Gary Kachadourian, an MFA student in Imaging and Digital Arts, has received a $25,000 grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painters and Sculptors Grant Program. The Painters & Sculptors Grant Program was established in 1993 to assist individual artists. The grants are given to acknowledge painters and sculptors creating work of exceptional quality.

Mr. Kachadourian will have work on display at UMBC from January 26 through February 18 at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture’s MFA Imaging and Digital Arts Thesis Exhibition.

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture celebrates its Fall 2011 K-12 school and community partnerships with an exhibition in the Hall Gallery on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building through February 9. The multi-media display features original artwork by more than two hundred students from four area schools—Lansdowne High School (Academy of Arts & Communication), Benjamin Franklin High School at Masonville Cove, Highlandtown Elementary/Middle School and Hampstead Hill Academy—alongside work by their UMBC student and faculty collaborators. Their artwork responds to the CADVC’s main gallery exhibition Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, which was on display in Fall 2011.

Work by students from two of these schools, Highlandtown Elementary/Middle School and Hampstead Hill Academy, are also on display at the Pop-Up Gallery at 401 South Conkling Street in Baltimore City through January 14. This exhibition, Highlandtown Transfer Remix, is the result of a partnership between the CADVC and the Highlandtown Arts & Entertainment District, also known as “ha!”.

More information is available at the CADVC’s Image Transfer exhibition page.

The Department of Theatre’s production of The Laramie Project, directed by Nyalls Hartman (associate professor), received a review in The Baltimore Sun and Howard County Times by critic Mike Giuliano on December 7, and received a review in Maryland Theatre Guide by UMBC alumna Amanda Gunther on December 9. The production concludes its run at the UMBC Theatre on Sunday, December 11.

Work by Steve Bradley, Visual Arts, will be featured in Radio Arts Space FM, an international radio art and sound art exhibition at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubjana, Slovenia, from December 7 to 16. The exhibition, which features audio works by 42 artists from 22 countries, is available as an audio stream at at the website radioCona.

James Smalls, professor of Visual Arts and affiliate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, will be featured on a panel, Gender and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, on Saturday, December 10 from 2 to 4 p.m.

In connection with works from two exhibitions, Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Terry Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, will be in conversation with Professor Smalls and with scholar-collector Thomas H. Wirth. This discussion will explore the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality within the Harlem Renaissance, taking cues from work by Richard Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas.

More information is available at www.brooklynmuseum.org/calendar/event/4785.

Fred Worden (assistant professor, Visual Arts) will be featured on the American Originals Now series at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. on December 11 and 17. Since the 1970s, Worden has been making experimental films primarily to examine “how a stream of still pictures passing through a projector at a speed meant to overwhelm the eyes might be harnessed to purposes other than representation or naturalism.” With wholehearted revelry in cinematic illusion and a commitment to kinetic abstractions, he produces short films and digital videos that draw attention to subjective perceptual play through the manipulation of visual phenomena. His work has been exhibited at festivals and venues in Paris, Hong Kong, Rotterdam, London, New York, and Toronto.

On December 11 at 4:30 in the East Building Concourse, a program features several of his more recent works, including Here (2005, 7 minutes), “a conjuring in order to accommodate a clandestine rendezvous between Sir Laurence Olivier and Georges Méliés”; Possessed (2010, 9 minutes, pictured here), a reworking of a short clip from an early Joan Crawford movie that establishes her firmly on the “outside”; and the ribald When Worlds Collude (2008, 13 minutes).

On December 17, also at 4:30 in the East Building Concourse, Worden will present “After Hours in the Cerebral Kitchen,” a talk/lecture he has designed to contextualize his interest in the moving image and human perception. Following the presentation, Worden will show one of his early 16 mm nonfiction film How the Hell I Ripped Jack Goldstein’s Painting in the Elevator (1989, 22 minutes, pictured) and offer a rare opportunity to view and discuss his current work in progress, tentatively titled All or Nothing.

Sandra Abbott, curator of collections and outreach at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, was featured in Maryland Life Magazine on November 8 in an article, “Unbound,” by Mary Medland. The article investigates the art of “altered books,” which are ordinary books that have been transformed into art objects. Abbott was a judge for the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s altered books exhibition last year.

The exhibition A Legacy of Love: Italian Memorial Sculpture, featuring photographs by Robert W. Fichter and Robert Freidus, on display at the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery through December 21, was featured in The Baltimore Sun by critic Mike Giuliano on Wednesday, November 16. The review also appeared in local papers published by Patuxent Publishing.

Steve Bradley (associate professor, Visual Arts) is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Arts in Community (MSAC AIC) matching grant for his “Portrait Stories” initiative in the Baybrook community.

In addition to this grant, “Portrait Stories” has been chosen by the Baltimore Rotterdam Sister City for its Artist Exchange program. The intended exchange will occur between the Baybrook neighborhood and Rotterdam’s Heijplaat neighborhood in the future.

The Baybrook initiatives are rooted in Professor Bradley’s 2009 residency in the Heijplaat neighborhood. His inspiration came from an educational curriculum developed by the Willem de Kooning Academie, also in Rotterdam.

Cut off from downtown Baltimore by the Patapsco River, the richly diverse communities of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay have few safe public recreational places for the youth to gather before or after school. The intergenerational “Portrait Stories” project strives to engage the youth and the elders of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay in a mutual exchange of stories. The objective is for the participants to create portraiture, in response to these stories, to share with the community.

This project is facilitated by students from UMBC and Maryland Institute College of Art for students from the Benjamin Franklin High School and elders from the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay community.

Exhibitions from “Portrait Stories” will be in several locations around Baybrook and Curtis Bay beginning May 2012.

Tim Nohe (associate professor, Visual Arts) has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Project – Creative Placemaking program, managed by the Station North Arts & Entertainment District.

The grant supports his sound project, “My Station North.” This winter and spring he will work collaboratively with children at Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School, their teacher, Ms. Meg Fink, and IMDA MFA graduate student Charlotte Keniston to document the Station North neighborhood through sound. Students working with an easy to use audio recorder will sample the sounds and stories of their neighborhood and school, which is located at 1600 Guilford Avenue in Station North. Once the sounds have been gathered, Professor Nohe will edit, mix and master a surround sound work for installation at the North Avenue Market in June 2012. The project will be a partnership with the Baltimore SoundscapeProject and Locus Sonus, a streaming audio project based in France.

The project will bring positive attention to the neighborhood, its vibrant arts community, the historic North Avenue Market, and Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School. Professor Nohe remarks, “Connections in our community will be heard through focused listening: to what we hear all around, to the music of the street, to the people working to revitalize homes and businesses, to our creative workers, and to the stories of elders and children. The installation will bring us together to listen, carefully, to this vibrant city neighborhood.”