15th Annual Imagining America Conference

America Will Be! 
The Art and Power of "Weaving Our We"

Baker Artist Awards 2015 at the Baltimore Museum of Art

September 16 — November 15, 2015

Associate professor Eric Dyer was named a 2015 winner of the prestigious $25,000 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, and he will present his art works at the Baltimore Museum of Art from September 16, 2015 - November 15, 2015.

IMDA MFA program alumna Dominique Zeltzman will join Dyer in the exhibition, as one of the recipients of a $5,000 b-grant .

The Baker Artist Awards were created to support artists and promote Baltimore as a strong creative community. Through a sophisticated online portfolio of artists’ work and significant monetary prizes to award the winners, the Baker Artist Awards serves artists of all disciplines who live and work in Baltimore City and its five surrounding counties. The website and awards were established by the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund in 2008, and are a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. The exhibition is generously funded by The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund.

http://www.bakerartistawards.org

"The app, called Octava, is aimed at enhancing the musical experience for listeners by delivering information via Wifi, synced with the music being played in the concert hall.

"We're trying to find ways to help contemporary audiences engage with words that match the elegance of the orchestral performance," said Octava co-founder Linda Dusman, a professor of music at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County."

Read the full article on the Sun’s website 

CBS Sunday Morning, The Baltimore Sun, and the Baltimore Jewish Times have run features on Project Mah Jongg, now appearing at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and is on view in Baltimore through June 29, 2014.. 

The show, which originated at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, NYC has also garnered notice in the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The LA Times. The show has travelled to Portland, Cleveland, LA, Miami Beach, Atlanta, and will continue on to San Francisco this summer.

CIRCA Director Timothy Nohe produced sound designs for three "Muji" players, documenting games in Chinatown and the Upper East Side. The sound work was invited by curator Melissa Martens Yaverbaum. Abbot Miller, a partner at Pentagram Design, designed the exhibit to highlight the intriguing objects and imagery surrounding the game. Original works by fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi, and renowned illustrators Maira Kalman, Christoph Niemann, and Bruce McCall pay homage to the influence mah jongg has had on design and contemporary artists. The exhibition's sumptuous companion publication "Mah Jongg: Crak, Bam, Dot," was edited by Abbott Miller and Patsy Tarr, and published by twice books.

After their successful Artscape concert in July, Straight Up Tribal has been invited by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts to perform on the Main Stage at the Baltimore Book Festival on Sunday September 29th at 3pm. 

The world music group, co-founded in 2008 by Interdisciplinary Studies Assistant Director Steven McAlpine and UMBC alumni Trey Kulp, Abhik Saha, Bryan Lee, Asif Majid, and Eddie Chen, has recently released an album of original songs available in the UMBC bookstore.