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Queer Artists + Archives Symposium

Friday, October 24, 2025

9:30 am – 5:00 pm

AOK Library Gallery, UMBC

Long before institutions turned their attention to LGBTQ+ archives, Queer individuals preserved, shared, and celebrated their own personal and community histories. This symposium brings together artists, archivists, and historians—as well as those working across disciplines—to reflect upon the evolving role of archives in preserving and sharing the stories and histories of Queer artists. Participants will include artists whose practice engages personal or public archival collections and practitioners who are illuminating marginalized histories through their work with archives and archivists. We will also examine the ethical and political imperatives for those who use and who steward these collections and consider the absences that remain.  

The Queer Artists + Archives Symposium is free and open to the public.

Registration is required. Please complete the registration form by October 20, 2025; requests after this date will be accommodated when possible.

Refreshments and lunch will be provided. Directions to campus and visitor parking lots are available at https://librarygallery.umbc.edu/plan-your-visit/


Speakers

Portrait of Leslie Cozzi

Leslie Cozzi

Darrel Ellis: From Archive to Exhibition

Dr. Leslie Cozzi, FAAR’18, is the Curator and Department Head of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at The Baltimore Museum of Art, where she is responsible for over 68,000 works on paper and has organized numerous exhibitions, including A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone and BaltimoreOmar Ba: Political Animals; and Darrel Ellis: Regeneration. She was a 2017-2018 Rome Prize Winner at the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Cozzi previously worked at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum. She holds a PH.D. from the University of Virginia and a B.A. from Yale University.

Alexander D’Agostino

Title TBA

Kate Drabinski

Kate Drabinski

Doing Queer Histories in Public

Dr. Kate Drabinski is Teaching Professor in Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies (GWST), Director of the Humanities Scholars Program, and Associate Director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL+) program. Her focus areas of teaching and research include queer theory, transgender studies, LGBTQ+ history, and public humanities pedagogies and practices. She organizes the UMBC LGBTQ+ Oral History Project, bringing students into conversation with queer people both on and off campus to record and preserve the histories of our communities. Her latest publication is Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, co-edited with UMBC’s own Dr. Nicole King and Dr. Joshua Davis.

Ben Egerman

Ben Egerman

History at the Gay Bar: Using local history and the arts to build and empower LGBTQ+ communities

Ben Egerman is a public librarian and researcher in Baltimore. Since working on the Maryland LGBTQ+ Historic Context Study starting in 2018, he has worked to uncover our state’s LGBTQ+ history and educate audiences around Maryland through library programs, events, and zines. His work aims to use history to build community, promote advocacy and activist groups, and highlight artists, musicians, photographers, and drag queens who use or refer to this history in their work. He lives in Hampden with his husband and a cat who, like Ben, is extremely annoying but gets away with it because he’s so darn cute.

Portrait of Hunter O'Hanian

Hunter O’Hanian

Three Case Studies in Queer Archival Research

Hunter O’Hanian is the founding Director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Additionally, he was head of the Stonewall National Museum and Library and the College Art Association.  In Spring 2025, Phaidon published Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories, which he co-edited with Beth Saunders and Jonathan D. Katz.  He also organized an exhibition of Badertscher’s works, which is currently on view at the gay/queer space here in Baltimore, The Club Car. He has also recently curated an exhibition of works by Dan Kane at the South Dakota Art Museum, as well as two exhibitions on homoerotic inspirations from Renaissance paintings in contemporary queer art.  A frequent consultant to the Tom of Finland Foundation, he is presently working on a new book project featuring American queer artist, Harry Bush (1926-1994).

James Smalls

James Smalls

Gossip, Hearsay, Innuendo: (Re)Creating an Archive (The Case of Féral Benga)

James Smalls is Professor of Visual Arts in the area of Art History and Museum Studies. He is Affiliate Professor of Africana Studies. His research and publications consider the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexualities in European art of the 19th century and in the art and visual culture of the Black Diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (2003) and The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten (2006). His current and future research and publication projects include Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism; As Gay As It Was Black:” Art, Queer Networks, and Interracial Sociability in the Harlem Renaissance, 1925-1939; “Baltimore’s ‘Outsider Within’: Race and Queerness in the Photography of Amos Badertscher;” “American Modernism’s Slippery Slope: Classicism, Primitivism, Ethnography in Sculpture;” and “Queer Harlem: Gay Sociability and Transatlantic Modernism.”

