2019

Bonnie Jones, Sound Artist

Location: PAHB 216, Dresher Center Conference Room
Monday, November 11, Noon – 1:00 PM

Bonnie Jones describes her work as telling the stories that objects would tell if they could. The story of a silver bowl. The autobiography of a sound. The history of a word. She creates environments and imaginary places using sound, text, and performance where everything is an autonomous actor-from the smallest sounds to the fleeting memory to the personal identity. At times, these stories are a layered cacophony of voices, other times an object aria, clear and direct.

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J.M. Giordano, Photojournalist

Shuttered Images from the Fall of Bethlehem Steel
Wednesday, November 6, Noon – 1:00 PM
Location: PAHB 216, Dresher Center Conference Room

Joe Giordano will present on SHUTTERED: Images from the Fall of Bethlehem Steel, currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. From 1887 to 2012, the Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point provided steady if dangerous work for tens of thousands of men and women. With the shuttering of the Point’s blast furnaces, the world inhabited by local steel workers took a number of hits, and the effects continue to reverberate today. The grandson of a steel worker, award-winning photojournalist J.M. Giordano has spent more than 15 years capturing the impact of the mill’s decline and closure on his hometown of Baltimore. What do you do, Giordano asks, when the only lifestyle you’ve ever known—an industrial lifestyle passed down by family, friends, and coworkers for generations—becomes obsolete?

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A Dialog with Elissa Blount-Moorehead

Wednesday, October 30th, Noon – 1:00 PM
Location: Lion Brothers Building, 875 Hollins Street, Baltimore, MD 21201
Free, catered event with good vegetarian options

Bio: Elissa Blount Moorhead is an artist and producer exploring the poetics of quotidian Black life, to emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building. She dwells in both immutable Black culture and the impermanence of its physical manifestations.

Moorhead has created public art, exhibitions, and cultural programs for the last 25 years. She is currently a principal partner at TNEG film studios, with Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed. TNEG asserts that a cinema calibrated to the cultural, socioeconomic, and existential particulars of Black being is not only possible but inescapably the way forward toward a viable Black cinema. Moorhead co-founded Red Clay Arts in NYC. She has co-produced and curated over 20 exhibitions and multimedia projects including Random Occurrences; Cat Calls (Street Harassment project); Practicum; FunkGodJazzMedicine; and Art in Odd Places. She was awarded the USA Artist Fellowship in (2018), Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship (2017), Ford Foundation /Just Films/Rockwood Fellowship (2017) and Ruby Award (2016) Creative Capital (2019) Baker Award winner (2019). She is currently producing a documentary film on Gil Scott Heron and a AR/projection installation called As of A Now. She is the author of P is for Pussy, an illustrated “children’s” book and is featured in the new anthology How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance released in March 2019. Her upcoming film, Back and Song co-directed with Bradford Young will premiere at the Philadelphia Contemporary in October 2019.

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How to Self-Produce Theatre, with Interrobang Theatre

October 23^rd, Noon – 1:30 PM
Location: Acting Directing Studio (ADS) – PAHB 105

Description: So you want to produce a play? Katie and Kiirstn share how they established their theatre company, Interrobang Theatre, as recent graduates of UMBC’s theatre program and share tips on how to produce plays with a limited budget and resources in Baltimore. Learn how to make #art with your #friends.

Bios: Katie Hileman (Artistic Director/Co-Founder), UMBC BFA Acting ‘12, is a Baltimore-based DIY theatre-maker, director, and performer currently pursuing her MFA in Theatre from Towson University. Katie is the Artistic Director and co-founder of the Interrobang Theatre Company (Winner, Best of Charm City Fringe 2014), where she has written, acted, directed, and cleaned toilets. Katie has worked with many local companies including The Acme Corporation, Submersive Productions, Venus Theatre Company, Cohesion Theatre Company, Rep Stage, Single Carrot Theatre, and more.

Kiirstn Pagan (Producer/Co-Founder), UMBC BA Theatre ‘11 (stage management concentration), is a photographer and graphic designer with extensive experience in marketing strategy. She is a co-founder of Interrobang and has overseen all Interrobang brand identity development and marketing campaigns over its five-year existence. She has previously worked on the in house marketing teams at Baltimore Center Stage and Everyman Theatre. Kiirstn is grateful for the opportunities and friendships UMBC has provided her and continues to offer beyond graduation.

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The politics and practicalities of Wikipedia editing, with Siân Evans

Monday, September 30th
Noon – 1:00, PAHB 216

Program: Editing the world’s largest open source encyclopedia is a political act. In this workshop, attendees will be introduced to the politics and practicalities of Wikipedia editing. By the end of the session, they will have created a user account and will learn how to add a well-cited sentence to an existing Wikipedia article. They will also be given the tools to learn how to create their own articles in the future and how to connect with various Wiki-related activist projects.

