Visual Arts Faculty Exhibition

October 30 - December 13, 2008

Organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC

The exhibition features work from UMBC's Visual Arts Faculty including Film, Video, Animation, Photography, Graphic Design, Print Media, Installation, and Performance.

Events:
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 5-7pm

For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Fall 2009 (Tentative)

Venues: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; International Center of Photography, New York; others to be determined

Curator: Maurice Berger, Senior Research Scholar, CADVC

Organized in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights represents the first comprehensive exhibition and publication to look at the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States. It will look at images in both high and popular culture, tracking the ways they represented race in order to perpetuate the status quo, stimulate dialogue, or change prevailing beliefs and attitudes. For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights is comprised of over 250 objects, including posters, photographs, graphic art, magazines, newspapers, books, pamphlets, political buttons, comic books, toys, postcards, and clips from film, newsreels, and television.

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The Site Of Memory: An Exhibition in Honor of Toni Morrison

Fall 2011

Curator: Maurice Berger, Senior Research Scholar, CADVC

This exhibition, which will open at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in fall 2011, celebrates the critical writing of Toni Morrison and its impact on American art of the past quarter century. It focuses on a groundbreaking essay written by the author in 1987, and subsequently reprinted in an influential anthology of cultural criticism published by The New Museum of Contemporary art in 1994, "The Site of Memory." The essay, which was widely read and discussed in the American art world, examined the role of remembrance in the lives and survival of people victimized by racism and other forms of discrimination.

The stories of the past, preserved and handed down from generation to generation, have allowed racial and ethnic minorities—men and women often denied the privilege of writing the standard histories of state and culture—to stake their claim to a past that is itself in danger of being lost forever. It is this danger, as Morrison observed of her own desire as a black woman to give voice to victims of the African Diaspora, which has motivated oppressed peoples to reclaim history through personal recollection and through the testimony of the souls who lived it.

With this imperative in mind, a number of contemporary artists over the past decade have engaged memory and remembrance in their work in order to challenge racism, explore its history, or present new and empowering ways of seeing or rethinking race relations, past and present. Their art is simultaneously beautiful, arresting, and challenging—a declaration of the power of memory and historical recollection to liberate and empower. The Site of Memory will include work in a range of mediums, including sculpture and media installations, photography, film, and video. The exhibition will also include a context station and reading area devoted to Morrison's literary and critical writing.

Artists: Jonathan Calm, Ken Gonzales Day, Ellen Gallagher, Simon Leung, Rodney McMillan, Pepon Ossorio, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Jordan Wolfson

Top Photo: Eikoh Hosoe: META