SHAN Wallace

SHAN Wallace

Not lost forever, but waiting to be found

SHAN Wallace (b. 1991) is a nomadic award-winning interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and image-maker, from Baltimore, MD. Wallace utilizes a range of mediums to weave narratives and imagine new stories. Rooted in image-making techniques such as photography, film, and collage, as well as in situ installations, these mediums serve as the foundation of her artistic practice.

She has exhibited work internationally in galleries and museums, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, CA, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.,  The Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts in New York, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, The Peale Center in Baltimore, MD, and NXTHVN in New Haven, CT. Her work is held in both public and private collections across the U.S., including The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, The Whitney Museum, and Johns Hopkins University, as well as various private collections.

SHAN lives and works in many spaces between Brooklyn, New York and Baltimore, MD.


Honoring Amos Badertscher

This convening honors the legacy of Amos Badertscher, a Baltimore photographer who from the 1960s until 2005 documented hustlers, club kids, go-go dancers, drag queens, drug addicts, friends, and lovers who were part of LGBTQ+ life in Baltimore. Amos compiled a personal archive of thousands of images that preserve one man’s vision of Queer life in his city during a pivotal historical moment. This symposium celebrates the publication of the first major monograph on the artist, and expands upon themes and ideas resonant with his body of work.


Cover image collage: (clockwise from top left) Baltimore Sun negatives; Jose Villarrubia, Adam. Photograph © 1991 José Villarrubia, Model: Cesar Tirado; Women: a Journal of Liberation vol 5 no. 2 (1977); rainbow colored book spines; Photographer unknown, Four women in tuxedos, ca. 1930s; BLK magazine; Documents of Struggle; No Straight Lines; Amos Badertscher, A 70’s Fairy Tale, 1979. Courtesy of the Artist. © Amos Badertscher; Kipp Dawson, Gay Liberation: A Socialist Perspective


The presentation of this public program is supported by the Arts+ initiative, CAHSS.

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Picturing Mobility: Black Tourism and Leisure during the Jim Crow Era

September 2 –December 19, 2025

Picturing Mobility explores what it meant to seek leisure and travel as a Black American during the Jim Crow era. The exhibition features snapshots and travel ephemera of Black leisure experiences primarily from the mid-Atlantic during the 1920s to 1960s. From beach outings to family road trips, these images offer glimpses into everyday moments of happiness, relaxation and community, challenging dominant narratives that define the era solely through restriction and struggle. Viewers are encouraged to reflect on the emotional power of these images of Black resistance and mobility.


Public Programming

Curatorial talk with Dr. Elizabeth Patton

Friday, September 19 at 5pm, Library Gallery

Followed by an opening reception

Elizabeth Patton is Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research interests center on media history, identity and space, and how media practices have informed popular understandings of work and leisure.

Her book, Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office (Rutgers University Press, 2020), examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture and by the communication and real estate industries through mass media during the 20th century. Elizabeth’s current book project, Documenting Black Leisure as a Form of Resistance, examines the history of Black leisure and tourism in the US through Jim Crow-era media. She is the recipient of the 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Recent research can be found in edited volumes such as Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021) and Race and the Suburbs in American Film (SUNY Press, 2021). She is the co-managing editor of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.

Panel discussion: Documenting Black Leisure and Preserving Community Archives

Thursday, December 4 at 5pm, Library Gallery

Followed by a reception


Lenders to the Exhibition:

AFRO American Newspapers Archives
Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum
The Burns Collection & Archive
The People’s Archive, DC Public Library
Linda Newton
Maryland Center for History and Culture
Maryland State Archives
The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University
Morgan State University
National Museum of African American History, Archives Center
National Park Service
New York Public Library
Old Dominion University
Peter J. Cohen Collection
Courtesy of Philip J. Merrill, Nanny Jack & Co. Archives
Virginia State Parks
Yale University

The presentation of this exhibition and its public programs is supported by the Arts+ initiative, CAHSS, and 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 Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributors.

Image caption: Addison Scurlock, Picnic, #78, [Highland Beach, Maryland], c. 1931, printed 1982. Gelatin Silver Print, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P82-17-014)

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Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories book out now!

We are proud to announce the publication of Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories, Edited by Hunter O’Hanian, Jonathan D. Katz, and Beth Saunders, with essays by James Smalls, Joseph Plaster, Rafael Alvarez, and Theo Gordon. Published by Monacelli.

