Author: Alieh Rezaei

January 27 – March 23, 2014

Seventy photographs–exquisite expositions of light and shadow, visual textures, and balanced tension–spanning the distinctive career of N. Jay Jaffee (1921-1999) are presented in this exhibition. From capturing the vibrancy of New York City streets to meditating on still landscapes, Jaffee’s photographs are very much a form of self-portrait, a means by which he interpreted both the world and his position in it. These thoughtful and subtly witty photographs are invitations to see, to question, and to engage fully with life.

Public Program

Christy Ford Chapin, Assistant Professor of History, will shed light on the historical context in which Jaffee was active as a photographer, with emphasis on the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the dramatic changes that occurred from the late 1940s through the 1990s. Tom Beck, Chief Curator of the Albin O. Kuhn Gallery, will discuss the life and work of photographer N. Jay Jaffee including: the influence of the Photo League the only arts group that was included on the United States Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations in 1947; Jaffee’s longtime muse—the streets of New York City; and the increasingly poetic and personal elements that characterize his later work.

This event is free and open to the public.

September 16 – December 20, 2013

Artist, writer, typographic poet, and scholar-critic Johanna Drucker is widely known for her contributions to contemporary art theory and history, as well as her prolific output as a creative artist. Throughout her career she has helped shape the field of artists’ books, visual poetics, and digital aesthetics in dialogue with the arts and critical issues. Druckworks, a retrospective exhibition, is the first comprehensive presentation of Drucker’s books, graphic art and visual projects, and reveals key insights into the artist’s development over the course of four decades.

This exhibition is organized by the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago.

Artist’s Talk: Johanna Drucker

6:00 p.m. Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Reception to follow

September 16 – December 20, 2013

This exhibition presents 34 letterpress prints produced by a group of international artists as part of the Vista Sans Wood Type Project, an experimental type and print project that blends modern technology with a historic printing process to produce a hybrid form of typographic design.

The Vista Sans Wood Type Project was organized by Tricia Treacy and Ashley John Pigford.

Public Program

Artist’s Talk: Ashley John Pigford

6:00 p.m. Thursday, November 21

Ashley John Pigford is a practicing visual artist and graphic designer, and a professor of graphic and interaction design at the University of Delaware. Pigford’s work examines the relationships between technology, materials and experience. His cross-disciplinary and highly collaborative design/art work involves a wide range of media experiences including traditional print design, motion graphics, interactive installation, kinetic sculpture, digitally-augmented performance and letterpress printing.

Reception to follow

April 8 – May 31, 2013

News photographs are an integral part of newspapers. They equally illustrate, document, and interpret the news. Historically, newspaper editors and artists used hand-working on photographs to give emphasis, drama, and legibility to the primary events of the image. The alterations would mostly become invisible once the newspaper was printed. Seeing the original photographs showing the editing marks is a multilayered cultural and aesthetic experience, and reveals a new context in this exhibition featuring 90 news photographs from the 1920s to the 1970s selected from UMBC’s Baltimore Sun archive.

6:00 p.m.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Symposium on Print Media, Photography & Art

William F. Zorzi The Wire, Writer, Editor, Actor; Baltimore Sun, Reporter, Retired

Jed Kirschbaum Baltimore Sun, Photographer, Retired

Tom Beck AOK Gallery, UMBC, Chief Curator

Christophe Corbett Department of English, UMBC, Professor

The presentation of A New Context: Photographs from the Baltimore Sun Revisited at UMBC is supported in part by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Endowment, and individual contributions.

January 28 – March 24, 2013

The exhibition presents more than 60 works of photography and video installations by twenty of Iran’s most celebrated photographers. These images, often luscious with color and imagery, are dense narratives full of history and symbolism, and filtered through private, individual sensibilities, that provide cultural clues about our sameness and our differences. The photographs presented in Persian Visions cannot entirely surmount the physical and cultural distance between Iran and the United States; nevertheless, the exhibition builds a visual bridge that allows for differences, and leads viewers to new awareness of other ways of being and seeing.

Persian Visions was developed by Hamid Severi for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran and Gary Hallman of the Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota, and is toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, D.C.

Public Programming:

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

5:30 PM

Hadi Gharabaghi will discuss the accomplishments of Persian Visions as an exhibition and humanistic endeavor, as well as what it means to set in motion grassroots cultural exchange in the void of over three decades of diplomatic discourse between two states. The idea of the artistic encounter being the only promising vector by which the imperialistically bastardized knowledge of culture in present-day Iran might be salvaged will be presented. However, there is a limit to humanistic discourse as a means of knowledge production, and circumstances in which the humanities have functioned as a façade for gathering intelligence on state-defined “hostile” territories will be presented.

This event is free and open to the public.

Installation Views

The presentation of Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran at UMBC is supported in part by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Endowment and individual contributions.

