CADVC welcomes guest curator Joanna Raczynska for her future project, Just Past: Using Documentation. Dates will soon be announced.

Organized by Visiting Curator, Joanna Raczynska, Just Past: Using Documentation presents a series of films and videos that utilize the subjective as well as mediated experiences of performance, exploring some of the many uses of video, film and audio documentation by artists, organizations, and collectives since the late 60s. The film and video presentations will contextualize questions regarding the concept of live performances and subjective experience; actions by Activist-Artists; histories of artist-run experimental media spaces and happenings; “professional” and “amateur” documentation and their purposes; copyright, archives, access and video format migration; and the experiences of projectionists, media arts curators and artists performing multiple roles in the making of meaning and history, among other concepts. The series will also work towards provoking a more active participation in the documentation of current artistic practices, organizations, and events.

Composed of six individual programs, Just Past: Using Documentation will feature screenings and guest speakers addressing very specific aspects about the production and uses of documentation including: Imagining the Documented with project organizer Joanna Raczynska, Franklin Furnace: The Art of Performance Documentation with founder and artist Martha Wilson in person, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center’s archive footage of Mike Kelley’s The Monitor and the Merrimac (1981) with Carolyn Tennant (archivist), Tony Conrad, and Tony Ousler in person, We’re All VideoFreex!: Archiving Utopia with Skip Blumberg and Tom Colley (archivist) in person, Gravity Hill Newsreels, serialized footage from Occupy Wall Street with filmmaker Jem Cohen in person, and final screening at Charles.

Joanna Raczynska is the Assistant Head of Film Programs in the Department of Film Programs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She earned her master’s degree in documentary by practice from Royal Holloway College, University of London in 2001. She first started making non-fiction films ands videos in 1996, while a student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her works have screened internationally and across the United States, most recently at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has previously worked for a variety of non-profit organizations including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY (where she served as Media Arts Director from 2002 – 2006), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Joanna Raczynska

Baltimore community arts activist and UMBC’s curator of collections and outreach for the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, Sandra Abbott, was sworn in to the board of the Baltimore City Public Art Commission on Monday, June 10, 2013 by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

As a member of the board of the Public Art Commission, Abbott juries public art projects along with eight other members under the City’s 1% for Art Program. The program enhances the cityscape, quality of life, and artistic and creative climate in Baltimore. The 1%-for-Art Ordinance requires at least one percent of the City's capital construction project's eligible funds be used for the selection, acquisition, commissioning, fabrication, placement, installation, display, and maintenance of public fine artwork. The program is administered through the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA).

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UMBC’s Department of Education joins the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) to celebrate their year long K-12 educational outreach collaboration with an art exhibition by students from their partnership schools.

The exhibition is featured at the UMBC Commons Mezzanine Gallery beginning with an artist’s reception Thursday, April 11, 6 – 8 pm.

The installation features original artwork by three Baltimore City schools (Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts High School, Baltimore City College High School, and Digital Harbor High School), Mt. Hebron High School in Howard County, and Hugh M. Cummings High School in North Carolina. Baltimore City College High School, Digital Harbor High School, and Mt. Hebron High School are Professional Development School partners with UMBC’s Department of Education. After experiencing the CADVC gallery and/or virtual exhibition, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, the students were invited to create visual artwork, poetry, or prose for display at UMBC as well. Their work, a creative interpretation of the interaction between visual culture and social justice, will be on display to the public through May 23, 2013.

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Maurice Berger, Chief Curator of the CADVC, has written his third essay for “Race Stories,” an ongoing series for the New York Times Lens Blog. The essay focuses on Ken Gonzales-Day’s important "Lynchings in the West Project."

Read the full article here:
"Lynchings in the West, Erased From History and Photos"

The previous two entries in the “Race Stories” series are also available on the Lens Blog:
"A Radically Prosaic Approach to Civil Rights Images"
"Malcolm X as a Visual Strategist"

Command Z: Artists Working with Phenomena and Technology curated by Lisa Moren, presented by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture last spring was featured today as one of the top ten art exhibitions of 2012 by City Paper.

The show, described as one that “reawakened our sense of wonder and possibility,” was alongside exhibitions presented by the Contemporary Museum, Open Space, Nudashank and others. Command Z also made the top ten list of Baker award-winning artist, Gary Kachadourian.

