Portrait Garden is a series of audio and photographic portraits of eleven women incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, MD, culminating a 1-1/2 year long collaboration between Ruby Award winning artist and Associate Professor of Visual Arts Lynn Cazabon. In the collaboration the inmates created perennial gardens on the prison grounds consisting of plants chosen to represent each woman, and Professor Cazabon recorded interviews with each about the selected plants and her past and present experiences with gardening. The completed portraits are photographs of the selected plants that were planted and cultivated over the course of a year, displayed with a short textual excerpt from the audio interviews and QR codes, which when scanned with a mobile device, play the full interview with each woman. The complete set of images and audio interviews are available through the project website: http://portraitgarden.org

For the month of December, Portrait Garden will be displayed as a series of 100 posters in trains within the Baltimore Light Rail system. This public dissemination is conceived as a moving gallery designed to bring the women metaphorically into the community of Baltimore City.

Between You and Me is a solo show in three parts by multidisciplinary artist Christine Ferrera. Counter-posing live and recorded performance, this piece contemplates art, humor and feminism. 

 An artist befriends a global coffee conglomerate, confronts her anxieties by attempting a stand-up comedy routine and battles a belligerent version of herself in a series of strange phone calls. Counter-posing live and recorded performance, Between You and Me is a solo show that contemplates art, humor and feminism.

Interdisciplinary Studies at UMBC invites undergraduate students of engineering, visual arts, environmental science, journalism, and interdisciplinary studies to submit a design proposal for a kinetic sculpture (a bicycle powered work of art).

Interdisciplinary Studies will offer a $250 prize to the winning design for a kinetic sculpture that will be built by a UMBC team of students and entered into the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race. To explore themes of sustainability, the working title for the kinetic sculpture is the “Trashmonster Upcycle.” Our goal is to put the notion of upcycling ("converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value") into motion by collecting discarded materials (also known as trash) that could be used as part of a bicycle powered sculpture.

For more information, please visit the UMBC Kinetic Sculpture Race blog at http://kineticumbc.blogspot.com and the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race web site at http://www.kineticbaltimore.com/.

RFP guidelines:

Please submit a description of up to 300 words and a detailed sketch for a kinetic sculpture powered by either 2 or 4 cyclists. The narrative must address the following questions:

1. What are the overall dimensions?

2. What are primary construction materials?

3. Do you propose incorporating regular bicycle frames or starting from “scratch” in a recumbent rider position?

4. How will the vehicle navigate roads, water, and mud?

Materials that could be used for aesthetic, structural or flotation purposes include:

• water cooler bottles
• buckets
• PVC pipe
• discarded lumber or shipping pallets
• old bicycle frames/wheels/ gears
• renewable materials such as bamboo