Command Z: Artists Working with Phenomena and Technology curated by Lisa Moren, presented by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture last spring was featured today as one of the top ten art exhibitions of 2012 by City Paper.

The show, described as one that “reawakened our sense of wonder and possibility,” was alongside exhibitions presented by the Contemporary Museum, Open Space, Nudashank and others. Command Z also made the top ten list of Baker award-winning artist, Gary Kachadourian.

See the list here: “2012 Top Ten Art Shows.”

Image: Leçon de Piano, Lisa Moren and Jocelyn Robert.

The exhibition currently running at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, For All The World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, curated by Dr. Maurice Berger, was reviewed this morning by City Paper.

The review uses commentary from Berger, chronicles the impact of items featured in the exhibition and the discusses overall power of the story told through For All The World to See, to examine the way in which the exhibition relates to the evolution of black identity in America.

Read the review “Visual Politics: UMBC Show Looks at The Visual Culture Surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.”

For All The World to See is currently on display at the CADVC and will continue through March 10. For more information about the exhibition, and for the Center’s hours during winter break, visit the Arts and Culture Calendar.

Visual Arts major, Diana Chou’s painting, Play the Cards, has been selected for inclusion in a prominent, annual anthology of student work. Chou’s work originally appeared in the 2012 issue of Bartleby, where Chou’s piece wasn’t the only one to capture the attention of the judges. The highly selective collection, Bennington’s plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing 2012, will feature Chou’s work, along with fiction, poetry, non-fiction writing and fine art from a select few students of colleges and universities around the country.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture Research Professor and Chief Curator, Dr. Maurice Berger, a $50,000 curatorial research fellowship award for his forthcoming project Revolution of The Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television. This exhibition and publication project represents the first collaborative institutional effort between the CADVC and the Jewish Museum in New York, where Berger holds the title of Consulting Curator. The grant will be administered through the Jewish Museum.

About Revolution of The Eye:

“From the early-1940s through the mid-1960s, a dynamic new visual medium emerged in the United States that, in its risk-taking and aesthetic experimentation, paralleled the cutting-edge nature of modern art: television. The revolutionary and uncharted medium attracted younger television executives, writers, producers, and directors. Scores of socially and culturally progressive and predominantly Jewish network executives, producers, directors, art directors, and writers—figures such as Paddy Chayefsky, William Golden, Leonard Goldenson, Robert Kintner, Ernie Kovacs, Dan Melnick, William S. Paley, David Sarnoff, Frank Stanton, David Susskind, and Rod Serling—mined the aesthetic, stylistic, and conceptual possibilities of a new and powerful technology. These innovators worked in a cultural milieu far less constricted by the competition for box office revenue and the censorious production codes then preoccupying the motion picture industry.

As the geographic focus of the networks shifted from the Hollywood movie studios to a television industry initially centered in New York, the proximity of these innovators to the city’s dynamic artistic and cultural community—particularly the avant-garde art and philosophies of the New York School, an artistic milieu also with a significant Jewish presence—would result in a powerful conceptual and stylistic synergy between modern art and early television.”

Revolution of The Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television is scheduled to be presented at the Jewish Museum in New York in the spring of 2016, and at the CADVC in 2017.

Dr. Maurice Berger is also curator of the exhibition currently on display in the CADVC, For All The World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts has awarded the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture $50,000 for the upcoming project, Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen.

The project, headed by Visiting Curator to the CADVC, Niels Van Tomme, is a traveling exhibition and publication project which explores the unique roles Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images and the realities they seem to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed governmental information, and places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.

Visibility Machines is scheduled to be presented next fall, mid-October through Decemeber, 2013.

Angel Chinn, Dance ’08, was featured in The Gazette this month when the newly formed dance company, NonaLee Dance Theatre, was slated to perform an adventurous, site-specific program at Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier. In the article, Angel Chinn speaks about her switch from competitive running and studying education, to pursuing a degree in dance at UMBC with an honesty and openness that is mirrored in her performance which featured movements about life questions, faith and hope.

