28 Command Z: Artists Working with Phenomena and Technology
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents Command Z: Artists Working with Phenomena and Technology, curated by Lisa Moren, on display from March 29 through April 28. Command Z is an exhibition and public programming project featuring several pioneering artists whose works use kinetics, morse code, audio, computer programming, a grand piano and fire. This exhibition will create new as well as re-create historic installations of internationally received work by Ingrid Bachmann, Paul DeMarinis, Nina Katchadourian and artist team Emile Morin and Jocelyn Robert.
Special Events
At 4 pm on Thursday, March 29, artists Emile Morin and Jocelyn Robert will discuss their collaborative piece Leçon de piano (Piano Lesson), in which letters fall like rain, slowly making sounds onto a keyboard randomly playing 47 phrases from a child's piano lesson book such as "the green valley" or "in the dark corridor." The "weight" of the projected letters and colors appear to press down on each key inspired by phenomena of colors, letters and sounds coming together in nature. In the collaboration of Jocelyn Robert and Emile Morin both artists bring programming, engineering and poetic skills to this project that randomly plays single notes minimally and automatically. Leçon de piano uses a Yamaha Disklavier, an acoustic and digital grand piano that receives input from a computer using MAX software programmed by the artists, in order to always vary the associations throughout the installation.
The Opening Reception on March 29 at 5 pm will include a special performance of Nina Katchadourian's Talking Popcorn, a sound sculpture that hears what popcorn is saying, a project inspired by the artist's interest in language, bi-culturalism and translation. A microphone is in the cabinet of a popcorn machine that picks up the sound of popping corn, and translates it according to the patterns and dictates of Morse code. A computer-generated voice provides a simultaneous spoken translation. Attendees will receive free popcorn in a bag labeled with the text of what their popcorn is saying.
On Thursday, April 12 at 4 pm, a "rush hour" concert wlll feature new works for Disklavier by UMBC faculty and composition students Matthew Belzer, Linda Dusman, Jacob Foster, Jacob Housand, Justin Mann, Timothy Nohe, David Revill, Anna Rubin and Alan Wonneberger.
Admission to the exhibition and all events is free. The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm (with the exhibition opening for regular hours on Friday, March 30) and is located in the Fine Arts Building. For more information call 410-455-3188.
Image: Emile Morin and Jocelyn Robert, Leçon de Piano.
Visual Arts
Wednesday, April 4 Robert Staples and Barbara Charles
Staples & Charles Ltd are planners and designers of outstanding museums, exhibitions, and visitor centers. Robert Staples and Barbara Fahs Charles established the firm in 1973 to provide the museum community with planning and exhibition design services at the highest aesthetic and intellectual level. Staples & Charles has conceived and designed projects for such diverse clients as the Smithsonian, Monticello, The Coca-Cola Company, South African Breweries, The Sixth Floor Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and Detroit Institute of Arts.
7 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery. Admission is free. Presented by the InterArts Series and the Visiting Artist Lecture Series.
Image: Staples & Charles design of the "Making Monticello" Gallery at the Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center, Monticello.
Visual Arts
April 9 - May 31 The Photographer's Eye: Civil War Photographs Selected from the UMBC Photography Collections
The Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents The Photographer's Eye: Civil War Photographs Selected from the UMBC Photography Collections, on display from April 9 through May 31.
The American Civil War coincided with the early years of photography, and the images captured by the early practitioners of this art have helped to shape the memories of this central historical event. Technological limitations, artistic aspirations and societal expectations strongly impacted the images produced by photographers "documenting" the events of the Civil War. This exhibition will explore the art and artifice of Civil War photography, while revealing something about why each of the selected 81 images was produced.
The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 12 noon to 4 pm, on Thursday until 8 pm, and Saturday and Sunday 1 - 5 pm. Admission is free. For more information call 410-455-2270.
The presentation of this exhibition is supported by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Foundation and individual contributions.
Image: Burnside and his Staff, 7 X 9.25in., albumen print, Photography Collections, UMBC.
Visual Arts
May 25 - June 18 Senior Exit Exhibition
Admission to the exhibition is free. The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and is located in the Fine Arts Building. For more information call 410-455-3188.
