A retrospective of work by Nayland Blake, whose work addresses issues of race and sexuality, opens at UMBC's Center for Art and Visual Culture with a public lecture by Blake (3:30 p.m.) and reception (5 p.m.) on February 7. Some Kind of Love: Performance Video 1989-2002, runs through March 22, 2003.

The exhibition will combine works from the past thirteen years of Blake's performance-based installations and includes several large-scale environments, objects and videos. Historically researched and often literary-inspired, Blake explores complicated and subtly mixed concepts such as identity, race, relationships, and representation. Some of his work incorporates playful and subversive images linked to childhood.

David Deitcher writes in the exhibition 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."

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.

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

The Center for Art and Visual Culture (formerly the Fine Arts Gallery) is located on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building. CAVC hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information call (410) 455-3188. Click here for a schedule of upcoming visual arts events.