January 26 – March 25
A Stirring Song Sung Heroic: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom, 1619 to 1865, Photographs by William Earle Williams
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

The history of American slavery is considered in A Stirring Song Sung Heroic, an exhibition of 80 black and white silver gelatin prints by photographer William Earle Williams. These images document mostly anonymous, unheralded, and uncelebrated places in the New World—from the Caribbean to North America—where Americans black and white determined the meaning of freedom. Archives of prints, newspapers, and other ephemera related to the struggle accompany the work.

The presentation of this exhibition marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished slavery nationwide following the conclusion of the American Civil War.

William Earle Williams is the Audrey and John L Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts, and Curator of Photography at Haverford College. He received his M.F.A. degree from Yale University School of Art, and holds a B.A. in history from Hamilton College. His photographs have been widely exhibited at diverse institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and UMBC. His work is held in many public collections including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and UMBC’s Special Collections. Williams has also received numerous fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2003–2004.

On Tuesday, February 24 at 4 pm, William Earle Williams will lecture on his photography. The lecture, co-sponsored by the Dresher Center the Humanities and the Library Gallery, will be presented as part of the Humanities Forum.

Admission to the gallery and the lecture is free. The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 10 am to 5 pm, on Thursday until 8 pm, and Saturday and Sunday 12 – 5 pm. For more information call 410-455-2270.

Following the shootings at the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, artist-in-residence at the Imaging Research Center, was interviewed on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show (January 7) and WEAA’s Marc Steiner Show (January 8) — listen here and here, respectively. KAL is editorial cartoonist for The Economist magazine of London and The Baltimore Sun, and winner of the 2014 Thomas Nast Award for cartooning on international affairs.

Timothy Nohe, director of the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts, and professor of Visual Arts, as been selected by the Warnock Foundation as a “social innovator” for his work to create accessible online and smartphone delivered urban forest stewardship resources. The project has been supported by a collaborative team, including lead scientist Matthew E. Baker, associate professor of Geography & Environmental Systems; Butch Berry of The Friends of Springfield Woods; Baltimore Green Space; and cohort of students from the Friends School of Baltimore under the direction of Josh Carlin. The project has also received support from the Breaking Ground Initiative at UMBC. More information on the project is available here.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded $40,000 in support of the exhibition Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, curated by Maurice Berger, research professor and chief curator of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC). The exhibition has been co-organized by the CADVC and The Jewish Museum in New York, which will administer the grant funds.

The exhibition, which will open May 1, 2015 at The Jewish Museum before embarking on a national tour, addresses the modernist aesthetic and conceptual principles that have influenced American television from its inception, and examines how early television introduced new trends in art, design, and avant-garde art. The exhibition will include photographs, paintings, sculptures, prints, conceptual art, excerpts of historic TV programs and film, memorabilia, posters, magazines, books, clothing, comic books, and toys by artists such as Herbert Ferber, Lee Friedlander, Allan Kaprow, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Ben Shahn, and Andy Warhol, as well as works by designers Lou Dorfsman and Saul Bass and architect Eero Saarinen. Also on view will be clips of TV interviews with John Cage, Salvador Dali, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and others.

The campus community is encouraged to participate in a survey at the exhibition’s website. Click here to share your culture interests and familiarity with television design.

Maurice Berger, research professor and chief curator of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, has been awarded a $30,000 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation.

The grant supports research for Berger’s monthly column, Race Stories, for the Lens Blog of The New York Times. The blog explores the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, and social or regional issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media.

Berger plans to conduct research on Robert Frank, focusing on contact sheets, notes, and shooting scripts for a two-part essay on Frank’s representations of race in The Americans. He will also conduct research for essays exploring parallel developments in African American, Latino, and Asian American photo-based art and photography from the 1960s to the present, focusing on the ways this work has challenged stereotypes and prevailing ideas about identity. More about the award can be found here.

Designed to support writing about contemporary art, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the Arts Writers Grant Program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

Three films by Vin Grabill, associate professor and chair of Visual Arts, will be featured this month at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Produced in 1982, 1986, and 2010, the films — Otto Piene’s Sky Art, Otto Piene’s Sky Art Neon Rainbow, and Sky Kiss at Desert Sun/Desert Moon — will be screened as part of the “Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s Film Program” and will play daily at 3 pm, December 5 – 30. “These programs featuring artist documentaries provide an expanded look at the ZERO network and the processes that the artists employed,” states the Guggenheim.

