Don't miss the great opportunity to present your work at URCAD! Register at this link by this Friday, March 1.

Explore URCAD Frequently Asked Questions here!

Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) features research, scholarship, and creative work carried out by UMBC undergraduates. Student work is shared through oral presentations, posters, artistic exhibits, performances, and film. Over 300 presenters participate annually. Researchers work with faculty mentors on independent research, or research that is part of the mentor's on-going projects. They are from all disciplines, and can be working on a thesis, capstone project, part of a scholars or honors program, or they can be unaffiliated. This campus-wide celebration of achievement affirms UMBC's commitment to the twin goals of research and a distinctive undergraduate experience.

All current undergraduates who have conducted research, scholarship or creative work in the last year may apply to present their results at URCAD. Mentors, fellow students, friends, family members, high school teachers and students, graduate school recruiters, and the general public are invited to attend.

The work is the result of the artist's Exploratory Research Residency at CADVC, ongoing since 2023. During this time, Williams has been researching the histories and mythologies of Cockeysville (Maryland) marble, a material used in many salient objects in the local built environment, including the Washington Monument and iconic exterior steps of Baltimore rowhomes. The film results from this research as well as movement workshops and other activities that included the participation of UMBC students and other Baltimore residents. Artist Nia Hampton, a current IMDA graduate student, and her mother, artist and arts advocate Sheila Gaskins, are featured performers. The filmic work was assisted by IMDA graduate student Bao Nguyen and artist Savannah Knoop, who worked on the project as an intimacy coordinator and facilitator.

dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore is an embodied consideration of the labor histories, and mythologies, surrounding a marble building material that appears throughout Baltimore's built environment. In the movement experiments surrounding the film work, participants negotiated relationships to public space, monumental form, and connections to history. In Williams's words, the project underscores the "intertwined history of African-Americans' plight to self-determined agency and full citizenship, and a rather benign stone."

This public display of an art work-in-process is consistent with CADVC's commitment to showcasing the experimentation of artists and the visual culture of interdisciplinary research. Currently, CADVC's gallery is exhibiting Spectrum of Process, highlighting UMBC faculty approaches to art and culture through rigorous, experimental processes.

Admission is free.

Visitors who need specific accommodations should contact CADVC at cadvc@umbc.edu or 410-455-3188 as soon as possible.