September 4 – November 25, 2012

Over a four-year period beginning in 1995, photographer Craig J. Barber, ex-combat Marine, returned to Vietnam to traverse many of his former military routes, making images with an 8×10 inch pinhole camera. Part cathartic exercise, part curiosity about what had become of this once war-torn country, Barber has created a series of diptych and triptych panorama platinum images that capture the serene beauty of the country and, at times for him, the all-too-memorable landscapes.

The images Barber has captured are not documentary images. The minutes-long exposure required to record pinhole images produce blurring in anything that was in motion during the exposure; this sense of movement contributes to both a sense of mystery and a dreamlike, introspective quality. They will appeal to a wide audience and to Vietnam veterans who may find some comfort, as does Craig Barber, in seeing Vietnam in a different light.

This exhibition has been organized by the George Eastman House & Museum. The presentation of this exhibition is supported by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund and the American Legion Towson Post #22, as well as individual contributions.

PublicProgram

6:00 p.m. Thursday, October 18, 2012

Artist Talk​: Craig Barber

Exhibition views

April 9 – May 31, 2012

The American Civil War coincided with the early years of photography, and the images captured by the early practitioners of this art have helped to shape the memories of this central historical event. Technological limitations, artistic aspirations and societal expectations strongly impacted the images produced by photographers “documenting” the events of the Civil War. This exhibition will explore the art and artifice of Civil War photography, while revealing something about why each of the selected 81 images was produced.

Public Program

4:00 pm
April 17, 2012

Myth, Memory, & the American Civil War
Anne Sarah Rubin, Associate Professor & Graduate Program Director, Department of History, UMBC

Civil War Photography & Historical Evidence
Tom Beck, Curator, Albin O. Kuhn Gallery, and Affiliate Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC

Reception to follow.
Free & open to the public

Exhibition views

The presentation of this exhibition is supported by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Foundation and individual contributions.

January 29 – March 22, 2012

The Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents Passage on the Underground Railroad, artwork by Stephen Marc, organized by the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo, New York, and curated by Sandra H. Olsen.

Stephen Marc’s fascinating photographs and digital montages explore the history of freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. With this body of work, Marc combines contemporary images with historic documents and artifacts to create richly-layered objects that bring the past palpably into the present. For seven years the artist photographed the routes traveled by fugitive slaves in their search for freedom, documenting and interpreting his research along the way. In Passage on the Underground Railroad, Marc shares the results of these explorations through eighty-seven thought-provoking, unconventional, and haunting digital images.

Marc uses two types of photographic composites to reveal the history of the Underground Railroad (UGRR): multiple photographs that describe UGRR sites and metaphorical montages that address the larger horror of slavery. Each UGRR site has a story, so individual sites are portrayed inside and out, using several photographs in combination to create visual tours. The companion montages evocatively interpret the South’s “peculiar institution” from which slaves were fleeing. These multilayered narratives weave together elements from the landscape of slavery—plantation structures, crop fields, waterways, tools of bondage and agriculture, merchant tokens and bank note currency, newspaper articles, and advertisements—along with UGRR site details, antislavery materials, and contemporary cultural references.

Public Program

4:00 p.m.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Passage on the Underground Railroad and the Black Experience within American History

Stephen Marc’s Humanities Forum presentation will place the Underground Railroad composite images into the context of his other bodies of work thereby giving his interpretations of history while focusing on the African American experience.

Sponsored by the Humanities Forum of the Dresher Center for the Humanities and the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery

Stephen Marc is Professor of Art in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts, Arizona State University.

August 31 – December 21, 2011

Dramatic social, political and artistic changes swept across Italy in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, finding expression in remarkable funerary sculptures commissioned by the newly affluent middle class. Featured in A Legacy of Love are photographs of memorial sculptures created between 1820 and 1840, and ranging in style from Neoclassicism through ever more astonishing forms of Realism, Symbolism and Art Deco. These sculptures, artifacts of both a personal and a public history, express the values, aspirations, virtues and sins of a rising social and economic class which had attained an unexpected degree of power.

The 62 photographs presented in this exhibition are by renowned photographers and friends Robert Fichter and Robert Freidus. Fichter is noted for his satirical images reflecting on American culture and Freidus is highly respected for his dedication to documenting and advocating for the preservation of Italian funerary sculpture.

Public Program

4:00 p.m.
Tuesday, November 1

Talks by photographers Robert W. Fichter and Robert Freidus

April 13 – May 31, 2011

Since the invention of photography, people have taken and used photographs of the deceased to celebrate memories of late loved ones and to mitigate the finality of death. Such images, known as memorial photographs, are special mementos with deep meaning for mourners. From early daguerreotypes to contemporary images, Sleeping Beauties showcases over one hundred examples of memorial photography, revealing the diversity within this photographic practice. Considered individually or together, the images on display in this exhibition encourage contemplation of the ways in which individuals and cultures respond to death.

Public Program