Guenet Abraham, associate professor of graphic design, who received a 10-month Fulbright for 2017 – 2018 to teach graphic design and conduct research in Ethiopia for an upcoming multimedia exhibition, will extend her stay with the support of an additional Fulbright award for 2018 – 2019. She will continue teaching at the Alle School of Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University as well as conduct her research, which has taken her to the far reaches of the country.

The design courses Abraham has developed for the school, including a course in typography, are pilot courses aimed to help introduce a full graphic design curriculum. Her work includes direct instruction of students and mentoring of faculty. The curriculum will address the needs of university students well-placed to contribute design skills in the many sectors of Ethiopia’s growing economy.

“It is going very well in spite of challenges I am not used to in my teaching activities,” says Abraham, noting that there is no wifi in classrooms, many students do not own their own laptops, and there are limitations in computer lab facilities. “Despite these roadblocks, the students have universally embraced the course material. I am pleased to say that they continue to surpass my expectations. This has allowed me to continue to expand the learning goals.”

The additional year afforded through the second-round Fulbright will enable Abraham to continue teaching and working with faculty to draft a program that will continue long after the end of her stay.

In addition to teaching, Abraham is using the time in Ethiopia to research the rise and rule of The Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army – later named Derg – the brutal military regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 – 1992. Her historic and artistic research will culminate in a multimedia exhibition, Labyrinth of Memory, at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) when she returns.

The exhibition will present a depiction of the political violence, displacements, and disfigurements exacted by the Derg “for public consumption and debate,” as Abraham put it. “It stems from my belief that artists have the unique skills to address sensitive topics in ways that encourage contemplation and create dialogue. The trauma that Ethiopian society has faced is documented in tomes, but there are few monuments, exhibitions, explorations, and interpretations. The tragedies cannot be left to languish in archives or filed away in governmental reports. They must be given a proper place in the public’s memory.”

Her research has led her to explore many regions, such as sulfur lake in Dalol, Danakil Depression, to juxtapose natural and contemporary sound and imagery against the horrors of the Derg period.

Abraham’s extended stay in Addis is also a return. As civil war erupted, she departed with her family in 1974 and escaped the extreme violence that followed. “Since I left, the country has gone through two major regimes, the first one being the communist government of Mengistu which fractured the social fabric of the country. Soon after the present government toppled the Mengistu’s regime in 1991, the country split in two (Ethiopia and Eritrea) in 1992.”

The whole population of Ethiopia before the split was about 26 million, 450,000 in Addis Ababa. Now Ethiopia’s population is close to 100 million with over 6 million in Addis Ababa. “I simply do not recognize the country,” says Abraham. “The city is completely new and so are many aspects of the culture.”

Abraham also shared the unexpected feeling of “otherness” she has experienced in navigating a country that is both an old home and new place. It is not unlike what she encountered as a new American, she describes. Her approach has been to focus on the present rather than searching for what she remembers, she explains, saying, “I continue to immerse myself in the culture of today.”

Images, from top: Guenet Abraham in the Ethiopian highlands, photo by Teddy Berhanu; Guenet Abraham with students, photo by Fitsum Seyoum; Guenet Abraham at the sulfur lake in Dalol, Danakil Depression, photo by Colton Flynn; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, photo by Guenet Abraham.

UMBC’s Maurice Berger, research professor and chief curator for the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC), and a major national figure in the field of media studies, has won the International Center of Photography (ICP) 2018 Infinity Award. The award, in the category of Critical Writing and Research, honors Berger’s acclaimed ”Race Stories” column for the Lens section of the New York Times.

ICP’s Infinity Awards are widely considered the leading honor for excellence in the field of photography and visual culture. The selection committee includes Isolde Brielmaier, assistant professor at NYU and executive director of Arts, Culture and Community, Westfield World Trade Center; Marina Chao, assistant curator of exhibitions for ICP; James Estrin, Lens blog co-editor and senior staff photographer for the New York Times; and Antwaun Sargent, writer and critic.

