On Friday, February 24, Symmes Gardner, executive director of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC), addressed the Maryland House of Delegates as a special speaker on Black History Month. His presentation featured images of the CADVC’s major touring exhibition, For All the World to See, organized in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and now on display at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. Among the delegates attending the presentation were Speaker of the House Michael Busch and Speaker Pro Tem Adrienne Jones (’76 psychology). In his remarks, Mr. Gardner emphasized the importance of the Maryland State Arts Council, which provided significant funding for For All the World to See.

In an article about the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Washington Post mentioned For All the World to See, an exhibition organized in partnership between the museum and UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. The full text of the article is available here.

Andrea Appleton at City Paper reviewed the MFA Imaging and Digital Arts Thesis Exhibition at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in the publication’s February 8th issue, concluding with, “Bravo, class of 2012. This is a show not to be missed.” The exhibition, on display through February 18, features work by Visual Arts graduate students Meghan Flanigan, Gary Kachadourian, Timothy Noble and Ali Seley.

To read City Paper‘s review—”A UMBC MFA exhibition dazzles with its scope, quality, and sense of fun”—click here. For additional information about the exhibition, visit the Arts & Culture Calendar.

Photo by Steve Bradley.

Timothy Nohe, associate professor of visual arts, has been invited to screen his experimental video and sound work People as Verbs in the 8th Berlin International Directors Lounge, a festival for contemporary media and film, February 9 through 19, 2012. This marks the European debut of the piece, which was first featured in a solo show at in/flux gallery, Baltimore, November 5 through 26, 2011.

Artwork by Lisa Moren, associate professor of visual arts, is on display at the President’s Gallery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY (City University of New York), 899 Tenth Avenue in New York. The exhibition, Truth of the Matter: paint, concept, memory, on display from February 1 through 28, presents three artists whose work focuses on memory. Professor Moren’s work, Marbleized Paper from the Gulf of Mexico, is made with pigments drawn from the polluted waters created from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The exhibition Where Do We Migrate To?, organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) is now on display at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parons The New School for Design in New York. Originally on view at UMBC in March and April 2011, the exhibition is curated by Niels Van Tomme, director of arts and media at Provisions Learning Center in Washington, D.C., and features work by nineteen internationally recognized artists and collectives. The show will be on display at Parsons through April 15, 2012.

Artwork by Vin Grabill, chair and associate professor of visual arts, is on display at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) through March 11 in an exhibition entitled Under Cover. Grabill’s 2010 video Frontier is among the approximately 50 works of sculpture, photography and video featured in the show, which is a project of MICA’s Exhibition Development Seminar.

Professor Grabill was interviewed by WYPR’s Tom Hall for a segment on Maryland Morning that aired on January 31. An audio file of the interview is here.

Eric Dyer, associate professor of visual arts, has been awarded a 2012 grant from Creative Capital for his project “Short Ride in a Phat Machine.” Professor Dyer was one of only 56 artists selected out of an applicant pool of 3,247 artists in all 50 states. Creative Capital grants provide up to $50,000 in direct project funds, plus advisory services.

Creative Capital is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to providing integrated financial and advisory support to artists pursuing adventurous projects in five disciplines: Emerging Fields, Film/Video, Literature, Performing Arts and Visual Arts.

The Winter 2012 issue of Issues in Science and Technology includes a writeup describing a project that Lee Boot, associate director of the Imaging Research Center, and IRC staff created for the National Academy of Sciences. The Seeintuit project, an exhibition and data collection center exploring the intuitive processes of the human brain, appears in the Archives section of the magazine and features an image of an artwork by professor Boot that is now in the permanent collection of the NAS. This collaboration between Mr. Boot, the IRC, and the NAS is ongoing (a third project is slated to begin at the end of January 2012) and is aimed at finding new ways to connect the general public with science content.

This issue of Issues magazine should be available online soon at http://www.issues.org/.

Lexie Macchi, a graduate student in the Department of Visual Arts and graduate assistant at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, was profiled in The Village Voice on Thursday, January 5. On page 5 of her interview she discusses her work at the CADVC and her studies at UMBC.