The long-awaited first career survey from photographer Amos Badertscher, who comprehensively documented a uniquely American queer underworld

Across several decades, self-taught photographer Amos Badertscher (1936–2023) made thousands of photographs of a liminal queer world: young male sex workers, drag performers, trans pioneers, and Baltimore, Maryland’s inclusive, ribald nightlife. The encounters with these marginalized figures helped Badertscher understand his own queer identity and reveal a confident body of work that stakes out an important corner of queer art and aesthetics.

Made between the 1960s and early 2000s, the photographs featured here constitute an unparalleled chronicle of a culture of the era particular not only to Badertscher’s hometown, but universally identifiable, one which began to fade with the movement of LGBTQ+ rights and liberation. The hundreds of images are accompanied by Badertscher’s writings about the history and experiences of his subjects, further illuminating the intimate inner lives of people who were frequently dismissed, feared, and objectified by mainstream culture. Amos Badertscher Images and Stories is a landmark introduction to a figure who is now finally receiving his due as a major twentieth-century portraitist and chronicler of queer subculture.

Click here to purchase.

Specifications

  • Format: Hardback
  • Size: 289 × 250 mm (113/8 × 97/8 in)
  • Pages: 334 pp
  • Illustrations: 300 illustrations
  • ISBN: 9781580936477
Black and white collage portrait of young man with bare chest and arms at waist.
Amos Badertscher, Portrait of a Hustler, 1978. Courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate

About the contributors

Hunter O’Hanian is a curator and former executive director of the Stonewall National Museum and Archives and director of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.

Jonathan D. Katz is Associate Professor of Practice in the History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, curator of The First Homosexuals at Wrightwood 659 Gallery in Chicago, and author of About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art(2024) and editor of The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a Global Identity 1869–1939 (2025), both published by Monacelli.

Beth Saunders is curator and head of Special Collections at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and curator of Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore.

James Smalls is Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art.

Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles.

Theo Gordon is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of York.


Press for Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories

BmoreArt

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Revisions: Celebrating Fifty Years of the UMBC Photography Collections

September 3 – December 15, 2024

Revisions: Celebrating Fifty Years of the UMBC Photography Collections features highlights and lesser-known gems from UMBC’s considerable photography holdings. Looking back at a half-century of collecting, the exhibition offers thematic groupings and visual juxtapositions of photographs from the nineteenth century to the present. The display asks viewers to approach the history of photography with fresh eyes. Among the artists featured are Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Kerry Coppin, Cary Beth Cryor, Judy Dater, Robert Frank, Roland Freeman, Ralph Gibson, Lewis Hine, and Alfred Stieglitz.  

Cover image: Kerry Coppin, Dakar, Senegal, 2000-2002. Inkjet print. The Kerry Coppin Collection, UMBC (Coll355)


Public Programming

Artist Talk: Tommy Kha

Tuesday, December 3, 4pm

Reception to follow.
Free & open to the public.

Tommy Kha, Headtown V, Whitehaven, Memphis, 2017. Inkjet print. Library purchase, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P2022-16-001)

Opening Reception
& Curatorial Tour

Thursday September 12, 5pm

Free and open to the public.

Alfred Stieglitz, Sun Rays – Paula, Berlin, 1889/ printed 1929. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Edward Bafford, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P74-07-001)


Ralph Gibson, Elba, 1983. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Carol Ann Merritt, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P93-14-004) © Ralph Gibson

Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1976. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Andrew Cahan, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P2013-32-001) © Mary Ellen Mark, courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation/Howard Greenberg Gallery

Darryl Curran, Point Lobos Legacy, 1980. Cyanotype. Gift of the artist, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P2021-01-005) © Darryl Curran
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Anastasia Samoylova FloodZone

January 29–May 24, 2024

In 2016, Anastasia Samoylova (American, b. Soviet Union, b. 1984) moved to Miami, Florida. As she familiarized herself with the city through photography, a larger story began to unfold. The resulting body of work, FloodZone, explores what it looks like to live in the southern United States at a time when rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten the most prized locations with storm surges and coastal erosion.

Samoylova’s lyrical photographs are deceptive, drawing us in with a seemingly documentary promise of a palm-treed paradise. Their alluring color palette—filled with lush greens, azure blues, and pastel pinks—gives way to minute details that reveal decaying infrastructure, encroaching flora, and displaced fauna.

Both seductive and eerie, Samoylova’s images show us what it is to live at the edge of a climate crisis, a space where palm trees topple over onto buildings, where the patina of constant moisture results in dank mold on a freeway overpass, where the sky fills with golden hues after the storm. Somewhere between the artifice and the sobering reality lies the melancholy of living with the constant burden of climate anxiety.

