UMBC Arts & Culture Calendar

A New Context: Photographs from The Baltimore Sun Revisited

alicia — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:55:51 +0000

Summer Hours (June 1-30): Monday through Friday, Noon to 4pm; Sunday and Saturday, 1pm to 5pm.

Visual Arts
Monday, April 8 – Sunday, June 30
A New Context: Photographs from the Baltimore Sun Revisited
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

Newspaper photography creates narrative and demands the cooperation of the photographer, the editor and the subject. This practice was born out of traditions that stretched back to early news photographs which were re-interpreted by an engraver before the image could be published. A retoucher employed ink and paint to bring out salient details and to provide cropping instructions to the newspaper designers. The edited news photograph was not intended to exist today—it was only to be known through reproductions, a practice that conceals its conceptual significance.

At one time, the photo editor made an art form of sleight of hand, of juggling pieces of photographs; the constructed imagery resulted in novel compositions. Presented as news, these creations were merely fragments of the “real” world. Even as the photo-editor insisted on the reality of each photograph’s individual elements, he denied them any sense of uniqueness or wholeness by subordinating individual elements to the picture’s overall composition. This exhibition does not ask why photo-editors or retouchers chose to edit what they did, and what the consequences—visually, socially, historically—of this action might have been. Instead, this exhibition examines the edited newspaper photograph as art objects in and of themselves. The infinitely reproducible photograph, with the help of the editor’s hand, reclaims the aura of the original. Contrasting areas of slick photograph and thick paint create corresponding states of tension and equilibrium. With the passage of time, that which was altered or omitted became elusive, then contingent upon elements which remain visible, the current cultural context, and the psyche of the viewer. The hand-edited photograph, with its marks of revision, is an elegant alternative to the photograph as “window onto the world.”

Tuesday, April 23
Symposium on Print Media, Photography and Art
6 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

A panel discussion focused on the intersection of print media, journalistic photography and art featuring UMBC faculty and Baltimore Sun staff.

Panelists include:

Tom Beck, moderator, UMBC’s Chief Curator of Photography and an Affiliate Associate Professor of Photography for UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts; Christopher Corbett, Professor of English for UMBC’s Department of English; retired Baltimore Sun Photographer, Jed Kirschbaum; and William F. Zorzi, retired Baltimore Sun Reporter and actor in HBO’s The Wire.

The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 12 noon to 4 pm, on Thursday until 8 pm, and Saturday and Sunday 1 – 5 pm. Closed Memorial Day. Admission is free. For more information call 410-455-2270.

A New Context is sponsored in part by The Baltimore Sun.

This exhibition was curated from pieces collected from the Baltimore Sun Archives housed in UMBC’s Special Collections in the Albin O. Kuhn Library. Approximately 750,000 prints, negatives and transparencies dating from the 1930s through the 1980s are contained in the Sun photography collection. It is estimated that 90% are original Baltimore Sun photographs while the remaining are from non-Sun sources.

The Vista Sans Wood Type Project

alicia — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:00:40 +0000

Visual Arts
Sunday, September 1 – Sunday, December 15
Vista Sans Wood Type Project
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

Artists Tricia Treacy and Ashley John Pigford initiated the Vista Sans Wood Type Project, that includes letterpress prints by over 20 artists and presses, often collaboratively made.

Inspired by their interest in the intersection of old and new media, Treacy and Pigford used a Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) router to create traditional wood type of the digital typeface Vista Sans, designed by Xavier Dupré for Emigré. Five letters, t-o-u-c-h, were sent to the various participants, along with a set of paper. These basic elements and the medium of letterpress printing are the shared factors among the prints. The resulting portfolio shows the wide variety of work being produced by letterpress in the contemporary book arts world. The exhibition features the prints in the Vista Sans Wood Type Project portfolio, and one set of the actual wood type.

The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 12 noon to 4 pm, on Thursday until 8 pm, and Saturday and Sunday 1 – 5 pm. Closed Labor Day. Admission is free. For more information call 410-455-2270.

Image by Daniel Mellis and April Sheridan.

Joel Katz, Visiting Artist Lecture

alicia — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:31:31 +0000

Visual Arts
Wednesday, September 25 | 7:00 p.m.
Joel Katz, Visiting Artist Lecture
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

Artist and designer, Joel Katz speaks about his experience in information design.

Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza, Visiting Artist Lecture

alicia — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:12:45 +0000

Visual Arts
Wednesday, October 16 | 4:00 p.m.
Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza, Visiting Artist Lecture
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

Annica Cuppetelli (USA) and Cristobal Mendoza (Venezuela) began their artistic collaboration in September 2010. Their practice centers around the creation of site-specific, multimedia installations that address issues of space, interaction and materiality. Their work has been exhibited in the Denver Art Museum, and in various galleries and festivals in the United States, France, Chile, Brazil, with upcoming exhibitions in Canada and Germany. Cuppetelli obtained her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (Fibers, 2008) and Mendoza at the Rhode Island School of Design (Digital Media, 2007). Mendoza is an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where they are based.