Bio: Siân Evans is the Information Literacy & Instructional Design Librarian at Maryland Institute College of Art and the co-founder of Art+Feminism, a campaign to create meaningful changes to the body of knowledge available about feminism and the arts on Wikipedia. Her writing can be found in journals such as Art Documentation and The Serials Librarian, and her work with Art+Feminism has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, and more. She was named a Leading Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine and a Badass Woman by Buzzfeed. She firmly believes that librarianship is information activism, and spends her free time with her precious pitbull, Pickle.

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CIRCA-IMET Catalyst – Art and Science Collaborations on Climate Justice and a Living Ocean

Friday, September 27, Noon – 2:00pm
Location: Performing arts and Humanities Building, PAHB 428
Free, catered event, with good vegetarian options

CIRCA-IMET will be co-hosting this event with Ocean Space, Venice, Italy, in coordination with a convening led by Chus Martínez, Curator, Director of Institut Kunst in Basel, ocean-archive.org, and TBA21–Academy. Operating at the intersection of scientific inquiry, artistic intelligence, and environmental advocacy.

Moderator:
Dr. Kathleen Cusick, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, UMBC

Panelists:
Dr. Tsvetan Bachvaroff, Research Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Lisa Moren, Professor, Visual Arts Department, UMBC
Dr. Eric Schott, Associate Research Professor, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Stephen Bradley, Associate Professor, Visual Arts Department, UMBC

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April Danielle Lewis, Artist

Monday, September 16th, Noon – 1:30 PM
Location: PAHB 216, Dresher Center Conference Room
Free, catered event with good vegetarian options

Presentation: April Danielle Lewis’ recent interventions, performances, installations and experiences have situated Baltimore at the center of dialogs around history, place, and identity sharpened with a social justice and community building lens.

Bio: April Danielle Lewis is an artist, visionary, and community cultivator. Derived from a printmaking background, her performances and interventions often involve working in multiples, repetitive actions and building a framework that allows for works and performances to naturally evolve. Her work collaborates and invites her audience to be participants in engaging and building community. Lewis earned a degree in art and design with a concentration in printmaking from Towson University and an Associate of Arts degree in visual art from Anne Arundel Community College. She serves as the Membership Manager at Open Works, a non-profit makerspace that makes tools, technology and the knowledge to use them accessible to all, volunteers as librarian at the Station North Tool Library and serves on the board of directors at Neighborhood Housing Services Baltimore. April lives and works in Baltimore.

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Kristen Hileman, Curator

Monday, September 9th, Noon – 1:30 PM
Location: PAHB 216 Dresher Center
Free, catered event with good vegetarian options

“The Shimmering Museum”
Reflecting on two decades of curatorial experience presenting exhibitions and permanent collections in museums, Hileman will discuss the current state of the museum field, considering the influence of commercial interests and power structures on programming decisions alongside challenges in securing next generations of patrons. Her talk will also address ways forward for increasing the social, political, and affective resonance of museums, as well as non-museum paths for artists whose aim is to develop a dialogue between their work and the public.

Bio: Kristen Hileman is an Independent Curator based in Baltimore. She served as Head of The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Department of Contemporary Art from 2009 through 2019, where she oversaw the reinstallation of the museum’s renovated contemporary wing in 2012, initiated numerous acquisitions to diversify the collection, and presented exhibitions featuring an array of artists, among them the Guerrilla Girls, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Sarah Oppenheimer, Dario Robleto, Anri Sala, and Tomas Saraceno. Her most recent BMA projects included Meleko Mokgosi: Acts of Resistance, Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin, DIS: A Good Crisis and John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a large-scale retrospective of that influential cultural figure’s visual arts career. Throughout her time at the BMA, Hileman foreground artists with ties to Baltimore including Seth Adelsberger, Maren Hassinger, Sharon Hayes, Jimmy Joe Roche, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek. Jo Smail: Flying with Remnant Wing, her survey of the career of the distinguished painter and Maryland Institute College of Art professor, will open at the BMA in spring 2020.

From 2001 through 2009, Hileman worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., where she organized the first full career retrospective of Anne Truitt, bringing new attention to the important DC-based abstractionist. At the Hirshhorn, Hileman also co-curated the international film and video exhibition The Cinema Effect: Realisms and led projects featuring John Baldessari, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cyprien Gaillard, Mario Garcia Torres, Oliver Herring, Jim Hodges, and Wolfgang Tillmans. She has taught at Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, and the Corcoran College of Art and Design and is a frequent visiting critic and lecturer at colleges and universities.

