Dan Bailey, professor of Visual Arts and director of the Imaging Research Center, was interviewed by WYPR’s Sheilah Kast on Wednesday, September 3. Bailey, along with Kristin Schenning of the Maryland Historical Society, discussed the UMBC/MHS collaborative project entitled “BEARINGS of Baltimore Circa 1815.” The on air interview is available online here.

Combining historical research with cutting-edge effects technology, the Bird’s Eye Annotated Representational Image/Navigable Gigapixel Scene (BEARINGS) of Baltimore, Circa 1815 provides a detailed rendition of the burgeoning city and conveys Baltimore’s prominence as a seaport and a commercial hub for the young country. By 1815, Baltimore was the third largest city in the United States; the IRC’s work recreates a view of its streets and buildings in significant detail. The IRC’s project is on view in the exhibition Full Glory: Maryland during the War of 1812 at the Maryland Historical Society (201 W. Monument Street, Baltimore). General information about BEARINGS of Baltimore Circa 1815 can be found here.

Additionally, Tamara Peters, faculty research assistant in the IRC, who has been the research lead on the project for two years, will speak at a TEDxUMBC event on Saturday, September 13. More details are here.

BEARINGS of Baltimore Circa 1815 was funded in part by the Maryland Department of Tourism and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.

Niels Van Tomme, Visiting Curator of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, has been named a 2014 Vilcek Curatorial Fellow by the Foundation for a Civil Society.

The Vilcek Curatorial Fellowship was established as part of the Foundation for a Civil Society’s Young Visual Artists Awards (YVAA) program. It is awarded annually to U.S.-based curators with demonstrated experience and excellence in engaging with international contemporary art. The fellowship provides curators with an opportunity to travel to one or more of the YVAA countries in Central and South East Europe to serve as guest jury members for the national awards as well as conduct short-term independent research, develop curatorial projects and expand their professional networks.

The Foundation notes that Van Tomme was chosen for his noted curatorial achievements, commitment to artists and publics alike, and potential to make important future contributions to the field of contemporary art. He will be traveling to Prishtina, Kosovo in mid-October to select the winners of the Artist of Tomorrow Award, as well as visiting Belgrade, Serbia; Bratislava, Slovakia; and Bucharest, Romania. He will also be conducting studio visits with artists, meetings with colleagues and presenting his curatorial practice at public events. As a Vilcek Fellow, Van Tomme will continue to be the agent of artistic exchange, creative collaboration and understanding between the United States and the YVAA countries.

The Young Visual Artists Awards is an international network of 10 national awards in Central and South East Europe and a New York residency program. First established with President Havel and a group of artists in Czechoslovakia in 1990, this highly successful program has grown to 10 countries and has to date awarded and presented in the US over 100 artists.

“The just-completed Performing Arts and Humanities Building atop the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County,” says fine arts critic Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun, “makes quite a statement from almost every angle — the sun-reflecting, stainless-steel-wrapped Concert Hall; the glass-enclosed Dance Cube jutting from the structure; views of the downtown Baltimore skyline from upper floors.”

Smith’s feature, accompanied by photographs by Barbara Haddock Taylor, ran in The Sun on Sunday, August 31, and includes an interview with Scott Casper, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Click here to read the full article and here to see the photo gallery.

Eric Dyer, Visual Arts, will be featured in a solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. His work Copenhagen Cycles: 2006 – 2014 will be on display from September 6 through October 11, with an opening reception on September 6 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Information is available at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. The exhibition received a preview article on August 15 in Wall Street International.

Forum, the public artwork by Thomas Sayre being constructed in front of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building, has been covered by local papers in North Carolina, where the “earth cast” columns were fabricated:

August 12, NewsObserver.com – First Look: Raleigh sculptor Thomas Sayre – with video here.

August 13, North Raleigh New – North Raleigh seniors dig unearthed art.

Tom Lagana, Music, was interviewed for a feature article in the Capital Gazette on his forthcoming third album, Volume 1. “It’s called Volume 1 because it’s the first record I’m playing all nylon string,” the guitarist told the Capital Gazette.

Also featured on the recording is electric bass play Tom Baldwin, an affiliate artist in the Department of Music.

Click here to read the full story, published on Monday, August 25.

Irene Chan, Visual Arts and Asian Studies, is featured in an interview published by Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW), an arts center she first visited back in 1996 as a studio intern. She speaks about the development of her artwork, her use of materials, and her projects about racial and cultural identity. Read the interview here on WSW’s website.

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 take on the thousands of photographs flooding out of Ferguson, Missouri. “Historically, photography was integral to the fight against racism and segregation. Leaders from Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X embraced the photograph’s potential as evidence and its ability to combat stereotypes,” writes Berger. “But sometimes, as in Ferguson, the camera has served as a more spontaneous ‘weapon of choice,’ as the photographer Gordon Parks called it, wielded by the oppressed in moments of anger, fear or frustration.”

Read “In Ferguson, Photographs as Powerful Agents” 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.”

Linda Dusman, Music, and Eric Smallwood, Visual Arts, in partnership with the School of Music at the University of Maryland, College Park, have received a $150,000 Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII) grant for their work on the tablet app, Symphony Interactive. MII was created as a partnership between the State of Maryland and five Maryland academic research institutions (Johns Hopkins University; Morgan State University; UMCP; University of Maryland Baltimore; and UMBC), and is managed by TEDCO, created by the Maryland State Legislature in 1998 to facilitate the transfer and commercialization of technology from Maryland’s research universities and federal labs into the marketplace. The MII program promotes the commercialization of academic research conducted in the partnership universities. Symphony Interactive is only the second project within the humanities ever to receive an award from MII, and the first to be funded in the arts and humanities at UMBC.

Symphony Interactive provides contemporary audiences a novel way to engage with live orchestral performances. Through both text and images presented through a unique interface at the exact moment the information is most pertinent to the music, SI enables an enriched experience for users by allowing them to learn about the music and its cultural history during its performance. Acting as an informed “friend,” the app subtly provides information to enhance engagement, keeping the experience of the live performance paramount. During the grant period, the SI team will create a library for thirty of the most performed orchestral works, producing unique textual and visual information for each piece. Over the next nine months, the grant funding also will enable developing a more fully featured proof of concept application, expanding the social media extensions of the app, and performing valuable market research to aid in the commercialization process.

The Symphony Interactive project has been in development since 2011, with support from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Development has progressed through collaboration with many faculty, staff and students from Music, Visual Arts, the Imaging Research Center, Human Centered Computing, and the Department of Information Technology. Symphony Interactive has been tested in performances by the UMBC Symphony, and most recently at the National Orchestra Institute at the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

Niels Van Tomme, Visiting Curator of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, has been named Curator of the 7th Bucharest Biennale (Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art), to take place May 26 to July 17, 2016.

The Bucharest Biennale is interested in exploring links between creative practice and social progress, as well as correspondences between local and global contexts. Now in its tenth year, the Biennale continues to build a strong partnership between Bucharest—a geocultural space where the political is reflected in all aspects of life—and the rest of the world. In transcending specific geographical, historical, or political frameworks, it connects to a broader complexity, namely the one of “resistance” within the quotidian realm.

More information about the Biennale is available on its website.