Header image: Anastasia Samoylova, Gator, 2017. From FloodZone © Anastasia Samoylova


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 Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributors.

We wish to thank HistoryMiami Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum for their support of the production of prints and texts for this exhibition.


Public Programs

Anastasia Samoylova in conversation with Mark Alice Durant

Thursday, February 8, 12 pm (noon, EST), online via Webex

Register here

Anastasia Samoylova and Mark Alice Durant, professor of visual arts at UMBC and publisher of Saint Lucy Books, will discuss Samoylova’s FloodZone and the art of the photobook.

Climate Change, Science Communication, and the Arts: An Earth Day Panel Discussion featuring Anastasia Samoylova

Monday, April 22, 5 pm, Library Gallery

Reception to follow; free and open to the public

How do climate scientists share their research and data with the wider public in a way that non-specialists can understand? How might art contribute to this urgent work? This panel discussion will feature artist Anastasia Samoylova in conversation with scientists and media historians specializing in science communication.

The panel is moderated by Sarah L. Hansen (M.S. ’15), STEM Communications Manager at UMBC, and features panelists Lavar Thomas of the Environmental Protection Agency, Tracy Tinga, Assistant Professor in the Media & Communication Studies Department, and Autumn Powell, graduate student in Geography and Environmental Systems.

This event is part of an Earth Month programming series organized in coordination with the Office of Sustainability.


Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984) is a Russian-born American artist who moves between observational photography and studio practice.
Her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. Recent exhibition venues include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, C/O Berlin, Fundación MAPFRE, George Eastman Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and Kunst Haus Wien. In 2022 Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her work is in the collections of the Perez Art Museum, Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Published monographs include FloodZone 2019, Floridas 2022, and Image Cities 2023.


Video courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.
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Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore

August 30–December 15, 2023

Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore is the first career retrospective of artist Amos Badertscher (American, 1936–2023) in the United States. Between the 1960s and 2005, Badertscher documented hustlers, club kids, go-go dancers, drag queens, drug addicts, friends, and lovers who were part of LGBTQ+ life in Baltimore. A self-taught photographer, Badertscher worked on the fringes of the polite society into which he was born as an upper-middle class white Baltimorean. “Breaking all the rules of documentary photography,” as he has stated, he developed a signature style of spare portraits staged in his home studio. 

Taking his camera into the city’s clubs and gay bars, Badertscher recorded the shifting geographies and personalities of queer Baltimore pre-Stonewall and through the height of the AIDS epidemic. In the early 2000s, he captured the urban decay, economic devastation, and rampant drug use of sex workers in the city’s post-industrial landscape, in a body of work foregrounding aspects of Baltimore’s queer history that have rarely been acknowledged. Badertscher returns repeatedly to his personal photographic archive, inscribing his prints with handwritten notes on his subjects’ personal histories, filtered through his own recollections. This exhibition explores the power dynamics and desires embedded in his photographs, which memorialize people often marginalized by society.

Header image: Amos Badertscher, Voice Wafers in Time #1, 1975. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate.


Black and white photograph of a young man, cut up, and put back together

Public Programming

LGBTQ+ Oral Histories: Ethics and Practice

Panel Discussion

September 28, 2023, 5pm

Reception to follow

Featuring Dr. Kate Drabinski (UMBC), Dr. Joseph Plaster (Johns Hopkins University), Hunter O’Hanian (Independent scholar and curator), and students of the 2023 Interdisciplinary CoLab, “LGBTQ+ Oral History Project.” This event is Co-sponsored by the Department of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, UMBC.

Image: Amos Badertscher, Portrait of a Hustler, 1978. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate.


Hear Curator Beth Saunders discuss Amos Badertscher with WYPR’s Sheilah Kast

Selected works


In Memoriam

Amos Badertscher | “Who Documented the Sexual Underground,” The New York Times August 9, 2023

Amos Badertscher | “Baltimore photographer who chronicled queer scene . . .,” The Baltimore Sun August 1, 2023

Amos Badertscher | “Remembering Amos Badertscher,” artnet News July 28, 2023

Amos Badertscher | “Amos Badertscher, photographer of Baltimore street life, 1936–2023,” ArtReview July 28, 2023

In Memoriam: Amos Badertscher (1936-2023) | CLAMP Art July 26, 2023


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Louie Palu: Distant Early Warning

Distant Early Warning, a multi-year project (2015-2018) by Canadian/American photojournalist Louie Palu, provides a look at the evolving militarization in the North American Arctic driven by invented narratives and imagined threats. Now, decades after the end of the Cold War, debates have emerged over more efficient shipping routes, opportunities for resource extraction and the future of the Arctic related to climate change. Along with the six other Arctic nations (Finland, Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden), the United States and Canada are maneuvering to assert and defend their claims over the territory. Consequently, some Indigenous communities in the region are slowly coming face to face with increased geo-political activity and tourism. This exhibition examines operations of power and bears witness to a culture of fear and hyper-preparedness as we brace for an unknown future.

