UMBC's Center for Art and Visual Culture presents Nayland Blake: Some Kind of Love: Performance Video 1989-2002 from February 7 through March 22, 2003. The artist will give a public lecture on his work on Thursday, February 6 at 3:30 p.m.; the opening reception will follow at 5 p.m.

Nayland Blake, a native of New York City, received his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1984. He has had solo shows at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, San Francisco Artspace, and other venues. Blake's work addresses issues of race and sexuality through playful and subversive images often linked to childhood.

Including several large-scale environments, objects, and videos, this exhibition will combine works from the past thirteen years of Blake's performance-based installations. Historically researched and often literary-inspired, Blake explores complicated and subtly mixed concepts such as identity, race, relationships, and representation. David Deitcher writes in the exhibitions catalogue, "[for almost twenty years] Nayland Blake's sculptural installations and performances have revealed a wide range of interests, from popular culture to vanguard subversion; from Camp to the queer body in the age of AIDS; from Sadean and psychoanalytic texts to the toxic legacy of American racism. Like so many American artists whose work has emerged during the 1990s, Blake's projects have often dealt with identity, which they envision as a compound process rather than a fait accompli."

Nayland Blake: Some Kind of Love: Performance Video 1989-2002 was organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, and curated by Ian Berry in collaboration with the artist.

About the Center for Art and Visual Culture
The Center for Art and Visual Culture (formerly known as the Fine Arts Gallery) is a non-profit gallery space dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary art. The CAVC serves as a unique center for students, faculty, and the general public in the visualization and discussion of important philosophical and aesthetic issues of the day. Disciplines represented include painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, imaging and digital arts, video, film, installation and performance.

Since 1989, the CAVC has incorporated a number of public programs into its exhibition programming schedule to further impact the communities it serves. Symposia, lecture series, conferences, film series, visiting artist series, and residencies have all been fundamental in an effort to create an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture. The Center has also initiated a number of projects with Baltimore and surrounding schools systems to integrate the contemporary artist and their concerns into the classroom. These projects take place on-site at both middle schools and high schools and are team taught by the instructors at these schools, professional artists, and students from the CAVC's Internship Program.

Currently the Center produces one to two exhibition catalogues each year. Each document is fully illustrated and contains critical essays on the given subject by a variety of distinguished professionals in the field. With the printing of Minimal Politics: Performativity and Minimalism in Recent American Art in 1997, the CAVC inaugurated a new series of publications entitled Issues in Cultural Theory. These catalogues are published yearly and are distributed internationally through Distributed Art Publishers in New York.

Since 1992, the Center for Art and Visual Culture has actively pursued the organization of exhibitions that contain the aesthetic, theoretical, and educational potential to reach both a national and international audience. Over the years, the CAVC has traveled these exhibition projects to a broad spectrum of museums, professional non-profit galleries, and universities national and internationally. These traveling exhibitions include:

• Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations (2001)
• Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999)
• Bruno Monguzzi: A Designer's Perspective (1998)
• Minimal Politics (1997)
• Kate Millet, Sculpture: The First 38 Years (1997)
• Layers: Contemporary Collage from St. Petersburg, Russia (1995/96)
• Notes In Time: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (1995)
• Ciphers of Identity (1994)
• Nancy Graves: Recent Works (1993)
• Environmental Terror (1992)

Beyond the scope of these traveling exhibitions, the Center for Art and Visual Culture also undertakes an exhibition schedule that includes a Faculty Biennial, and projects such as the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership. As part of the educational mission of the CAVC, one graduate thesis exhibition and one undergraduate senior exhibition are scheduled on a yearly basis.

This multi-faceted focus for presenting exhibitions, projects and scholarly research publications focused on contemporary art and cultural issues positions the Center for Art and Visual Culture in a unique position within the mid-Atlantic region.

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Sunday: closed
Monday: closed
Tuesday 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Wednesday: 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Thursday: 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Friday: 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Saturday: 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.

Telephone
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This release as a pdf document: http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/releases/03spring/blake.pdf (3.5 Mb)

Images for Media
High resolution images for media are available online:
http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/hi-res/
or by email or postal mail.

Directions
From Baltimore and points north, proceed south on I-95 to exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to the Fine Arts Building.

From I-695, take Exit 12C (Wilkens Avenue) and continue one-half mile to the entrance of UMBC at the roundabout intersection of Wilkens Avenue and Hilltop Road. Turn left and follow signs to the Fine Arts Building.

From Washington and points south, proceed north on I-95 to Exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to the Fine Arts Building.

Daytime metered visitor parking is available in Lot 10, near the Administration Building. Visitor parking regulations are enforced on all University calendar days. Hilltop Circle and all campus roadways require a parking permit unless otherwise marked.

Online campus map: http://www.umbc.edu/aboutumbc/campusmap/

Photo Credits
Top: Transport #5 (function)
1990
Two Sony monitors on trolleys
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Middle: Gorge
1998
Video transferred to DVD with sound, monitor
60 minutes
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Bottom: Starting Over Suit
2000
Cloth with 140 pounds of beans, steel armature
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York