Since 1985, the ICP Infinity Awards have recognized major contributions and emerging talent in the fields of photojournalism, art, fashion photography, and publishing. The 34th annual ICP Infinity Award honorees will be celebrated at a gala on April 9 in New York City.

”I am honored to receive an award long considered important to the community of photographers, writers, editors, and curators of which I’m a part,” Berger shares. “To write monthly for the New York Times about the ways photography mediates the issues of race fulfills a long held dream. To have that work acknowledged and rewarded by my peers, in addition to the incredible support I get from Times readers, is truly wonderful.” 

Berger’s monthly “Race Stories” column explores the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, and social issues around race not usually covered in the mainstream media. He launched the column, in July 2012 and two years later received the 2014 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation ArtsWriters Grant in recognition of his writing.

The well-researched essays are written in a literary and reader-friendly style and explore a range of subjects and photographers. Predominantly focused on work from the civil rights era to the present, his writing has focused on a multiple issues: contemporary African American art and photography; the modern civil rights movement; Latino/a, Asian-American, and Native American photography; Asian and African photography; 19th-century and Civil War-era photography and race; and developments in Latino and Asian American photography. His work has also explored how artists and photographers of color have employed photography to combat stereotypes and prevailing ideas about race and identity in the United States.

Included in the series is a moving personal essay from December 2017, “Using Photography to Tell Stories About Race”, that contextualizes Berger’s writing on race within his personal story. In the essay, Berger writes:

As a Jew, I have known anti-Semitism. As a gay man, I have known homophobia. But neither has seemed as relentless as the racism I witnessed growing up — a steady drumbeat of slights, thinly-veiled hostility and condescension perpetrated by even the most liberal and well-meaning people. It was painful to watch, and as my friends let me know, considerably more painful to endure.

“Continually observing this reality shaped how I understood racism: When people told me they had experienced prejudice, I believed them. I had rejected the liberal tendency to defensively dismiss the victim to protect the accused.”

ICP worked with Harbers Studio and MediaStorm to produce mini-documentary films on each of the 2018 Infinity awardees, including a  12-minute film on Berger:

The CADVC recently launched a webpage indexing all of the “Race Stories” essays that is updated monthly as new posts are published. “I wanted to find ways to make the ‘Race Stories’ series available to as broad an audience as possible,” says Berger. “I think it’s important for college and university students to read these essays. So putting them on the CADVC website has made all of them available, in one convenient place, to our students at UMBC as well as the thousands of outside visitors to our website.”

Berger shared further, “I always write my essays for The New York Times and curate my exhibitions on race and visual culture with young people in mind…because if you can inspire a young person to see the world in new ways, then you can inspire anyone. I get a lot of emails from high school teachers and college professors, who tell me they routinely assign my ‘Race Stories’ essays to their students. I’m an educator, first and foremost. The principal purpose of my work is to teach racial literacy through visual culture.”

In addition to Berger’s writing for the New York Times, his work regularly appears in other major publications, from Artforum and Aperture to Wired and the Los Angeles Times. His latest essay, “These Reenactments Put a Personal Face on the History of Black Protest,” appears in a historic April special issue of National Geographic on race. The magazine put together a team of photographers and race writers to explore one of the most complicated issues of our time. Berger’s writing engages with the work of Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop, who explores the fight for civil rights in reenactment photos. His essay will also appear in an eight-page spread in the print issue.

Top image: Maurice Berger, photo by James Estrin. Center images from left to right: Nona Faustine, Arbores autumnales puella, Queen Ming, the photographer’s daughter, 2016, Courtesy of the artist; Gordon Parks, Untitled, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation; Ken Gonzales-Day, Erased Lynching: Disguised Bandit, 2006

Baltimore Dance Project returns to the Proscenium Theatre for its traditional winter performances, February 8–10. Co-directed by UMBC’s Carol Hess, professor and chair of dance, and Doug Hamby, associate professor of dance, the contemporary dance company will present a blend of new, recent, and repertory works. Performances will include the premiere of Unravel, choreographed in 1995 by the late Eric Hampton and reconstructed by Alison Crosby, and an excerpt from Framework, one of the company’s earliest works, choreographed by the late Elizabeth Walton, the company’s founding artistic director, who was a member of UMBC’s dance department for more than 40 years.