Palu’s work was supported by funding from the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Geographic Magazine, and Pulitzer Center. The presentation of this exhibition is supported by a project grant from the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts & Sciences and 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 Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributions.


Ice block installation by Louie Palu at SXSW at the Harry Ransom Center in 2019. Photo © Louie Palu

Public Programming

Participatory Installation & Panel Discussion: Geopolitics and Geology in the Arctic

Monday April 4, 2022 at the AOK Library Gallery

Installation: noon-5pm

Panel discussion: 5pm

Free and open to the public, reception to follow

Ice block installation by Louie Palu at SXSW at the Harry Ransom Center in 2019. Photo © Louie Palu

Once considered nearly impenetrable, the Arctic is losing roughly 21,000 square miles of ice each year and warming faster than any other place on the planet. As climate change melts its icy armor, the region is taking on strategic importance. This panel discussion explores contemporary geopolitics and geology in the Arctic from a variety of artistic, scholarly, and scientific perspectives. Topics include: new scientific methods for measuring and analyzing the influence of sea ice thickness on the climate, the future of national competition and claims over the Arctic, and impact of climate change on the indigenous communities in the region.

Join us before the panel discussion for a participatory installation of photographs from Distant Early Warning encased in blocks of ice in the plaza outside the Albin O. Kuhn Library and in a hands-on display in the Library Gallery.

Panelists:

Louie Palu (bio below)

Dr. Nathan Kurtz is the Chief of NASA’s Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory, Deputy Project Scientist for NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite mission, and UMBC alum (PhD Atmospheric Physics, 2009). His research involves remote sensing of the polar regions with an emphasis on the use laser and radar altimetry data to study the impact of sea ice on the climate. He has traveled to both the Arctic and Antarctic numerous times as part of ship-based and airborne field campaigns.

Dr. Brian Grodsky is a Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair of the Political Science Department at UMBC. His research interests include various aspects of democratization and human rights, as well as the politics of disaster response and climate change. His books include, The Costs of Justice (University of Notre Dame Press 2010); Social Movements and the New State: The Fate of Pro-Democracy Organizations When Democracy is Won (Stanford University Press 2012); and The Democratization Disconnect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).


Person lying in ice in Arctic landscape
A Canadian Ranger lies in the ice on the shore of Clyde Inlet training for search and rescue operations in Clyde River, Nunavut, Canada. (mandatory credit: photo by © Louie Palu
Two soldiers in winter gear walk on Ice covered plane wreckage
On reconnaissance outside Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, Nunavut, Canada Arctic Operations Advisors walk on the wreckage of an airplane in temperatures below minus 50 degrees Celsius (-58 F). © Louie Palu

Louie Palu is a photographer and filmmaker whose work has examined social political issues, such as human rights and conflict for over 30-years. He is a 2016 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and was awarded the 2019 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions In Portraiture. His work has examined topics such as the war in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, drug war in Mexico and changing geopolitics of the Arctic. His last four publications deal with how narratives can be reshaped by changing the sequence of images including in his deconstructed book Front Towards Enemy (2017, Yoffy Press). His work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, BBC, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and El Pais. His work is held in numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and National Gallery of Art. His films have been broadcast internationally and screened at numerous festivals including the Munich and Barcelona Documentary Film Festivals.


