comfort/drones, an original production by Alan Kreizenbeck, theatre, will open in the David Mikow Art Gallery, Friday, November 17 at 7 p.m. The play, based on the writings of Wallace Shawn, is embedded with questions about morality. It is the first play to take place in the David Mikow Art Gallery, operated by Carolyn Forestiere, political science, and Asher Mikow. A group discussion will follow the performance.

Performances will take place Friday and Sunday, November 17 and 19, and Saturday and Sunday, November 23 and 24, at 7pm each evening.

The David Mikow Art Gallery is located at 1002 Vineyard Hill Road, Catonsville, MD 21228. Learn more and reserve tickets at the gallery’s website.

The percussion quartet Umbilicus, featuring Tom Goldstein, music, Shelly Purdy ’10, Will Redman ’98, and Rob Wolk ’11, performs Friday, November 15 at 8 p.m. at The Parlor, in a program including a set with new Department of Music faculty member, Patrick Crossland, trombone. Umbilicus’ set will include work by Anna Rubin, music.

The Parlor
800 St. Paul Street
Baltimore, MD

Umbilicus was founded in 2012 in reaction to the generic contemporary percussion quartet, with the intention of promoting and performing a more experimental repertoire, much if it composed by its members.

The suggested donation for this event is $5-$7.

Freshman Amy Berbert was awarded the grand prize last month for her submission in the second annual USM Foundation Art Contest. The winning art piece meant to illustrate this year’s theme — a Steve Jobs quote, “I want to put a ding on the universe” — will be featured in December on the cover of the USM Foundation Annual Report.

The winning entry, one of 88 submissions from faculty, staff and students throughout the University System, was selected because Berbert’s artwork “was clear, concise, and offered a literal and thoughtful translation of the quote.”

Read more information about the contest and the four runners up at the USM Foundation’s blog. Berbert’s artwork along with the pieces submitted by the runners up will be presented on the blog this December.

The artwork of Vin Grabill, associate professor and chair of visual arts, was included in the October 2013 issue of The Faculty Voice. Read about his video pieces and digital prints in the article “The Art of Vin Grabill” or view one of the works discussed, Frontier, at Vimeo.

The article also mentions the work of Steve Silberg, visual arts, and Neal McDonald, visual arts, which will be exhibited with Grabill’s at the Howard County Arts Center in Ellicott City from January 10 to February 21, 2014.

Honors College Professor of Visual Arts Ellen Handler Spitz is one of the authors represented in a prominent exhibition catalog at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is hosting “The Malcolm X Steles,” an exhibition by
distinguished visual artist, novelist and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud. Riboud divides her time between Paris and Rome and is originally from Philadelphia. The exhibition is the first solo show by a woman artist of African American descent since the museum’s opening in 1876. It features sculptures dedicated to assassinated civil rights leader, Malcolm X.

Dr. Spitz wrote for the exhibition catalog, found here.

The percussion quartet Umbilicus, featuring Tom Goldstein, music, Shelly Purdy ’10, Will Redman ’98, and Rob Wolk ’11, performs Friday, October 4 in the program Feeling Different — an event that “explores what it means to feel different.”

“When is [feeling different] a good thing, or a bad thing? Empowering, or marginalizing? When does difference generate harmony, and when chaos?”

Attendance is free, but registration is required for attendance. Please email Peter Bruun at peter@bruunstudios.com, to reserve your space. Bruun Studios is located at:
302 E. Federal Street
4th Floor
Baltimore, MD

The Department of Visual Arts is pleased to present a lecture by Joel Katz, Wednesday, September 25 at 7 pm in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

Artist and designer Joel Katz, University of the Arts, Philadelphia University, is internationally known for his information design and wayfinding systems.  Major wayfinding projects include: Walk!Philadelphia; Ride!Philadelphia, bus shelter maps and historical panels; Central City Portland, Oregon; Downtown Omaha, Nebraska; and schematic design for the MIT Master Plan, which won an Honor Award from the Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD).

Katz’s photography has been exhibited and published in both the U.S. and abroad, and his design work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto. He was made an honorary life member of the International Pediatric Nephrology Association for his work visualizing the function of infants’ kidneys.

Learn more about this event at our Arts and Culture Calendar.

A panel discussion for the exhibition, Cyber In Securities, curated by Lisa Moren, visual arts, and presented by the Washington Project for the Arts will take place Saturday, September 21 at 3 pm in the Pepco Edison Place Gallery.

Participants in the panel, moderated by Moren, will include, Kevin Bankston, senior counsel and director of Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy and Technology; Heather Dewey-Hagborg, information artist and PhD candidate, electronic arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; David Rokeby, interactive sound and video installation artist; and UMBC faculty member, Anupam Joshi, computer science and electrical engineering, director of the Center for Cybersecurity.

“Cyber In Securities is an exhibition that addresses the growing concern among a cross-generational group of artists whose enthusiasm about new media is complicated by the suspicion that the good will of their shared digital consciousness is being used against them.”

Cyber In Securities is on view through Sept. 27 at Pepco Edison Place Gallery. Learn more about the exhibition here.

Image: Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stranger Visions (detail), 2012-2013, portrait masks created from found DNA the artist collected in public places in NYC.

Cyber In Securities curated by Lisa Moren, visual arts, and presented by the Washington Project for the Arts, received a positive review from the Washington Post, labeling it as a display that “should be one of the fall’s most discussed local exhibitions.”

Read the article at the Washington Post’s website: “Fall gallery shows: ‘Cyber In Securities,’ ‘Silver Clouds,’ ‘This is Labor’”

The exhibition features work by 13 artists or teams, “who contemplate the role of information-gathering, including surveillance by intelligence and law enforcement agencies. . . All use technology to comment on technology and its implications.” 

Cyber In Securities is on view through Sept. 27 at Pepco Edison Place Gallery. Learn more about the exhibition here.

Image: Hasan Elahi, Hawkeye, 2012

The Fringe NYC performances of Inexcusable Fantasies — written by Susan McCully, theatre, and directed by Eve Muson, theatre — received praise in a NYTheatre.com review released last week.

Read the article here: “Inexcusable Fantasies”

The review of the “masterfully-written two-woman piece,” written by Andrew Rothkin, details the comedy as an honest, intelligent coming-of-age story that invites the viewer into McCully’s “baring [of] her very soul.” Rothkin says, “I was awed by McCully’s wordsmithery, her intricately woven stream of words whose meanings and allusions seemed three steps ahead of me.”

He also commends the acting and chemistry of both McCully and Rachel Hirshorn ’04, theatre, as incredibly solid performance, and says that the “beautiful” staging by Muson “highlight[ed] the theatrical as much as the real, the touching as much as the funny.”