Inexcusable Fantasies, written by Susan McCully, theatre, directed by Eve Muson, theatre, and starring McCully and Rachel Hirshorn ’04, theatre, has been selected as one of The Villager‘s featured Fringe NYC productions, in the article “They came from the Academic Milieu”

The production, has been performed at a number of venues, including the Prague Film Festival in 2012, the Strand Theatre Company this year and various other international festivals since 2004, and will be a part of this year’s New York City International Fringe Festival, Fringe NYC, program Sunday, August 18 through Saturday, August 24.

Learn more about the production at GrrlParts.com; find time and ticketing information at Fringe NYC’s website.

Inexcusable Fantasies, written by Susan McCully, theatre, and directed by Eve Muson, theatre, will be part of this year’s New York City International Fringe Festival, Fringe NYC, program. Performances will take place Sunday, August 18 through Saturday, August 24.

About Inexcusable Fantasies (GrrlParts.com):

“Martha Stewart, motorcycles, and Grandma’s Oil of Olay jar. What do they have in common? They are just a few of the often hilarious obsessions Susan McCully visits in Inexcusable Fantasies a show about sexual politics, lust ‘over forty, cloning, eye replacement surgery, and the unmistakably erotic powers of Martha Stewart’s marzipan.”

The production, starring Susan McCully and Rachel Hirshorn ’04, theatre, has been performed at a number of venues, including the Prague Film Festival in 2012, the Strand Theatre Company this year and various other international festivals since 2004. It’s been considered by critics as a comedy with incredible “subtlety”, “intelligence” and “verve,” and that “what makes the script so poignantly hysterical is the idea that the obsessions, the irrational emotions, the painful awkwardness—while hugely hyperbolic—speak to experiences we’ve all shared.”

Learn more about the production at GrrlParts.com; find time and ticketing information at Fringe NYC’s website.

Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, a forthcoming project from the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC and its Project Director, Dr. Maurice Berger are the recipient of a 2013 Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The $40,000 grant, awarded under the Endowment’s America’s Historical & Cultural Organizations Grant program, will assist in the planning of an exhibition, book, and website. Revolution of the Eye represents the first collaborative institutional effort between the CADVC and the Jewish Museum in New York, where Dr. Berger holds the title of Consulting Curator. He is Research Professor and Chief Curator at CADVC. The grant will be administered through the Jewish Museum.

This is the third NEH grant awarded to Dr. Berger since 2008 in his capacity as project director at CADVC. An earlier project, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights received Planning ($40,000) and Implementation ($400,000) grants from the NEH in 2008 and 2009.

“Revolution of the Eye is the first exhibition to comprehensively examine the influence of modern art on television in its formative years, from the late-1940s to the early-1970s. The project looks at the dynamic new visual medium, and the ways its risk-taking and aesthetic experimentation paralleled the cutting-edge nature of modern art. More than just a compelling and entertaining story, the exhibition, catalog, and website will captivate the mind, eye and ear through a dynamic and bold installation and book and web design inspired by the visual revolution ushered in by American television and modernist art and design of the 1950s and 1960s.”

The traveling exhibition For All the World to See: Visual Culture the Struggle for Civil Rights curated by Maurice Berger, CADVC, and organized by the CADVC has been selected as a critic’s pick for Artforum Magazine by Chelsea Haines. Haines describes the exhibition as one that, “provides a historical mirror for our current moment of global unrest, in which demands and claims over cultural ownership have spurred almost as much social momentum as the toppling of states.”

Read the review of the exhibition at Artforum’s website.

In the latest essay for his Race Stories column for the New York Times, Maurice Berger, CADVC, discusses the Russian-American Photographer Vincent Soboleff’s pictures of Native Alaska.

Berger writes about Soboleff and the storytelling power of his imagery, especially when compared to other photos of the time. Before digesting the race-related implications of the images, he discusses the importance of the unique pictures:

As 19th-century Native Americans were forced to adapt to a world dynamically altered by war, racial brutality, disease and displacement, photographic depictions of them habitually trafficked in stereotypes built on an implicit comparison between the new, “civilized” Indian and the tradition-bound “savage.” Mr. Soboleff’s pictures were more respectful of, and ultimately more informative about, his subjects, despite the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, which began working in Alaska in the mid-18th century, was actively proselytizing in the Tlingit community.