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Fine Arts Opportunities for Fulbright Applicants

Faculty focused webinar with light refreshments

CIRCA, Pi Mu Ep, and the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences present: Dr. Diane Hoffoss

April 29, 12-1pm
PUP 105, Reception follows in Atrium of PUP, 1:00 – 1:30

In August 2018, a two-ton interactive sculpture showcasing unsolved problems of mathematics and physics came to life in the Nevada desert. Rising 12 feet tall, the unfolding dodecahedron was externally skinned with black panels containing 2240 acrylic windows illuminated by more than 16,000 individually programmed LEDs, while the interior was lined with mirrors over each pentagonal face. The resulting artwork was displayed at Black Rock City, the desert location of Burning Man. This talk outlines our journey, two mathematicians embracing the role of amateur sculpture artists.

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CIRCA Presents: Shelly Purdy and Bonnie Lander in Concert

April 19, Music Box, 3:30-4:30, followed by reception

Shelly Purdy is a contemporary percussionist and educator committed to performing new and experimental music. She performs with various ensembles including the percussion quartet Umbilicus, the science/music ensemble The Inverse Square Trio, Sonic Meditations Baltimore, arts-in-education ensemble Envirodrum Maryland, and The Columbia Orchestra.In addition to ensemble pursuits Ms. Purdy regularly partners with local composers, musicians, dancers, sculptors, and various improvisers within the Baltimore community. Ms. Purdy’s passion for contemporary works has led to a vast array of opportunities including performances at Baltimore’s Artscape Festival, So Percussion’s Summer Institute, IFCP at Mannes, June in Buffalo, Make Music New York, The Livewire Festival, The High Zero Festival, The Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale, and has performed with ensembles such as the Talujon Percussion Quartet, the Wooden Cities Contemporary Ensemble, and the Baltimore trio Microkingdom.

Bonnie Lander (USA) is an avant-garde soprano, violinist, free improviser, and composer based in Baltimore. As a performer and composer Bonnie specializes in works that combine free improvisation with structured composition. In the past few years Bonnie has developed a series of theatrical series of works called “Inside Voices.” These works intend for the audience to experience the voices, noise, and emotional narratives in the performer’s mind through the operatic use of timbre, resonance, articulation, as well its embrace of visceral, gut wrenching emotion. Bonnie currently works at 2640 Space in Baltimore, and is a founding member of NYC based chamber ensemble Rhymes With Opera, which premiered her 2017 opera Coping Mechanisms.

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Building connections with venues, funders, agencies, performers and artists

Monday, April 8
Noon – 1:00 PM
Location: Fine Arts, FA 453

Ashley Molese is an independent curator, producer and festival organizer. She has over fifteen years of non-profit experience, and since 2018 has founded studios, worked in film, and continues to collaborate with artists on upcoming installations. She specializes in temporary public art, new media and large-scale design/build projects. Ashley managed and curated Light City during its first three years of development and festival delivery. Previously, she has worked in a variety of arts organizations, including Arts Access Victoria, Arts Victoria, Australia, The Overload Poetry Festival, The Melbourne Writers Festival and the Creative Alliance.

She received a Masters of Arts in Arts Management from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Ashley received a Master of Fine Arts in Curatorial Practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. She currently splits her time between Baltimore and New York.

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CIRCA Presents: Brooke Singer

April 1, 5:00 PM
Black Box Theater, Performing Arts and Humanities Building
A reception follows

Brooke Singer engages science, technology, politics and arts practices. Her work lives “on” and “off” line in the form of websites, photographs, hardware, visualizations, performances, installations and social spaces. She is interested in negotiating between worlds characterized as either natural or social because design in the age of the Anthropocene requires both scientific and cultural modes of inquiry. She is a serial collaborator and her partners include government, academic, cultural and business entities. She is interested in taking knowledge out of its “home” context to open up discourse, reframe ideas and allow for distinctly new possibilities.  She is Associate Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase, a co-founder of the former collective Preemptive Media and co-founder of La Casita Verde in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is in the collections of of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Microsoft and Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy.

Professor Singer will discuss her newest collaboration, Carbon Sponge, a platform to explore carbon sequestration in urban soils as a means to tackle the urgent problems of food security and anthropogenic climate change. Carbon Sponge is the first carbon sequestration study initiated by non-scientists in an urban area with a focus on numerous, small plots of land distributed over large areas with dense populations. Partners include the New York Hall of Science, CUNY Graduate Center’s Advanced Scientific Research Center and NYC Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation.

www.carbonsponge.org

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CIRCA Catalyst: Amy Cavanaugh and Doreen Bolger 

March 6, Dresher Center, PAHB 216
Noon-1:00

Program: The presenters will discuss the evolution of curatorial work over forty years, beginning in the 1970s with Bolger’s work on historic American Art, continuing with Cavanagh’s efforts with living artists, and concluding with their recent collaboration on MAP’s 2018 exhibition Repurposed with Purpose: Making and Meaning in the Materials of Art. They will consider substantial changes in curatorial intention, from sometimes esoteric art historical research to community impact and engagement, and comment on opportunities and challenges offered by technology and its innovations.