New works include a solo by Sandra Lacy, instructor of dance, and Tipping Point by Ryan Bailey ’16, dance. The program also includes encore performances of Hamby’s Square Breath, a tour de force of intensity and desperation, and Hess’ LightForest, a venture through breathtaking images of nature.

“For this concert, Baltimore Dance Project is honoring memory of Elizabeth Walton, the founding director of the company and the dance department’s first chair, by performing an excerpt from her piece Framework,” says Hess. “When I arrived at UMBC in 1982, I saw a performance of Framework in UMBC’s old theatre and loved it. In 1984, I suggested to Liz that she present the piece again. There were three dancers in the 1982 version, but Liz decided to expand the cast to six. Both Sandra Lacy and I were in that 1984 cast.”

Hess explains, “In order to re-mount the piece, I used an archival video of the piece, and my memory of Liz’s directions. I found a reel to reel master tape of the electronic score, composed by William John Tudor. The department of music’s Alan Wonneberger used his amazing expertise to process the old tape so the sound could be played and then digitized. Teaching the piece to the dancers brought back so many memories of Liz, and I am so thrilled to be able to share her work on this concert.” Walton, an associate professor emerita, passed away in November 2017.

Hamby views the restaging of Square Breath, originally choreographed in 2007, as an opportunity for exploration. “When awakening a dance from the past, I get to rediscover it with fresh eyes, often adding to my understanding about the essence of the dance,” he explains. “A dance is a living, breathing thing, so new dancers bring new ideas and new kinetic exploration to the work. The musical score for Square Breath incorporates live sounds made by both the dancers and musicians. This allows the movement and the sound score to interact in a new and surprising way, with each restaging.”

Baltimore Dance Project infuses visual media, sound, light and technology into riveting dance performance. Known for its edgy artistic collaborations between choreographers, composers, sound artists, visual artists, engineers, and technologists, the company presents the creative work of Hamby and Hess, performer and choreographer Sandra Lacy, and guest artists.

Formed in 1982 under the name Phoenix Dance Company, BDP features outstanding performers from the Baltimore/Washington area and has been honored with numerous grants and awards. Hamby, Hess, and Lacy have received a total of sixteen individual artist awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and their work has appeared on the streets of Baltimore and in theaters and film festivals across the United States.

More information about the upcoming performances is available on UMBC’s Arts and Culture Calendar here.

Images by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The Cone sisters are beloved in Baltimore and known internationally for the art collection that is their legacy. Now, they are also the subject of All She Must Possess, a new production by playwright Susan McCully, assistant professor of theatre at UMBC. The Rep Stage in Columbia, Maryland, will host the play’s world premiere as part of the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival this month.

The play focuses on the Cone sisters, Claribel (1864-1929) and Etta (1870-1949). Together, the siblings, Baltimore natives, built a massive collection of works by some of the most important artists of their time – Matisse, Picasso, Pissarro, Courbet, and Degas – amassing approximately 3,000 objects, including 500 works by Matisse alone.

Billed as a “highly theatrical celebration of Etta’s extraordinary life,” McCully developed the play after a year of deep research into an extensive collection of the sisters’ personal papers held by Baltimore Museum of Art.  The papers were donated by Etta to the museum, where the sisters’ art collection also resides, upon her death in 1949.

Notwithstanding their conservative dress and appearance, the sisters were renegades of their era. Neither married and Claribel became a doctor of medicine, specializing in pathology. Their impulses as art collectors, at first led by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, were ahead of the times and led to purchases of works considered provocative and even scandalous. One such work was Blue Nude by Matisse, which is brought to life in the production.

Speaking to Celia Wren of the Washington Post about the play, McCully theorized that as single women with comfortable incomes the Cone sisters had the freedom and energy to travel and develop their own interests, identities, and relationships. “The collection exists in a way because they were, at least, not heteronormative,” said McCully. The dramaturg, known for her work at the intersection of feminist and queer representation, also refers to Etta as “a kind of gay hero” who lived on her own terms, and had an intimate relationship with acclaimed writer and fellow art collector Gertrude Stein.

