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CADVC Welcomes Guest Curators

CADVC welcomes guest curators Heiferman & Van Tomme for their future projects, Sciences, Photography and Visual Culture and Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen, respectively. Dates will soon be announced.

Organized by visiting curator, Marvin Heiferman, Sciences, Photography and Visual Culture is a project designed to explore that relationship and engage members of the UMBC community in an innovative and interdisciplinary dialog about how photographic images work across the sciences, arts, and humanities. In Visual Practices Across the University (2007) Dr. James Elkins--Chair of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago-- noted that “it turns out that images are being made and discussed in dozens of fields, throughout the university and well beyond the humanities. Some fields, such as biochemistry and astronomy, are image-obsessed; others think and work through images.” While Elkins wrote about imagery produced in all media, this UMBC project focuses specifically on photographic imaging, and although one might suspect that most images created in university settings are produced within art programs, the reality is that photographic images are more often the goal or by-products of scientific inquiry on campus.

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Marvin Heiferman is an American curator and writer, who originates projects about the impact of photographic images on art and visual culture for museums, art galleries, publishers and corporations.

As Assistant Director of LIGHT Gallery, New York (1971-1974), Director of Castelli Graphics and Photographs, New York (1975-1982), an artist representative (1982-1988) and an independent curator (1989-present), Heiferman has organized influential thematic exhibitions and worked with a wide range of artists and photographers including Eve Arnold, Garry Winogrand, Robert Mapplethorpe, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston, Robert Adams (photographer), Nan Goldin, John Waters, and Richard Prince.

Heiferman has conceived of and produced major exhibitions and online content for clients including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, International Center for Photography, P.S. 1 Museum, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution Archives.[2] His most recent book, Photography Changes Everything (2012), which features approximately 80 interdisciplinary texts on photography’s active role in shaping memory, history, and experience was based on an encyclopedic online project (2008-2011) he organized for the Smithsonian.

A contributing editor to Art in America, Heiferman has also written for publications including Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Bookforum, "Photoworks", and ArtNews. He is a core faculty member in the International Center of Photography/Bard College MFA Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, and teaches in the School of Visual Art’s MFA Program in Photography, Video and Related Media.

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Organized by visiting curator, Niels Van Tomme, Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen instigates a thought-provoking dialogue between two major artistic oeuvres. Establishing the military industrial complex as the arena that forcefully represents the collapse of the public sphere, the project zooms in on how these artists make visible the political implications of seeing with machines. Its intention is to emphasize the unique role both Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the military apparatus. In exploring the complex artistic strategies Farocki and Paglen use, the project initiates critical discourse about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed governmental information. Additionally, the exhibition places the oeuvres of these two influential artists within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.

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Niels Van Tomme is a New York based curator, researcher and art critic. He has organized numerous exhibitions in partnership with institutions such as the Lambent Foundation (New York), American University Museum (Washington, DC), the Czech Center (New York) and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (Baltimore). He has also organized the presentation of video screenings and public art projects at Old Embassy (Tokyo), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver). He is a co-curator of VIVA Festival, an ongoing traveling video exhibition, which has been shown at the Hara Museum (Tokyo), Reina Sofia (Madrid) and MoCA (Shanghai).

As a contributor to various journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues, including Art Papers, Afterimage, EXTRA, and hART, he investigates the sociopolitical aspects of contemporary culture. Van Tomme has served as a Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Denison University (Granville), and HISK (Ghent). He is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.