Amy Cavanaugh, the niece of color-field artist James Hilleary and daughter of sculptor Carolyn Cavanaugh, Cavanaugh was born in Washington, DC, and trained there as a classical cellist at Catholic University of America. She then toured and worked in the recording industry, playing with the instrumental band, Yeveto, composers of experimental rock music. In 2004, Cavanaugh joined Washington’s ARCH Development Corporation as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. There in 2007 she opened the Honfleur Gallery, now recognized as one of the region’s leading platforms for emerging and mid-career local, national, and international artists. In 2012, she became the Executive Director of Maryland Art Place (MAP), the anchor arts organization in Baltimore’s Bromo Tower Arts and Entertainment District. MAP places emerging and mid-career artists in the spotlight with professionally-staged exhibitions and programs as well as community outreach. In 2014, Cavanaugh boldly returned MAP to its original home, a five-story historic building on Saratoga Street, after some peripatetic years, most spent in the Inner Harbor.

Doreen Bolger retired in 2015 after 17 years as Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art, a center for 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art, where she redefined its artistic focus, placing greater emphasis on its world-class collection; initiated major traveling exhibitions; expanded educational programs; and eliminated general admission fees. She also led a major BMA renovation, including the transformation of galleries and essential infrastructure, improved visitor amenities, and the addition of a new education center that offers creative experiences for visitors. Bolger, a supporter of the city’s emerging art scene, plays a leadership role in the region’s cultural community, serving on the boards of the Creative Alliance and Maryland Citizens for the Arts. She was previously Director of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, and served as a curator at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Bolger received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of The City University of NY, M.A. from the University of Delaware, Newark, and B.A. from Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA.

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CIRCA PRESENTS ANDREW KEIPER AND KEI ITO

Wednesday, February 13, 12 – 1 p.m.
216 Performing Arts and Humanities Building (Dresher Center Conference Room)

The Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts presents Andrew Keiper and Kei Ito, a collaborative artist team whose large-scale visual and sound installations probe the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and their intertwined family histories. Ito’s grandfather witnessed the explosion of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that killed his family, while Keiper’s grandfather was an engineer who contributed to the effort to develop the bomb. Their collaboration grapples with this history while asserting its pertinence to a contemporary audience living in an increasingly unstable political landscape. Ito and Keiper seek mutual understanding while contemplating the roots, sorrow, and scope of the bombing. The artists will discuss their project Afterimage Requiem, a pairing of Ito’s 108 photographic prints, and Keiper’s four-channel audio experience, as well as their forthcoming work, Archives Aflame.

In 2016, Ito and Keiper received the Rubys Artist Project Grant through the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance to create Afterimage Requiem. The Rubys was conceived and initiated with start-up funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and are a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. Further support for this project comes from Full Circle Fine Art Services.

Andrew Paul Keiper is a sound artist based in Baltimore, Maryland, where he is faculty in the Animation and Film programs at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work addresses the legacy of nuclear weaponry, race and white supremacy in Baltimore, and the frontier between sound art and experimental music. Andrew’s art has spanned the gamut from painting and woodworking to video and performance, but currently, he primarily produces sound-based art, installation, sound design, and scores. His work very often portrays reverberant acoustic spaces and the ways sounds erode when transmitted or recorded. Andrew’s work asks the audience to listen deeply into and through imagined worlds that both resist and open up to our hearing. Andrew received his BFA in painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2002 and his MFA from MICA’s Photographic and Electronic Media program in 2016. He has exhibited in Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey and Washington, DC. Andrew’s work has been covered by the Washington Post Magazine, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Magazine, Bmore Art and others.

Kei Ito is a conceptual photographer working primarily with camera-less image making and installation art. Ito earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016, following his BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2014. Ito’s work addresses issues of deep loss and intergenerational connection as he explores the materiality and experimental processes of photography. His recent exhibitions include Afterimage Requiem at the Baltimore War Memorial funded by the Rubys Artist grant; an art billboard project in NYC funded by 14×48.org, an art billboard organization; Only What We Can Carry, a solo show at the Hillyer Art Space in Washington DC; a solo exhibition hosted by Noorderlicht in the Netherlands; and he is one of the participants of 2018 FOTOFOCUS Biennial in Cincinnati. Ito’s works have been collected by major art institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL; the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL; the California Institute of Integral Studies/Chroma in San Francisco, CA; En Foco in the Bronx, NY; and the Nikon Corporation in Tokyo, Japan.