This year, October is proving to be an exciting month for the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC).

On Thursday, October 8th, our fall exhibition Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports opened to a packed house. Organized by Independent Curators International in New York, Mixed Signals was very well received by the UMBC community. Afterward, we benefited from a healthy turnout for a lecture by the exhibition’s curator, Christopher Bedford. He spoke on his own athletic background as a football player in college and how that experience influenced him to curate an exhibition on men and sports. In particular, he spoke about the pivotal role Matthew Barney’s own history as an athlete and his subsequent work as an artist plays in the exhibition as a whole. His lecture was extremely illuminating.

Continuing the CADVC’s desire to forge new institutional partnerships in presenting our public programming, we will present a lecture by the architect Rob Brennan on Wednesday, October 21st, as part of Baltimore’s Architecture Week. Entitled Architecture as a Community Experience and co-sponsored by the University of Baltimore’s Ampersand Institute of Words and Images, Rob Brennan, AIA, will speak on the architectural profession and its ability to act as a springboard for educating communities and encouraging social participation to improve the way we live. He will discuss how Brennan + Company Architects has created unique initiatives such as alterego (2003) and common ecology (2007) to actively engage and educate the public on sustainable design and ultimately, sustainable neighborhoods.Rob Brennan’s lecture will be presented at the University of Baltimore’s Student Center at 6 pm.

On Thursday, October 29th, CADVC in partnership with the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, will present special screenings of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4 (1994) and Drawing Restraint 10 (2005). Though separated by more than a decade, these two films, seen in the context of the Mixed Signals exhibition, dynamically reveal many of the key issues surrounding masculinity and sports. The screenings will take place at Shriver Hall on the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University and will begin at 7 pm.

We hope that you will take advantage of these two excellent public programs in downtown Baltimore as well as the Mixed Signals exhibition at UMBC. They all represent the multi-faceted approach of the CADVC’s core mission to bring new and important programming on contemporary art and culture to as large and diverse an audience as possible.

Sincerely,
Symmes Gardner, Director
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

Top Photo: Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000