The subject of the films, Otto Piene, was one of the founding members of Group Zero, “an international network of artists that shared the group’s aspiration to redefine and transform art in the aftermath of World War II,” and was the recipient in 1995 of an honorary doctorate from UMBC.

Complete information about the screenings can be found here.

The Surdna Foundation, which is dedicated to fostering sustainable communities in the United States, has awarded $95,882 to the Imaging Research Center, in partnership with the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, to establish a Spring 2015 residency by renowned choreographer Liz Lerman.

The purpose of this residency is to develop an approach to building and sustaining an online interface for Liz Lerman’s “toolbox” of artistic practices in community-engaged projects, and to do so in a way that incorporates the needs and perspectives of a diverse community of users. Lerman will join researchers at the IRC at UMBC as a Research Professor, and from that “home base” will directly engage with the university and regional communities, and with the broader world via an interactive website. Her work at the IRC will begin with the specific focus of disseminating her lauded developmental work on important behavioral and creativity tools that are valuable not only to artists, but also across diverse communities where creativity in a social context is a key demand. IRC researchers will work with her and diverse groups to create online digital media to make accessible the processes Lerman conceived and developed during her career as a socially-engaged dancer and choreographer. The work will engage broad audiences and this particular project will leverage current research and resources that UMBC, CAHSS, and IRC are investing in the communities of Baltimore. The development of a user-focused website of Lerman’s work is a challenge that matches both the IRC’s mission and expertise in visual communication, collaboration, learning and online dissemination of important information to the general public. Of equal importance will be Lerman’s engagement as a visiting artist/scholar with UMBC’s faculty, staff, students and regional communities.

“I am convinced that creative research laboratories bring significant information to various fields. They provide new platforms for building relationships between artists and universities, and between organizations and their neighborhoods, and they provide convening spaces for the explosion of trans-domain activities that are naturally occurring in response to the complex questions of our time,” noted Lerman.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance, and the 2014 Dance/USA Honor Award. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to various publics from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011. She was an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 2011, the same year that she instigated the National Civil War Project. Her investigation of the impact of war on medicine, Healing Wars, premiered at Arena Stage in 2014. Other projects include the genre-twisting work Blood Muscle Bone with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women; teaching her Critical Response Process around the world from the UK (Puppet Animation, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the London Sinfonietta. The Federation of Scottish Theatres) to Australia; and an online project called “The Treadmill Tapes: Ideas on the Move.” In 2013 she curated Wesleyan University’s symposium “Innovations: Intersection of Art and Science,” bringing together teams of artists and scientists from North America to present their methods and findings. Her collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and was released in paperback in 2014.

Read more about the grant here on the IRC’s website.

When J Jayalalithaa, a film star turned prominent politician, was convicted of charges involving financial assets, her supporters in the state of Tamil Nadu responded to the verdict by creating billboards and posters representing their feelings of anger and loss. Preminda Jacob, visual arts, spoke to Scroll about the historic connections between cinema and state politics in Tamil Nadu. 

Jacob focused on how Jayalalithaa used images to promote her political career and connect with supporters. “Over the space of half century the population has been very adept on how to read these images,” she said.

Jacob is the author of Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India.

Click here to read “How Jayalalithaa used posters to transform herself from a film star into the Amma of Tamil Nadu” in Scroll.

Revolution of Eye, an exhibition organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture and the Jewish Museum in New York, and curated by Maurice Berger, research professor and chief curator at the CADVC, received coverage in Broadway World on October 1. (Click here to read the article). The exhibition will open in May 2015 and will be the first to explore how avant-garde art influenced and shaped the look and content of network television in its formative years, from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. A microsite that provides a preview to the exhibition is now available here.

In the latest essay for his Race Stories column in The New York Times, Maurice Berger, research professor at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, shares his views on Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood, a new book by a Toronto-based photographer and physician, Zun Lee. While the book’s images of African-American  fathers may at first seem ordinary — for example, a man feeding his baby as his other children play nearby — Berger notes that the photographs “are in one sense unusual: Their subjects are black and counter mainstream media that typically depict African-American fatherhood as a wasteland of dysfunction and irresponsibility.”

Read “Black Fathers, Present and Accountable” and view the photographs at The New York Times Lens blog.

Berger’s Race Stories column, which appears monthly on The New York Times website, is “a continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race.”