CIRCA Catalyst
With Steve Bradley, Visual Arts and Nicole King, AMST
CIRCA Catalyst is an ongoing series promoting conversations around transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research that fuses the performing and visual arts with other fields of inquiry and scholarship. A catered lunch, with vegetarian options, will be provided by CIRCA (the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts).
Catalyst Program:
UMBC associate professor Steve Bradley of Visual Arts and assistant professor Nicole King of American Studies will present their collaborative research Mapping Baybrook, an interdisciplinary exploration of place that uses digital mapping to illustrate research on the history and culture of an industrial community in Baltimore, Maryland referred to as Baybrook—a merging of the names of two neighborhoods, Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. The story of Greater Baybrook reflects the tenacity of a community striving for sustainability in the boom and bust of U. S. industrial development.
Steve Bradley is an inter-media and interdisciplinary artist whose focus is the mapping of place using sound, image, physical artifacts or debris that have been discarded or perhaps lost in the landscape. Then, using Google Map open source tools he archives, digitizes and juxtaposes these various elements with one another, striving to create micro-narratives that “tell” spatial-based stories for us to contemplate; for us to hear deeply, and to see our relationship to our time and space, and to one another.
He has received solo commissions and fellowships from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA), Bienal de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla, Baltimore Rotterdam Sister City Committee, University of Oldenburg, Germany, Scientific Oceanographic facilities on the North Sea, and Hull Time-Based Arts, UK. His sound performances, media installations, and site-specific art works have been exhibited and presented both nationally and internationally.
Professor Bradley holds degrees in drawing and painting from the University of South Florida (B.F.A.), and in painting and electronic media from Florida State University (M.F.A.).
Nicole King joined the faculty of the Department of American Studies at UMBC as an assistant professor in 2008, the same year she earned her Ph.D in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She also has a M.A. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
King’s research focuses on the tensions of preservation and development in historic places from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. She has published a book, Sombreros and Motorcycles in a Newer South: The Politics of Aesthetics in South Carolina’s Tourism Industry (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), on the rise of the tourism industry in South Carolina during the period of desegregation. Her work has also been published in edited collections and journals, including an article on her research on post-industrialization in Baltimore neighborhoods in the Journal of Urban History special edition “The Place of the City: Collaborative Learning, Urban History, and Transformations in Higher Education” (forthcoming May 2014).
Since 2009, King has been working on cultural documentation research and public humanities programming in the Brooklyn-Curtis Bay neighborhoods in the southern corner of Baltimore City. In collaboration with Visual Arts Professor Steve Bradley and the Imaging Research Center (IRC), King has developed the digital mapping project Mapping Baybrook.