Image: Transposition, 2013, Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza. Sound composition by Peter Segerstrom. Denver Art Museum, March – September 2013.

Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen

alicia — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:00:17 +0000

Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, 2003, video, color sound, 58 minutes

Visual Arts
Thursday, October 24 – Saturday, February 22
Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

Visibility Machines explores the unique roles Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed — and politicized — our relationship to images and the realities they appear to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed information, and places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.

Video artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki addresses the primary links between technology, politics, and coercion. Establishing a critical dialogue with images, image- making, and the institutions that produce them, he reveals increasingly complex relationships between people and machines, vision and violence. Visual artist and photographer Trevor Paglen investigates the covert activities of U.S. secret military operations, collectively known as the “Black World.” Aligning himself with the study of the politics of perception, Paglen utilizes complex technologies of seeing in order to reveal the historical relationships between photography and political domination.

Displaying the unique thematic and formal intersections between curated selections of both artists’ works, Visibility Machines is organized along a three-part structure—Vision, Observation, and Knowledge—around which the exhibition’s narrative is constructed. The first section connects theories of vision to a number of works dealing with enhanced forms of abstraction. The resulting images, which are produced with the help of machines or using advanced technological means, fluctuate between two inherent contradictions: not only that what is known is not what is seen, but also that what is seen is not all there is to be known. The second section, Observation, elaborates on the different methods Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen engage with. Presenting works resulting from extensive observation and collaboration, this part shows how both artists align themselves with scientific modes of research and the ways in which they connect observational techniques to developments in the media they are creatively engaged with. Finally, the third section, Knowledge, hints at the specific knowledge that can be generated from bringing these two substantial artistic oeuvres together. Displaying image-making as an unfolding historical process, it emphasizes both oeuvres as an inherently political project with vast aesthetic consequences.

Admission to the exhibition is free. The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and is located in the Fine Arts Building. For more information call 410-455-3188.

Eurydice

alicia — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:00:26 +0000

Theatre
Thursday, October 24 – Sunday, October 27
Eurydice
Location TBD

The Department of Theatre presents the play, Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, under the direction of Nyalls Hartman, associate professor and chair of Theatre.

Ticket prices TBD.

Senior Dance Concert

alicia — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:37:38 +0000

Dance
November 8 & 9 | 8:00 p.m. each evening
Senior Dance Concert
Studio 317, Fine Arts Building

The Department of Dance presents the Senior Dance Concert featuring choreography from Department of Dance Seniors.

$12 general admission $7 students and seniors. For information and reservations, call the Dance Box Office at 410-455-6240; order tickets online through MissionTix.

W.E.B. Du Bois Fifty Years after the March on Washington

Chelsea — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:59:40 +0000

David Levering Lewis

November 13, 2013 , 7 p.m.
University Center Ballroom
The Department of Africana Studies Presents the Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture with Dr. David Levering Lewis, Professor of History at New York University
“W.E.B. Du Bois Fifty Years after the March on Washington”

Humanities Forum
Sponsored by the department of Africana studies

The author of eight books and editor of two more, Lewis’s field is comparative history with special focus on twentieth-century United States social history and civil rights.

He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois (in 1994 and 2001, respectively). He is the first author to win two Pulitzer Prizes for biography for back-to-back volumes.

Brooke Singer, Visiting Artist Lecture

alicia — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:46:36 +0000

Visual Arts
Thursday, November 14 | 4:00 p.m.
Brooke Singer, Visiting Artist Lecture
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

Brooke Singer discusses her work and experience as an artist in multimedia installation and interactivity.

Kid-Simple, a radio play in the flesh

alicia — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:00:44 +0000

Theatre
Thursday, November 21 – Sunday, November 24
Kid-Simple, a radio play in the flesh
Location TBD

The Department of Theatre presents Kid-Simple, a radio play in the flesh by Jordan Harrison, under the direction of guest artist Michele Minnick of Towson University.

Moll, a girl who invents things, wins the science fair with a machine for hearing sounds that can’t be heard. But when a shapeshifting Mercenary steals the invention (and her heart), she must embark on a quest to save noise as we know it. Accompanied by the last boy-virgin in the eleventh grade, Moll crosses chasms and rafts rivers into a world where there’s more to sound than what meets the ear. A fable of innocence and experience, featuring live sound effects, mutinous onomatopoeia, and a host of woodsy temptations.

“A beguiling little fantasy rooted in the notion that even the brainiest, most independent-minded girl can get seriously sidetracked by that initial rush of hormones and first love…Harrison has a fresh, vivid, poetic voice ideal for the theater.”

—Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

Ticket prices TBD.