All She Must Possess is directed by Joseph Ritsch, who is directing UMBC’s spring production of Machinal and is adjunct professor in the department of theatre. He also directed UMBC’s production of the Amish Project in 2017. Keri Eastridge ‘17, theatre, appears in the role of The Writer; sound design is by William D’Eugenio ‘15, theatre; Julie DeBakey ‘09, theatre, is the stage manager; Sim Rivers ’17, theatre, is the assistant director; and Brittany Federici ‘17, theatre, is the assistant stage manager for the production.

Susan McCully is a scholar of feminist theatre and a dramaturg, as well as a playwright and performer. Her plays have been produced at colleges and universities, as well as fringe and alternative spaces throughout the U.S. and internationally. At UMBC, she teaches a range of courses in theatre history and dramatic literature, and works on the department productions in the role of dramaturg. She is a specialist in cross-gender casting and gender performance; she also teaches courses in queer performance and feminist representation for UMBC’s gender and women’s studies program

All She Must Possess will be performed February 8-25 at Rep Stage at the Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center at Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, Maryland. Tickets: $10-40. Call 443-518-1500 or visit repstage.org.

Images, from top: Grace Bauer as Etta Cone, Valerie Leonard as Claribel Cone/ Gertrude Stein and Keri Eastridge as Writer in All She Must Possess; Grace Bauer as Etta Cone and Keri Eastridge as Writer in All She Must Possess. Photo by Katie Simmons-Barth, courtesy of Rep Stage.

See coverage in the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post.

This fall, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC), celebrates the launch of four significant projects by research professor Maurice Berger, who through his curatorial work frequently explores issues of race, society, and culture, examining difficult subjects through the lens of art, photography, and visual media.

The new projects include the unveiling of exhibition websites for For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights and Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, the creation of a online home for Berger’s “Race Stories” essays, and the extension of a national tour of For All the World To See through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ On the Road program — all of which will broaden public access to this research.

“I have a lot of faith in visual media to communicate powerful and even life-changing ideas about this country,” says Berger, whose previous work includes exhibitions such as Notes in Time: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (1995), Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999); Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000 (2002); White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (2003); For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2012, photo above); and Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television (2016). Since 2012, Berger has contributed monthly “Race Stories” essays for the Lens Blog of The New York Times, exploring the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race, and complementing many of the issues explored in his curatorial work.

The online version of the exhibition Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, which toured nationally from 2015 to 2017 and was co-organized by CADVC and the Jewish Museum in New York, explores how modern art served as an influence and a model for shaping the new medium, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Visit the site here.

For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, co-organized by CADVC and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened in 2010 and continues to travel in a smaller, lower-security version through the NEH on the Road initiative. The exhibition was the first to comprehensively explore the historic role of visual culture in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for racial equality and justice in the United States from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s. Visit the new online version of the critically acclaimed exhibition here.

“Websites are incredibly valuable teaching tools,” explains Berger on the importance of these new resources. “They reach more people than come in the door of the average museum. Most exhibitions actually have a relatively small audience. For All the World to See is the exception, which has had a million visitors and counting. That’s virtually unheard of. The typical art or visual culture exhibition, no matter how many venues, will probably reach no more than 100,000 visitors. A website is not bound by geography, or the fragility of art, or the enormous cost of shipping and maintaining an actual exhibition. Visitors can pop in from all over the world. Yes, there is nothing like experiencing real works of art or important examples of visual culture. But these online exhibitions augment the original exhibition in powerful ways, disseminating its ideas far and wide.”

The launch of the Race Stories webpage brings together in one convenient place links to Berger’s monthly “Race Stories” column, which explores the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, or social or regional issues around race not usually covered in the mainstream media. Visit the site here.

