Visiting Artists

Students have the opportunity to enhance their education by taking part in the Department of Visual Arts Visiting Artist Program. Throughout the year, many prominent and emerging artists visit the department to present their work and lead discussions with students. All presentations are free and open to the public. Past artists include James Duesing, Laure Drogoul, Billie Grace Lynn and Jeanne Dunning.

Visiting Artist lectures and other important arts events at UMBC are announced at the UMBC Arts & Cultural Events Calendar

Spring 2008

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher
Wednesday, January 30th
5 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: Portraits, curated by Maurice Berger, senior research scholar at the CADVC. Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: Portraits is the first exhibition to examine the portrait photographs of this esteemed husband-and-wife team. Their portraits— like their radical landscapes and city-scenes—are powerfully evocative, boldly subverting our expectations of the discipline. Rather than "capturing" the visual essence of a sitter, they reveal identity to be complex, transitive, and culturally and historically defined. The artists capture their subjects in ways that transform, enhance, and accentuate our understanding of them. They do so with the full complicity and respect of the people they photograph. They spend weeks living with each community they document. They immerse themselves in its history. They interview its residents and participate in their rituals and customs. They photograph them in various, active stages of work, play, and home life. Ultimately, Robbins and Becher allow their subjects to represent themselves—not only as they would like to been seen, but also in ways that illuminate the complexity of their humanity. By seeing identity as changeable and conditional, these improbable portraits remind us that who we are is as much a matter of choice as destiny. The exhibition will contain eight series created over the past fifteen years: German Indians (1997-98), Colonial Remains (1991), Bavarian by Law (1995-96), The Americans of Samaná (1998-2001), Sosúa (1999-2000), The Oregon Vortex (1994), Postville (2005), and Figures (2002).

Catherine Chalmers
Presented by the InterArts series.
Thursday, April 10
7 pm, Lecture Hall 8 (ITE Building).

Catherine Chalmers photographs a variety of insects and amphibians as they move through the natural cycles of life, including those of reproduction and sustenance. For her series Food Chain such events were photographed in vivid color against a stark white ground. The sterile background implies an atmosphere of objectivity and observation, and what happens in front of it—and in front of Chalmers’s camera—are events not normally witnessed by human eyes.

Catherine Chalmers was born in San Mateo, California, in 1957. Before she received an MFA degree in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, Chalmers earned her B.S. in engineering from Stanford University. Chalmers’s photographs have recently been exhibited at the Ansel Adams Center for Photography, San Francisco; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Reykjavik Municipal Art Museum, Iceland; White Columns, New York; and the Yukon Arts Center, Whitehorse, Canada, among others. In 1999 her work was featured in the exhibition The New Natural History at the National Museum of Photography and Film, Bradford, England.

Robert Allen and Antoinette LaFarge
Presented by the InterArts series.
Thursday, April 17
8 pm, Lecture Hall 7 (ITE Building).

Robert Allen (director) and Antoinette LaFarge (writer and video artist) will discuss their recent works.

Robert Allen is a theater movement specialist and teaches movement for actors when he is not directing. His recent projects include For a Better World by Roland Schimmelpfennig (UMBC, 2006); Galileo in America by Antoinette LaFarge (staged readings, Goethe Institute L.A. and the Villa Aurora, Los Angeles, 2004); Demotic (workshop, Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA 2004). Allen has an M.F.A. in Theater from Columbia University, where he studied directing with Anne Bogart. His work as a director is grounded in prior experience as a choreographer and performer in German Tanztheater, working with Reinhild Hoffmann (a contemporary of Pina Bausch) and other German directors. He also possesses an M.F.A. in modern dance from UCLA and a B.F.A. in visual art from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Antoinette LaFarge is associate professor of digital media at the University of California, Irvine. An artist and writer with a special interest in virtual and mixed realities and net-based improvisation, her recent intermedia performance works include the Demotic workshop production (Beall Center, 2004), The Roman Forum Project (Beall Center, 2003), Reading Frankenstein (Beall Center, 2003), Virtual Live (Location One, NY, 2002) She has co-curated two ground-breaking shows on computer games and art, ALT+CTRL (2005) and SHIFT-CTRL (2000). Antoinette is the founding director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering Internet performance group that uses net-based virtual worlds to stage their performances. The Plaintext Players have appeared at a wide variety of international venues, including documenta x (1997), the Venice Biennale (1997), and the European Media Arts Festival (1993), and a transcript of one of their performances was published in Performance Art Journal in 2003. She is also the founder-director of the Museum of Forgery, a virtual institute dedicated to the aesthetics of forgery.

Jon Berry
Presented by the InterArts series.
Thursday, May 1
7 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

Jon Berry is a creative director and motion graphic designer/animator. A winner of multiple BDA, Promax,Telly and Emmy awards, Berry is an admitted typography hound. Until December 2005, he was the design/creative director of the Fine Living television network, helping to lead its look and feel since its inception in 2001. Today, he creates solutions for clients around the world while watching the surf from his base in Manhattan Beach, or will occasionally join in-house teams on-site for limited projects.

Jacky Redgate
Wednesday, May 7
7 pm, location to be announced.

The Visiting Artists Lecture Series and the InterArts Series present a lecture by artist Jacky Redgate. Born in London in 1955, Redgate emigrated to Australia in 1967 and lives in Sydney. Her 28 year practice explores the complex relationship between two and three dimensional space in the mediums of photography and sculpture. Michael Desmond wrote, "With a mixture of innate sensuality and stylistic intelligence, Redgate guides the eye to the perceptual fissure seperating mind and matter, object and subject."