We have a very exciting series of conversations hosted within the context of a course in a course in the department, AMST 430/680 "Seminar in American Signs: Place-Based Artistic Research" This public humanities seminar explores the work of of contemporary artists and other cultural practitioners whose work responds to place-based contexts. Events are below-- mark your calendars!

Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at UMBC (CADVC) hosts an exploratory research residency that allows artists and interdisciplinary collaborators to take advantage of scholarly resources and to build partnerships at UMBC and in the Baltimore region. Artists In Residence (AIRs) are invited to pursue open-ended outcomes, and their engagements may develop into workshops, artworks, or other future projects.

This season, CADVC welcomes three low-residency AIRs who are developing research and creative projects in UMBC and Baltimore. The visiting artists will offer programs open to the general public in the UMBC Lion Brothers building in downtown Baltimore.

Paul Rucker

Paul Rucker is a multimedia visual artist, composer, and musician. His practice often integrates live performance, original musical compositions, and visual art installation. For over two decades, Rucker has used his own brand of art making as a social practice, which illuminates the legacy of enslavement and its relationship to the US prison industrial complex.An avid collector of artifacts and archives, Rucker holds more than 15,000 pieces about the history of the United States. Items that address false narratives of US history and the strategic withholding of historical events are used as a tool of  "demonization for colonization." His research visit to Baltimore will focus on Baltimore County and the history of "coordinated exclusion."

February 13, 5:30pm: Join Paul Rucker and artist Kim Rice in a public discussion about their research into the history of urban redlining.Rucker and Rice will discuss a project-in-process focused on discriminatory real estate practices and the power of art to change spatial injustice.

Spaces are limited. RSVP required at this link:

 https://forms.gle/FC5K2aADQM8Ufg1S8.

Tomashi Jackson

Tomashi Jackson is an expanded field painter whose multimedia work investigates the links between history, materiality, and current events. In her residency at CADVC, which began in 2022, she has been developing a body of research focused on the history of and advocacy for alternative art spaces. This work builds on Jackson's existing research that she calls the "Pedagogy Study Hall" project. The project is ongoing. 

February 20, 5:30pm: Join Tomashi Jackson for a discussion about her present research. Jackson will be in conversation with Dr. Nicole King, Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture at UMBC.  Spaces are limited. RSVP required at this link: https://forms.gle/wqSCicNmUHYCvApb9.

Levester Williams

Levester Williams is a multimedia artist whose artistic production is rooted in explorations of the relationships between the material and social worlds. His sculptural work and multichannel video projects have been exhibited in museums and art spaces nationally and internationally. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Williams is making a series of visits to UMBC and Baltimore to complete a new filmic work under the project title "dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore." Williams is researching the histories of Cockeysville (Maryland) marble, a material used in many salient objects in the local built environment, including the Washington Monument and iconic exterior steps of Baltimore rowhomes. The movement art documented in Williams's film is an embodied consideration of the labor histories, and mythologies, surrounding this complex material. In Williams's words, the project underscores the "intertwined history of African-Americans' plight to self-determined agency and full citizenship, and a rather benign stone."

March 5, 6pm: Levester Williams will be in conversation with collaborators on his current work in progress, "dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore"(2021-2024). Other discussants will be announced. 

Spaces are limited. RSVP required at this link: https://forms.gle/cV5xEnT572A2e9zNA