“I wanted to find ways to make the ‘Race Stories’ series available to as broad an audience as possible,” says Berger. “I think it’s important for college and university students to read these essays. So putting them on the CADVC website has made all of them available, in one convenient place, to our students at UMBC as well as the thousands of outside visitors to our website. I always write my essays for The New York Times and curate my exhibitions on race and visual culture with young people in mind. My ideal reader is a smart high school student — because if you can inspire a young person to see the world in new ways, then you can inspire anyone. I get a lot of emails from high school teachers and college professors, who tell me they routinely assign my ‘Race Stories’ essays to their students. I’m an educator, first and foremost. The principal purpose of my work is to teach racial literacy through visual culture.”

After a successful national tour, the exhibition For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights received support from the On the Road program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, providing the opportunity for it to continue to tour the country in a reduced format. NEH on the Road is designed to create wider national access to the ideas, themes, and stories explored in major exhibitions funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Recently, the NEH extended its support of For All the World To See through 2023, the first time the endowment has doubled the national tour of an exhibition, allowing travel to an additional 47 geographically diverse national venues through 2023. Information on the NEH On the Road version of For All the World To See is available here.

Timothy Nohe, director of the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) and professor of visual arts, is featured in a one-person exhibition at the Kohl Gallery on the campus of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. The show, which opened Thursday, November 9, and continues through Friday, December 15, is entitled Voltage is Signal: Analog Video Works by Timothy Nohe and features works that explore analog video technology in innovative ways.

A 2015 residency at Signal Culture (Owego, New York) inspired Nohe’s work with analog modular video synthesis, and since then he has gone on to exhibit and screen video and interactive works at major public festivals such as Light City Baltimore 2017 and Artscape. His interactive exhibits, autonomous video generating circuits, installations and prints simultaneously look back and forward to technologies that slip between obsolescence and contemporary “glitch” culture. Nohe’s show at the Kohl Gallery in many ways marks a new direction, as he departs from a typically more image-based practice to consider the ways that voltages might produce abstractions. The resulting works are resonant of past traditions, from color field to Pop, even as they emerge from an interrogation of various media. A number of the works on display call for audience interaction, long a characteristic of Nohe’s work.

Professor Nohe will return to Washington College for a public talk on his work on Thursday, November 16 at 4:30 p.m. He will also participate in a production of the modern dance LightForest by Baltimore Dance Project, directed and choreographed by Carol Hess, chair of UMBC’s department of dance, at Washington College on November 17 and 18. Nohe composed the score for LightForest for mobile devices and dancer-worn Bluetooth speakers. During the residency stay he will conduct workshops with Washington College music majors.

Nohe was the recipient of a 2006 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and an Australian-American Fulbright Commission Fulbright Alumni Initiative Grant in 2011. Five Maryland State Arts Council awards have supported his work, and he has also been recognized with a Creative Baltimore Award. In 2015 the Warnock Foundation recognized his interdisciplinary work in urban forests with a Social Innovator award.

Additional information about Voltage is Signal is available here. Images are courtesy of the artist.

Critical Social Justice (CSJ): Rise began outside the confines of a lecture hall last week, bringing the mission directly to the streets of UMBC. During the kickoff event, Chalking for Change, students answered the question “What do you rise for?” with familiar words – equality, inclusion, respect, tolerance, and other personal credos – that told a visual story of empowerment spanning Academic Row.

Now in its fifth year, CSJ is designed to encourage the public to think more closely about Critical Social Justice. Sponsored by the Women’s Center, The Mosaic Center for Culture and Diversity, and 18 additional co-sponsors, the week-long series offers a range of opportunities to explore individual and collaborative instances of resistance and resilience.

“Our attempt was to flip the script since these types of events are usually panels of speakers telling you what to think,” explains Jess Myers, director of The Women’s Center. “We wanted to use Chalking for Change as a way to allow for more dialogue and to break down the hierarchy of who gets to talk about what they care about and what they’re rising for.”

One of the most compelling events of the week was speaker Adrienne Keene’s keynote lecture, “Native Appropriations, Indigenous Social Media, and Responding to Racism.”  Keene opened her dynamic speech by displaying the results of a web image search for the term “Native American.” The search yielded repetitive images of historic photos or paintings that predominantly featured men bedecked in war regalia.