See the list here: “2012 Top Ten Art Shows.”

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded CADVC Research Professor and Chief Curator Maurice Berger a $50,000 curatorial research fellowship award for his forthcoming curatorial project Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television. This exhibition and publication project represents the first collaborative institutional effort between the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture and the Jewish Museum in New York, where Dr. Berger holds the title of Consulting Curator. The grant will be administered through the Jewish Museum.

From the early-1940s through the mid-1960s, a dynamic new visual medium emerged in the United States that, in its risk-taking and aesthetic experimentation, paralleled the cutting-edge nature of modern art: television. The revolutionary and uncharted medium attracted younger television executives, writers, producers, and directors. Scores of socially and culturally progressive and predominantly Jewish network executives, producers, directors, art directors, and writers—figures such as Paddy Chayefsky, William Golden, Leonard Goldenson, Robert Kintner, Ernie Kovacs, Dan Melnick, William S. Paley, David Sarnoff, Frank Stanton, David Susskind, and Rod Serling—mined the aesthetic, stylistic, and conceptual possibilities of a new and powerful technology. These innovators worked in a cultural milieu far less constricted by the competition for box office revenue and the censorious production codes then preoccupying the motion picture industry.

As the geographic focus of the networks shifted from the Hollywood movie studios to a television industry initially centered in New York, the proximity of these innovators to the city's dynamic artistic and cultural community—particularly the avant-garde art and philosophies of the New York School, an artistic milieu also with a significant Jewish presence—would result in a powerful conceptual and stylistic synergy between modern art and early television. American television and avant-garde art capitalized on the “modernist visual revolution,”

Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television is currently scheduled to be presented at the Jewish Museum during the spring of 2016 and follows up at the CADVC / UMBC in 2017.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts has awarded the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture $50,000 for the upcoming project, Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen.

The project, headed by Visiting Curator to the CADVC, Niels Van Tomme, is a traveling exhibition and publication project which explores the unique roles Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images and the realities they seem to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed governmental information, and places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.

Visibility Machines is scheduled to be presented next fall, mid-October through December, 2013.

The fall issue of UMBC Magazine features a three part feature on For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. The text, written by CADVC research professor and chief curator Maurice Berger, analyzes a selection of objects in the exhibition. There is also a profile of and an interview with Dr. Berger, but the interview appears only in the online version.

The exhibition has been touring the US since 2010 when it opened in NY. Both the exhibition and the book, by the same title, have won many accolades, including a tour through the NEH on the Road initiative, which travels sponsored exhibitions nation wide. More info is available--as well as a virtual exhibition version of the project--on our website at foralltheworldtosee.org.

As UMBC anticipates the exhibition finally coming "home" to CADVC this November 15, 2012 through Mar. 10, 2013, we have planned a number of related programs throughout the coming months.

UMBC's Humanities Forum will also be presenting several lectures and panel discussions on the civil rights movement, including a discussion between Julian Bond and Freeman Hrabowski, among others. For more details see this link.

CADVC's traveling exhibition, "Migrate," opens this weekend at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. Learn more about the installation and events there on CAC's exhibition page or local station WBOK's site.

Where Do We Migrate To?, curated by CADVC guest curator Niels Van Tomme, explores contemporary issues of migration and experiences of displacement and exile. The exhibition features work in diverse media by 19 internationally recognized artists and collectives including Acconci Studio, Svetlana Boym, Blane De St. Croix, Lara Dhondt, Brendan Fernandes, Claire Fontaine, Nicole Franchy, Andrea Geyer, Isola and Norzi, Kimsooja, Pedro Lasch, Adrian Piper, Raqs Media Collective, Société Réaliste, Julika Rudelius, Xaviera Simmons, Fereshteh Toosi, Philippe Vandenberg, and Eric Van Hove.

The award-winning scholarly catalogue can be purchased through D.A.P.

Image: Xaviera Simmons, (detail) Superunknown, (Alive In The), 2010, C-prints mounted on Sintra, dimensions/size of installation variable, first produced for Greater New York 2010 MoMA/PS1

This project was made possible, in part, with the support of the Flemish Government through Flanders House.

The 2012-13 UMBC Humanities Forum Lecture Series will feature several events in conjunction with CADVC's exhibit, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 15 Nov. 2012 to 10 March 2013

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