This year’s Homecoming brought Retrievers of all ages back to their alma mater. In many ways, Homecoming represented the very best of what UMBC has to offer, from reunions with lifelong friends spanning all of the university’s 52 years, to celebrations of the life of the mind, as well as plenty of fun on and off the field. Here are some highlights from this year’s Homecoming, held October 4-14, 2018.

See the full collection of Homecoming 2018 photos here.

30th Anniversary of the Alumni Awards

To celebrate 30 years of alumni excellence, UMBC greeted a packed concert hall full of guests from our Retriever community. Read more about the Alumni Awards honorees and ceremony here.

Homecoming Carnival and Crab Feast

The weather may have cooled off, but Retriever Fever kept the campus warm all weekend, with carnival games, reunions, food, and more.

GRIT-X

Back by popular demand, GRIT-X featured some of UMBC’s most intriguing faculty and alumni speaking on a variety of topics, from evocative art and film, to math and storytelling, to ways artificial intelligence and robotics are opening the doors of accessibility to people with disabilities.

#RetrieverNation in the House

UMBC’s most faithful fans broke out the black and gold for this year’s Athletic Alumni Reunion and the men’s soccer game versus Hartford (which the Dawgs won).

by Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor, UMBC

When the British street artist Banksy shredded his “Girl With Balloon” after it was purchased for US$1.4 million at Sotheby’s, did he know how the art world would react?

Did he anticipate that the critics would claim that the work, in its partially shredded state, would climb in value to at least $2 million? That the purchaser would not object and would instead rejoice?

We have no way of really knowing, though the famously anonymous artist did suggest that the shredder malfunctioned: The painting was supposed to be fully shredded, not partially destroyed.

As an art historian, I view his act in a larger context – as the latest example of artists deploying guerrilla tactics to expose their disdain for the critics, dealers, gallery owners and museum curators whom they depend on for their livelihood.

In shredding “Girl With Balloon,” Banksy seems to be pointing to a central absurdity of his graffiti art being treated as fine art. When it appears on city streets, anyone can vandalize it; now that the same images are in galleries and auction houses, they must be handled with white gloves.

But, as he may well know, the art market is far too wealthy and adaptable to be undone by a shredder.

In fact, we’ve seen the same pattern play out, time and again: An artist will launch a withering critique and instead of taking offense, the market simply tightens its embrace.

The many versions of subversion

Some of the most well-known of Banksy’s subversive artistic predecessors were part of the early-20th century Dada movement. One of their principal strategies involved denying the market of objects that could be commodified.

French-American artist Marcel Duchamp is perhaps the most well-known Dadaist. In 1917, his “Fountain,” a urinal laid on its back and remounted on a pedestal, was his first volley against the art market’s intellectual pretenses about art.

Duchamp wanted to force the art world to acknowledge that its judgments about quality were based on media hype and money rather than artistic innovation.

However, years later Duchamp admitted to the futility of his gesture.

“I threw … the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” he lamented, “and now they admire [it] for [its] aesthetic beauty.”

In 1920, Francis Picabia, a Cuban-French Dadaist would follow Duchamp’s lead and participate in a performance purposefully designed to provoke the French art world.

Before a Parisian audience gathered at the Palais des Fêtes, Picabia unveiled a chalk drawing entitled “Riz au Nez” (“Rice on the Nose”). The artist’s friend, André Breton, one of the hosts of the event, then erased the drawing. The artwork lasted for just a of couple hours and is now lost to history. The work’s title, it’s been noted, sounds too similar to “rire au nez” (“to laugh in one’s face”) to be coincidental.

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg, who was then an up-and-coming American artist, plucked up the courage to ask Willem de Kooning, an established abstract expressionist, for one of his drawings. Rauschenberg didn’t tell de Kooning much – just that he intended to use it for an unusual project. Athough de Kooning was disapproving, he acquiesced.

After securing his gift, Rauschenberg proceeded, over the period of a month, to carefully erase all traces of the expressive pencil, charcoal and crayon drawing that de Kooning had put to paper.

Rauschenberg then re-titled the work, now preserved in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, “Erased de Kooning Drawing.”

Jean Tinguely’s auto-destructing work, “Homage to New York” (1960), is probably the closest parallel to Banksy’s stunt. Made of scrap found in New Jersey junkyards, the massive work – 27 feet high and 23 feet in length – was supposed to be a mechanical display, sort of like a Rube Goldberg device.

The piece was set up the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and those attending the show included collectors Walter Arensberg and John D. Rockefeller III, and artists John Cage, Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg.

Tinguely briefly set the piece in motion – and then it burst into flames.

The Museum of Modern Art described the scene:

“… a meteorological trial balloon inflated and burst, colored smoke was discharged, paintings were made and destroyed, and bottles crashed to the ground. A player piano, metal drums, a radio broadcast, a recording of the artist explaining his work, and a competing shrill voice correcting him provided the cacophonic sound track to the machine’s self-destruction – until it was stopped short by the fire department.”

Apart from a fragment from Tinguely’s “Homage” preserved in the MoMA collection, all that remains of the work is some choppy film footage.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone surpassing Tinguely’s sound-and-light spectacle.

But in 2001, Michael Landy of the Young British Artists group orchestrated the most comprehensive “art as destruction” work to date.