“There are 567 different federally recognized tribes and hundreds more state-recognized and non-federally recognized tribes, and each of those tribes has their own culture, their own regalia, their own language, their own history, their own government and that vast diversity and complexity is nowhere in this set of images,” Keene said in reference to the largely uniform results.

The Native scholar and activist addressed a standing-room-only audience about the ramifications of appropriating Native culture for entertainment purposes, in everything from runway fashion to athletic mascots. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Keene stressed, “If I’m standing up here saying these are the things that make me a Cherokee woman, and you can go and buy all of those things at Target and Urban Outfitters, it starts to erode that ability for me to say those cultural markers make me who I am.”

In closing, Keene left the audience with a charge, saying, “UMBC really prides itself on being one of the most diverse campuses in the country and that’s amazing, but I want you to really think about what that means if it doesn’t include the original inhabitants of this land.”

During CSJ, The Women’s Center also invited survivors and secondary survivors to a quilt making workshop to create pieces for addition to the Monument Quilt, a public demonstration of stories from sexual violence survivors and their loved ones and supporters. The ultimate goal of the Monument Quilt is to blanket the National Mall with 6,000 squares that will spell out “Not Alone.” Moderators also used this time to address the #MeToo movement on social media, and gave many individuals the opportunity to speak about it in person for the first time.

The week culminated in the annual Baltimore Walking Tour with Kate Drabinski, senior lecturer in gender and women’s studies. Participants started their walk at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Pratt Street and continued to the Inner Harbor, stopping at various sites of resistance and resilience along the way. The tour focused heavily on transit and the effects it has on shaping communities.

“It’s really important for CSJ to not just be these ivory tower conversations. We have to be thinking about the ways that we do social justice as an institution and as a community within Baltimore,” Myers explained. “What’s important to remember about Critical Social Justice is that it’s not just supposed to be five days. What we really hope is that it can create springboards or open doors for people to think about Critical Social Justice all the time.”

To learn more about Critical Social Justice, visit the Critical Social Justice blog.

Banner image: Members of the UMBC community share their input during a workshop facilitated by Adrienne Keene. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. Additional photos provided by UMBC Women’s Center.

In 2012, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Baltimore artist David Hess felt compelled to accelerate the construction of an unusual series of sculptures: life-size mock assault rifles fashioned from everyday ordinary objects.

“This body of work is my personal awakening to the American obsession with weapons and the abstraction of violence,” says Hess. Taking discarded bits of things (“rescued” objects, he calls them) that most people would consider trash — a vacuum cleaner, the handle of a saw, an old black sneaker, a pink Barbie bike frame, a raggedy crutch, the body of an electric guitar, a turquoise sewing machine — Hess fashioned strikingly realistic-looking “guns” for exhibition, to prompt conversations about violence in America.

Hess’ work came to the attention of Kathy O’Dell, special assistant to the dean for education and arts partnerships, and associate professor of visual arts, art history and museum studies, who has organized an exhibition, simply titled Gun Show, of all 112 of Hess’ gun sculptures at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, opening on September 4 and continuing through October 14. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, September 7, from 5 to 7 p.m.

The exhibition displays the sculpture on the floor, laid out on tarpaulins, recalling the presentation of bodies awaiting identification following disasters, or the arrangement of confiscated weapons at police headquarters. Ranging in weight from 8 to 44 pounds, the mock guns include no shooting mechanism.

“The reason I felt strongly about convincing David Hess to hold this exhibition at UMBC is that it’s a research institution,” says O’Dell, “and research is what has driven David’s entire project, starting in the early 1990s through the present: What is a gun? What does it mean to hold one? What does it mean to make one? Who does or does not own them? Who should or should not own them? What are sensible reasons and safe ways to use them? What are the ramifications of their use or misuse? How do issues of race, class, gender identity, and age impact these questions?”

O’Dell continues, “Research is about asking questions and then attempting to answer them — as individuals and as groups working together to make sense of the world and to advance thinking.”