The NonaLee Dance Theatre, created and directed by Angel Chinn was developed in 2011, with the intention of striving to give dancers with diverse backgrounds the “opportunity to perform and grow artistically.” The dance troupe has evolved since its induction, but always aims to bring its own identity to the world of modern dance. This most recent performance was a “fresh take on modern dance and something people haven’t seen yet. It has a modern feel, it also has a hip hop feel, it has a funk feel.” NonaLee blurred “the line between audience and performer” by leaving the stage and performing in close proximity to the viewers in the museum lobby in a piece called “The Living Art Museum”.

Angel Chinn will return to UMBC to perform in the 2013 Baltimore Dance Project February 7-9. Read the entire article, including Associate Professor of Dance, Doug Hamby’s comments on Chinn’s dance at Gazette.net.

What’s Baltimore buzzing about? A fascinating community project from UMBC’s Departments of American Studies and Visual Arts.

Students from the multidisciplinary BreakingGround course “Mapping Baybrook” have been working toward a special community event all semester, producing oral history recordings, a walking tour brochure and other work to highlight the area’s history and culture. The community celebration, highlighted on the Baltimore Magazine blog “The Chatter,” will take place this Saturday, December 1, 1:00-5:00 p.m. at the Polish Home Hall, 4416 Fairhaven Avenue in Curtis Bay. The event will also launch the new Mapping Baybrook website, designed in collaboration with UMBC’s Imaging Research Center. Learn more about the event and the students involved.

An interview featuring UMBC Artist-in-Residence, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, was released yesterday by Asia Society. In the interview Kal speaks about a range of topics, including his recent return to working with the Baltimore Sun, and shares his thoughts on the creation of politically charged, satirical work. A cartoonist for 35 years, he closes the interview expressing his opinion on the fate of traditional mediums in the decline of print cartoons, and the possibilities for cartooning in a “promising new era of visual satire.”

KAL will share personal stories and discuss his practice through teaching and live sketching in an event in Hong Kong for Asia Society in collaboration with The Economist.

Read the entire interview, “For Editorial Cartoonist ‘KAL’, Pen is Definitely Mightier than the Sword,” at the Asia Society’s Blog.

Associate Professor of Visual Arts Timothy Nohe is one of ten artists selected to show work in the upcoming exhibition Nature in The Dark presented by the Center for Creative Arts in Melbourne, Australia. Nohe’s piece, At The Wall of the Anthropocene, is an animation set to an original film score, and will be available for view online beginning at the close of the exhibition’s screenings (which take place through December 23).

Nature in the Dark presents a rare intersection of scientific study and artistic practice; animals were “caught on camera” as part of a collection project, and the data was used by both artists and conservationists to very different ends. Nature in the Dark invited ten artists to respond, and presents their creative adaptations, remixes and interventions of the scientific footage of bush animals at night.

Nature in the Dark opens this Wednesday, November 21. Find more information about the exhibition and Tim’s contribution on the Center for Creative Art’s website.

It’s the open road for the next few months for recent alumna Rachel Younghans ’12, geography, as she and her boyfriend, photographer Rob Brulinski, cross the country in search of “Only-in-America Americans” for their art-project/website Freak Flag America.

The couple were profiled by The Washington Post‘s Michael Rosenwald on September 17th, one day after they had set out on their cross-country trip. The two will travel to the Pacific and back in a Toyota Yaris packed with supplies ranging from a tent to rolls of film, from an American flag from Goodwill to a stuffed rat from IKEA which Brulinski plans to bug Younghans with.

Younghans spoke to Rosenwald of the importance of the project, saying, “We really feel a lot of responsibility, and we like our role as storytellers, as historians preserving folk stories.”

Adding that she is a fan of Aesop’s Fables and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the alumna also detailed the vision behind the trip, which the couple hope to turn into a book on top of the blog posting which they plan to post to their site over the next four months

“Stories just retell themselves over and over throughout history,” Younghans said. “We are a creating a book that stands as part of that — stories based on true events that still hold the value of moral stories.”