Titled “Break Down,” Landy placed objects on a conveyor belt running into a machine that pulverized them. In the process, he destroyed all of his belongings – 7,227 pieces in all – including his own paintings and the art of his Young British Artist peers.

Guerrillas in the midst

These acts of destruction are motivated by the same impulse.

In the late 19th century, art production largely became untethered from patronage offered by the church or the state, and artists turned to powerful art dealers for their livelihood.

But many found that the radical, critical aspect of the artistic act was severely compromised – or erased altogether – when the most well-known feature of a work became the dollar sign attached to it.

To many, the market symbolized nothing more than a void.

With the urban street as his studio and insurgency as part of his artistic mission, Banksy’s graffiti often critiques institutions, such as the art museum, and authority figures like the police) and the Queen of England.

Though the market value of his work has soared in recent years, Banksy continues to paint images in public spaces that make preservation near impossible – and even invite theft or defacement.

Still, as guerrilla theater, Banksy’s recent act will be tough to beat. It’s certainly his most subversive and penetrating public foray into the elite art marketplace.

But even with all his critique, the question continues to nag: Is Banksy complicit with the art market? The very society he undermines, one that feeds on spectacle, has made him famous and his art immensely profitable.

In the wake of World War I, Dadaist artists made a practice of shocking their public audiences by wantonly destroying their own artistic creations. The public soon learned to cheer them on, and to detach themselves from the attack artists were actively waging on their sensibilities.

A century later, at Sotheby’s, the initial shock of a shredded “Girl With Balloon” dissipated quickly. The hype only grew. The market adapted.

Sotheby’s has since released a statement declaring that the piece – renamed “Love is in the Bin” – is “the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.”

* * * * *

Header image of Preminda Jacob by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC Magazine.

Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

UMBC has received a new five-year, $1.4 million grant to further expand the university’s tradition of innovative undergraduate teaching and strong partnerships with community colleges to support the success of students from all backgrounds. The Improving Undergraduate Science Education (IUSE) grant from the National Science Foundation will focus on teaching and learning in biology, following similar work on the chemistry curriculum in 2016 and 2017.

At the center of this work will be close collaboration with area partners Howard Community College, Anne Arundel Community College, Community College of Baltimore County, and Montgomery College.

The first aim of the grant focuses on aligning curriculum in biology across all the partner institutions to improve the transfer student experience.

It’s about “getting faculty in the same room to talk about how biology is taught,” says Laura Ott, executive director for IUSE and director of the College of Natural and Mathematical Science’s Science Education Research Unit.

Faculty from all partner institutions will meet regularly to discuss course content and potential differences in class size, assessment methods, facilities, or teaching techniques that could impact the student experience. They’ll outline ways to either limit those differences or to better prepare students to anticipate them and feel confident in knowing how to handle them.

Biology by the numbers

The grant’s second goal creates the NEXUS Institute in Quantitative Biology, which builds on work by UMBC faculty to develop, implement, and evaluate biology teaching modules that incorporate quantitative reasoning skills. That work found that some students gained more from the modules than others. Transfer students in particular seemed to have more trouble applying their math skills to biology.

With this finding in mind, faculty from the partner institutions will work together throughout the year “to come up with a common set of modules to be used in the four core biology courses, so everyone is getting the same exposure, no matter what point they enter UMBC,” says biology professor Jeff Leips, one of the IUSE leads. The materials that are developed will be made completely public, so other institutions can utilize them as well. Instructors will also receive guidance on how to use the modules in their courses.

“The idea is that over five years we’ll develop a whole warehouse, a repertoire of these modules that people can mix and match to align with the cultures of their departments,” says Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at UMBC.“The modules are a tool to get people to talk, to give them something to think about,” he adds, “so they can build fruitful collaborations across their unique institutions founded in their shared commitment to student success.”

For Leips, helping biology students develop their quantitative reasoning skills  “is exciting, because it’s necessary.” As science continues to become more quantitative, gaining the relevant skills is imperative to students’ long-term success. “You can’t get away with being a researcher or a medical practitioner without understanding quantitative applications,” he says. “There’s a societal need.”

Sharing skills

The third goal for the grant is to support faculty development. UMBC offers a certificate for instructors who want to embrace active learning and inquiry-based teaching practices. Under IUSE, Linda Hodges, director of UMBC’s Faculty Development Center, will work to make a similar certificate available to instructors from all the partner institutions.

“Cohesive, steady engagement” and “practice, feedback, and reflection” are known to encourage lasting change among teachers, explains Hodges, which, in turn, “is linked to improved student learning.”

Supporting educators in this way will also help them develop a sense of community and share their own knowledge of best practices with one another—as Dean LaCourse describes, “to take the best of everything we do and bring it together.” This work with faculty could also broaden the reach of the project, as that community of educators goes on to publish about successful, new techniques for teaching biology.

The new IUSE grant marks the third successful UMBC-community college partnership to improve the educational experience and learning outcomes for transfer students in the sciences. At their core, these partnerships “are about building relationships, better communication, and building a community that benefits the students, the faculty, and the institutions,” LaCourse says. “My students are your students, and your students are my students,” he adds. “The idea is to make a bigger tent, and not work as two institutions, but as one.”

Image: Weihong Lin (second from left), associate professor of biological sciences, works with her students in the lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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