O’Dell notes that the power in Hess’ use of “rescued” objects is their familiarity. “Every object fits into a story with which each viewer can relate,” she says. “Yet each story is personal. A Barbie bike seat will have a different meaning to me than it will for a young man whose sister had a bike like that. Contemplating a personal story leads to contemplating one’s personal position on what the bike seat has been made to represent — a gun. The ‘rescued’ objects allow us to ‘rescue’ memories and, on the basis of memories, build thoughts and positions in the here and now.”

David Hess’ work has been exhibited at Goya Contemporary in Baltimore and the John Elder Gallery in New York. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections, including the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore/Washington International (BWI) Thurgood Marshall Airport, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sinai Hospital, Montgomery College, Kaiser Permanente, and the Emerson Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition, he has completed over twenty public art commissions in and around Baltimore, Rockville, and Germantown, and Washington, D.C.

Kathy O’Dell, curator of Gun Show, teaches and writes on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on performance and global art. The author of Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), she has published numerous articles and reviews in Art in America, Artforum, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and other journals. Currently, she is writing a book titled The Dot: A Small History of a Big Point and is co-writing, with Duke University Professor Kristine Stiles, a survey text titled World Art Since 1933. She serves on the Board of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the Maryland State Commission on Public Art.

Read more about Gun Show on UMBC’s Arts and Culture Calendar.

All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC except detail of sculpture courtesy of Geoff Graham.

From June 16 to 23, UMBC’s Earl and Darielle Linehan Concert Hall will host an ambitious new annual event, Festival Baltimore, featuring performances of major classical chamber music works by Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Shostakovich, Paul Creston and George Walker. Produced in partnership between UMBC’s department of music and non-profit organization Music for Minds, the festival’s concerts are unusual opportunities to hear complete cycles of works — for example, all of the Brahms piano quartets or all of the Beethoven cello sonatas — in a single evening.

“Each concert is dedicated to a composer’s complete works for a certain genre or instrumentation,” explains festival director and pianist Asiya Korepanova. “They bring back the atmosphere of the magical old times of 19th century, when two symphonies could be premiered on the same evening — after two hours of other music! — when audiences were just soaked in music, limitlessly absorbing it, when time flew by differently, and people couldn’t wait to hear premieres and then discuss their impressions.”

The festival offers “a distinctive twist on programming,” said Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun on May 31, “in UMBC’s impressive Linehan Concert Hall.” Read his article about Festival Baltimore here.

UMBC faculty, staff and students are among the festival’s highlights. “We are thrilled to be partnering with the extraordinary musicians in Festival Baltimore to bring the joy of summer chamber music to the Baltimore region,” says Linda Dusman, chair of music. “Audiences will delight in the amazing beauty and acoustics of the Earl and Darielle Linehan Concert Hall, which brings every nuance of the performance to every seat in the house.”

Gita Ladd, cellist and UMBC affiliate artist, will perform on the festival’s finale on Friday, June 23, in a program presenting the complete Beethoven cello sonatas. Four UMBC student musicians — cellist Michael Bradshaw, violinist Morgan Dice, pianist Jackie Smedley, and pianist Junghoon Park (all class of ’18) — have received scholarships to the Festival Baltimore Academy (read more here), and with nine other academy attendees will perform the complete Brahms piano quartets on Friday, June 23.

Alan Wonneberger, director of recording for the department of music, will oversee the festival’s recording sessions, assisted by two UMBC students — Stephen Johnson and Nicholas Spears — who will intern during the festival to gain hands-on recording experience. “Festival Baltimore provides opportunities for the UMBC community and the community at large to connect with world class musicians,” he notes. “For the interns, the festival provides opportunities to record concerts with varying instrumentation performed by superb artists.”

The festival opens on Friday, June 16, with Korepanova’s performance of Franz Liszt’s complete 24 etudes for solo piano. “I admire these etudes because they are among very few examples in the piano repertoire when a 5-minute piano piece can sound like a symphonic poem,” she says. “I’ve played the 12 transcendental etudes as a set since I was 19 and always enjoyed the challenge and grandeur of this cycle. Learning that cycle felt like taming a wild animal, and now, with another 12 etudes added, it feels that way even more.”