Read “A Russian-American Photographing Native Alaska” at the New York Times Lens Blog.

Berger’s Race Stories column has featured several essays centered upon race and photography including, Malcolm X as image maker, Ken Gonzales-Day, images of emancipation, the photographs of Deborah Will, the civil rights work of James Karales, and the woman in a civil rights photo, fifty seven years later.

The artist statement for Lynn Cazabon, visual arts, and Neal McDonald’s, visual arts, multimedia project, Junkspace, 2012, will appear in the Vol 46. No 5 issue of Leonardo — Transactions.

Leonardo is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the MIT Press covering the application of contemporary science and technology to the arts and music.

http://www.leonardo.info/transactions.html

Junkspace “is a time and location sensitive video installation and corresponding iOS App that superimposes two forms of waste, one earth—bound (electronic waste) and the other celestial (orbital debris).” Learn more, or download the app at the installation’s website.

Ellen Handler-Spitz’s, most recent publication, Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles, in which she is a principal contributor, is featured now on the Yale University Press’ website.

The publication, a catalog for the exhibition of the same name, features Handler-Spitz’s writing alongside photography of the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s “monumental series of sculptures dedicated to the assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X.” It includes a fascinating analysis of the Malcolm X sculptures in light of critical debates on abstract art’s role in memorializing the past.

Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles will be on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art September 14 – December 8, 2013.

Kelley Bell, associate professor of Visual Arts, received an honorable mention for her design of the catalog Command Z: Artists Working with Phenomena and Technology in the 2013 Museum Publication Design Competition — for the category of “exhibition catalogs” — presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

The catalog, designed by Bell and published by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, was written by Lisa Moren, associate professor of visual arts, and curator for Command Z.

Bell’s honorable mention was one of only nine acknowledgements in the category, in this nationwide, juried competition open to all “noncommercial cultural institution[s] offering exhibits to the public.”

Command Z was presented in the spring of 2012 in the CADVC.

Curator of collections and outreach for the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, Sandra Abbott, was sworn in to the board of the Baltimore City Public Art Commission on Monday, June 10, 2013 by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

As a member of the board of the Public Art Commission, Abbott juries public art projects along with eight other members under the City’s 1% for Art Program. The 1%-for-Art Ordinance requires at least one percent of the City’s capital construction project’s eligible funds be used for the selection, acquisition, commissioning, fabrication, placement, installation, display and maintenance of public fine artwork. The program is administered through the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA).

With her experience on the steering committee of the Highlandtown Arts and Entertainment District since 2008, Abbott is well-positioned to work with BOPA and the other city arts districts on the recent $200K ArtPlace America grant for the City’s three arts districts in partnership with the European Union. The Grant will fund Transit, a project that brings together European and Baltimore artists, arts organizations, city planners and transportation officials to strategically transform transit environments within the city’s A&E districts. The project was chosen from more than 1,200 applications as an exceptional example of creative placemaking.

Abbott is co-author of the chapter on museum internships in A Life in Museums (American Alliance of Museums, 2012), and serves as the Maryland representative to the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries. She often speaks at national conferences and most recently won the Collegetown Network’s Staff Award for outstanding service at the 6th annual Service-Learning and & Civic Engagement Conference.

Friday, June 21 at 8:00 p.m., Between You and Me, an exhibition by Coordinator/Producer of the New Media Studio, Christine Ferrera ’10 M.F.A., Imaging and Digital Arts, opens at the Gibbs Street Gallery in Rockville, Maryland.

According to Rockville’s VisArts website, Between You and Me is a collection of performance pieces “that circuitously contemplate art, humor and feminism. Each piece uses personal monologue as a vehicle to explore longing, insecurity, narcissism and enlightenment. By counter-posing live and recorded performance, satire and sincerity, the artist either transcends her angst or winds up in a self-reflexive tangle.”

The works include Starbux Diary; Awkward Pauzez the Digital Comic, a stand-up comedy act with computer generated punchlines; Google Art Video, a performance featuring the strange encounters of two women drifting through cyberspace receiving mystical clues and the inspiration to create, and Stellar Cellar, a journey through a woman’s subconsciousness under the guise of a radio show discussion about wine. Read the complete descriptions of the works on the event poster.

This event is free and open to the public, and continues through July 7. Performances of the works are scheduled through June on the 22nd, 23rd, 28th and 29th. A free opening reception will be held on the 28th from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.