The impulse small children have towards creating pictures and stories lies at the center of several new children’s books reviewed by Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, in a story entitled “Drawn Out” in the August 23rd edition of The New York Times.

I Gotta Draw, by Bruce Degen, and Dog Loves Drawing by Louise Yates deal with the visual side of children’s imagination, while Rocket Writes a Story by Tad Hills deals with the written word, with all featuring canine protagonists as they go about letting their imaginations run free, even if it causes them trouble.

Spitz praised all three stories in her review, writing that the books “by example and by counsel, empower young children to engage their fertile imaginations: to mark, to match, to make and to record — to become ever more active constructors of their own inner and outer worlds.”

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visal arts, discussed author Betsy Rosenthal’s latest children’s book Looking for Me for her monthly column in The New Republic.

The book follows its protagonist Edith Paul, the fourth of twelve children born to a working-class Jewish family, as she grows up in Baltimore during the 1930’s. Over the course of the short book, Edith experiences poverty, bigotry, and even death within the family as a sibling succombs to illness.

Spitz noted the Tolstoyan aspects of Rosenthal’s novel, drawing parallels with the seemingly inconsequential decision of a French corporal to re-enlist in War and Peace with the witnessing of Edith’s graduation, a moment in which the girl “learns that, like Tolstoy’s thousandth corporal, she matters.”

The column, “Learning to Matter,” appeared in the magazine on August 15.

A June 29 Huffington Post blog post focused on Baltimore’s online magazine What Weekly.

“The Baltimore Experiment: Getting Out From Under ‘The Wire'” detailed What Weekly‘s focus on more positive coverage as opposed to the more-or-less expected grim news dispatches so often associated with Baltimore, as well as its strong links with the city’s arts community who work and live there. Among the contributors listed was Lee Boot, associate research professor and associate director of the Imaging Research Center, whose column “Who We Aim” appears in the publication.

Boot’s clog, also entitled “Who We Am,” focuses “on building a transdisciplinary, online discourse about human behavior.”

“Where Do We Migrate To?”, a national touring exhibition organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC), was reviewed for the June/July issue of Art in America. The exhibit was curated by Niels Van Tomme, director of arts and media at Provisions Learning Project in Washington, DC, and features 19 internationally-recognized artists and art collectives.

The works exhibited deal in various mediums with the subject of migration, ranging from the two video pieces by Kimsooja and Julika Rudelius which anchor the exhibition, to more sculptural and installation-oriented work by Blane De St. Croix and the French collective Claire Fontaine, and photographic prints by Xaviera Simmons, to name just a few. Markus characterized the exhibition as a success, saying that “intelligent curatorial decisions transformed what might have been a straightforward thematic survey into a thought-provoking examination of the discontinuities that persist in our steadily globalizing world.”

“Where Do We Migrate To?” was featured from February 3 to April 15 in the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, which is part of the Parsons New School for Design in New York City. It is being exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans from June 30 to October 7 according to Markus’ review, and will travel from there to the Ruben Center for the Visual Arts in El Paso, Texas, for dates to be announced.

Shana Palmer, an MFA candidate with Visual Arts for 2015, is participated in the Invisible Time exhibition at the MUU Gallery based in Helsinki, Finland. Palmer contributed  to the track “Lunar Storm” from her band Secret Secrets’s latest album Chiromagica, to the “Wall of Sound” portion of the exhibit, alongside ten other track by other participating artists. Secret Secrets is a duo of Palmer on vocals and electronics with drums provided by Melissa Moore.

Invisible Time opened at the MUU Gallery on June 8th and closed on June 21st. More information on the exhibit and its participants can be found here.

Josephine Kalema, a senior dance major, will have her piece Past, Present, and Future performed at the Washington, D.C. performance space Dance Place as part of the  annual New Release Choreographer’s Showcase this coming July.

It will feature dancers Arnesha Reives, Jonique Holcomb, Alexis Renee, Candice Grace, and Jasmynn Speight, and  mixes traditional and modern African dance. Kalema dedicates Past, Present, and Future to her Ugandan family, as well as “every culture that has gone through life changing barriers,” according to Dance Place’s website.

The dates for the New Release Choreographer’s Showcase are July 7th at 8 p.m., and July 8th at 7 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at Dance Place’s webpage for the event, located here.

Gary Kachadourian ’12, imaging and digital arts, will be participating in the Maryland Art Place’s Young Blood 2012: Work by Recent MFA Graduates exhibition this summer. In addition to Kachadourian’s large-scale installation, the fifth annual exhibition will feature work by artists from the Maryland Institute College of Art, The University of Maryland-College Park and Towson University.

The exhibition runs from July 18th to August 25th, and will feature an artists’ talks and reception at 6 p.m. on the 18th. For more information, visit the Maryland Art Place’s website here.

Visual Arts associate professor and chair Vin Grabill’s latest experimental video Wet has been making the rounds for the past few months, including being show at the 2012 Athens International Film & Video Festival at Ohio University this past April and at the Tenement Street Workshop’s Second Annual Snowballs Film Festival in New York City June 3rd. Describing the piece, Grabill says on the video’s site that, ” I collaborated with computer animator Francisco Olivares to create a waterspout sequence designed to overwhelm a series of abstracted TV scenes. A second animated water sequence depicts the flooding of the physical detritus of our media infrastructure. Additional interludes depicting wetness round out the video’s visual episodes.”

Grabill’s work was also featured in last month’s edition of the online quarterly journal The Light Ekphrastic. Gabrill’s two pieces are another collaboration, this time with Baltimore writer Danielle Ariano, and entitled “Black Friday” and “Dishes.” The concept was to pair writers and poets with visual arts and have them switch off, with Grabill’s “Black Friday” inspiring Ariano’s “Holding,” and the writer’s “Anger” inspiring Grabill’s “Dishes.”

Associate Professor Timothy Nohe, Visual Arts, and Charlotte Keniston ’14, Imaging and Digital Arts, recently collaborated with students from the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School for a project documenting the school’s Station North neighborhood. The project My Station North: Sounds Surrounding Us involved Nohe and Keniston providing five students ages 10-11 simple point-and-shoot cameras and audio recorders to go and interact with the diverse collection of area residents, ranging from bricklayers, to bike shop collective members, to artists based in the Copycat Building. The results are to be exhibited at an installation opening in Gallery CA at the City Arts building on June 7^th at 5:00 p.m.

Speaking on June 5th with Tom Hall for WYPR’s Maryland Morning, Nohe spoke of his  and Keniston’s motivations for working with the students at Baltimore Montessori, saying, “We really wanted students to get out and walk the neighborhood and really meet people, and really see the environment. To knit the school closer into the neighborhood. That’s a neighborhood that thinks of itself as Station North, but also is Greenmount West, and we were trying to tie these two entities together.”

My Station North: Sounds Surrounding Us will be on view at the Gallery CA from June 7th to July 6th.