Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts & Culture
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu

Continuing on display at the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery through December 12th is The Velvet Years 1965-67: Warhol's Factory, photographs by Stephen Shore. These photographs, taken by Shore between 1965 and 1967, depict the scene at Andy Warhol's studio, the Factory. Shore captures a time when Warhol was emerging as a prominent visual artist and avant-garde filmmaker. The Factory Shore depicts is populated with a diverse group of musicians, artists, actors, writers and aspiring cultural sophisticates.

The Velvet Underground was very much a part of Warhol's scene. He is credited with galvanizing their career and promoting them through his multi-media shows, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, held at the Dom, a club on St. Mark's Place in lower Manhattan. The group consisted of Lou Reed on guitar and vocals, John Cale on electric violin and viola, Sterling Morrison on bass and Maureen "Mo" Tucker on drums. Nico, one of Warhol's discoveries, performed and sang with the group for a short period of time. She received equal billing on the Velvets' first album, for which Warhol designed the cover: a peelable illustration of a banana. It sold more than any of their subsequent albums. The group was a forerunner of punk rock and their sound and style greatly influenced David Bowie, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Blondie, the Sex Pistols and many others.>

Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past twenty-five years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has also had one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked interest in color photography and led the rebirth of the use of the view camera for documentary work. Aperture has published two monographs of his photographs, Uncommon Places and The Gardens at Giverny. He currently serves as chairman of the photography department at Bard College. He is represented by Pace/MacGill in New York City.

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. Public information: http://www.umbc.edu/arts or 410-455-2270.

Images for media use are available at http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/hi-res/.