On Saturday, June 17, the Firebird Duo (saxophonist Matthew Evan Taylor and pianist Asiya Korepanova) performs Paul Creston’s complete works for saxophone and piano. “It has been fun to trace Paul Creston’s evolution in writing for solo alto saxophone and piano,” shares Taylor. “I’ve really enjoyed experiencing the difference between Creston’s early style, in which he is fitting his various influences together, and his mature style, which is elegant and assured.”

On Sunday, June 18, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and pianist Asiya Korepanova perform the complete Brahms and Shostakovich viola sonatas, and on Wednesday, June 21, pianist Redi Llupa performs the complete piano sonatas by George Walker. Thursday, June 22, features the duo of violinist Netanel Draiblate and pianist Lura Johnson, who will perform the complete Brahms violin sonatas.

Friday, June 23, hosts two concerts. First, college musicians attending the Festival Baltimore Academy will perform the complete piano quartets by Brahms. Capping off the festival in the evening, Ladd and Korepanova will perform the complete cello sonatas by Beethoven.

“Gita and I met at the Endless Mountain Music Festival in 2013 but hadn’t played as a duo until 2015, when, due to a mistake by the festival, I wasn’t told that I was to perform with her, and it was three days before the concert,” remembers Korepanova. “So, I had three days to learn the Prokofiev Cello Sonata, the Chopin Polonaise and some other challenging works, and we could rehearse only twice. The surprise was when we got together and played the entire program as if we had played with one another other for decades! It was insane, as if we didn’t need to rehearse anything — we both knew what the other was about to do.”

All Festival Baltimore performances will be held in UMBC’s Earl and Darielle Linehan Concert Hall, and master classes throughout the week are open to the public. General information about each of the concerts is available on UMBC’s Arts and Culture calendar here, and tickets are available through the Festival Baltimore website here. UMBC faculty and staff receive a 50% discount on tickets; UMBC students and attendees under the age of 18 receive free admission.

Festival Baltimore’s logo was inspired by Forum by Thomas Sayre, the public artwork situated in front of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building.

Header image: UMBC’s Linehan Concert Hall. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Kelley Bell, associate professor and associate chair of visual arts, will display a new work, Babel, from Friday, May 19 through Sunday, May 21 at the David M. Brown Planetarium in Arlington, Virginia. The commission of the work was supported by the Friends of the David M. Brown Planetarium.

Utilizing archival imagery and animation, Babel takes advantage of the planetarium’s concave ceiling to present a projected 5-minute tour of iconic domes from around the world. Visitors find themselves beneath the oculus of Rome’s Pantheon, gaze up at the rotunda of the United States Capitol, scan the gorgeous lattices of Tilla Kari Madrasa in Uzbekistan, and take in other historic locations.

Bell ’06 M.F.A., intermedia and digital arts, stacks the different rings of these domes like children’s toys, aspiring to build a towering edifice, one atop the other. As seen in the video excerpt below, the domes spin in consecutive circles, and each level erodes and supplants the next in a futile architectural battle royale spanning centuries, geography and ideologies.

“As the Tower of Babel presents an allegorical origin of cultural difference,” explains Bell, “Babel suggests that an ideal monument is one that brings together all ideals—faith, pleasure, beauty, industry—that the balance and tension of these paradigmatic forces allows them to coexist while supporting one another naturally, like tiers of stones stacked to form a domed ceiling.”

Admission to Babel is free, but tickets are required and can be obtained through Eventbrite here. Bell will discuss her artwork after the viewings on Friday, May 19 at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., and on Saturday, May 20, at 7:00 p.m. She will also talk about Babel on WERA radio (96.7, Arlington, Virginia) on Thursday, May 18, at 8 a.m.

After the showing of Babel at the David M. Brown Planetarium, Bell will fly to Zagreb, Croatia, for Animafest Zagreb, which will feature her forthcoming work Carnival Love Wall.