Virtual Artist’s Talk: Louie Palu
5:00 pm (EST)
February 22, 2022

Register here (via Webex)

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Peggy Fox: Morality Tales

Peggy Fox’s career as a photographer spans assignment-based work and her own fine art practice. For clients, she produced picture stories aimed at conveying a narrative within a single image. Meanwhile, her photographs recording street life in Baltimore, documenting the vanishing towns of Maryland’s Patapsco Valley, and chronicling her extensive travels across the globe provided opportunities to tell stories shaped by personal encounters and characterized by a strong sense of place. Fox’s experiments in collage expand the existing imagery of those photographs. Combined with transparencies, layered upon aluminum ground, and embellished with hand-worked details or digital manipulation, the resulting images engage the surrealist tendencies of collage to render reality into fantasy and to juxtapose subjects in new, unexpected ways. Certain motifs recur across the body of work, including enshrouded, falling, or diving figures; architectural features of arches, portals, and stairways; and references to religious iconography, mythology, and physics. This virtual presentation is structured around three groupings, intended as three possible unfolding paths that emphasize the inherent narrativity of the artist’s constructions. These sets of collages are not prescriptive, but are rather evocative of emotions, impressions, and symbols. Viewed as “morality tales,” the images conjure stories but remain ambiguous, their lessons open to multiple interpretations. 

* The images below will scroll automatically. They can also be advanced using the arrows at right and left. To pause the slideshow and to view titles, hold the cursor over the image.


The work begins with my black and white photographs. It grows out of a desire to personalize and elaborate on these initial images by joining them, collaging them, and painting on them to enlarge the story. The particular quality of the photographs is integral to, and is the dominant feature of, the images.

As an independent contract photographer I was part of a genre of “what makes a one shot, picture story?” There were parameters, there was an approach. There were stories to be told, in schools and hospitals. It was very traditional storytelling taken to the highest level. This work, while honoring that, is storytelling of a different nature.


Peggy Fox studied painting at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. After relocating to Baltimore and serving as director of the art department at St. Paul’s School, she embarked on a career as an independent photographer,  balancing her time between assignment photography and fine art. 

Early in her career, Fox was featured in a one-person show at the Baltimore Museum of Art. From 1987 to 1996 she developed Lost in the Cosmos, a 10-by-200-foot mural executed in porcelain enamel on steel and commissioned by the Maryland Transit Administration for the Johns Hopkins Hospital Metro station. 

In 2009 her book with writer Alison Kahn, Patapsco: Life along Maryland’s Historic River Valley, was published by The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago. She also had a solo show at The Atlantic Gallery in New York City in 2012. She has received two Maryland Arts Council grants and her work has been exhibited nationally.

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Séance: Photographs by Shannon Taggart

August 31–December 17, 2021

For the past twenty years American artist Shannon Taggart (born 1975) has documented Spiritualist practices and communities in the United States, England, and Europe. The resulting body of work, Séance, examines the relationship of Spiritualism to human celebrity, its connections to art, science, and technology, and its intrinsic bond with the medium of photography. This exhibition presents forty-seven haunting images from the series, revealing the emotional, psychological, and physical dimensions of Spiritualism in the 21st century. 

Spiritualism is a religion born in nineteenth-century America whose adherents believe in communication with spirits, often transmitted through the figure of a medium who receives psychic messages from the dead. Not coincidentally, photography was invented at the same historical moment, when the new technology was revered for its ability to faithfully record reality. Photography thus became a preferred medium of scientific documentation capable of rendering invisible phenomena visible, such as in astronomical photography, X-Rays, and microscopy. For Spiritualists, photography was a tool for revealing the existence of spirits, but for non-believers the ghostly forms that materialized in spirit photographs proved nothing more than darkroom trickery. While this double-sided coin of belief and skepticism haunts the histories of both photography and Spiritualism, Taggart’s photographs do not take sides. The images that comprise Séance are characterized by open-mindedness and empathy toward their subjects, many of whom are brought to Spiritualism through grief and a desire to reconnect with lost loved ones.

The photographs on display explore the communities and phenomena associated with Spiritualism, including séance circles, mediumship, and the objects and technological devices used to aid communication with spirits. Among the most arresting images are those that chart the artist’s quest to capture ectoplasm, a supernatural substance that is paradoxically both spiritual and material. Often made in darkened rooms, the photographs are characterized by otherworldly blurs, chance flares and orbs, and entrancing portraits cast in glowing colors. Taking on the role of participant observer, Taggart bears witness with her camera to an unseen world of belief lying just beyond the fringes of everyday reality.

Man holding filmy glowing orb

Public Program

Artist’s Talk: Shannon Taggart

Thursday October 14, 2021

5:00 PM – 7:00 PM


Portrait of artist Shannon Taggart

Shannon Taggart is an artist and author based in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Her photographs have been exhibited and featured internationally, including within the publications TIME, New York Times Magazine, Discover, and Newsweek. Her work has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Taggart’s monograph, SÉANCE (Fulgur Press, 2019) was listed as one of TIME magazine’s ‘Best Photobooks of 2019.’


This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Pensacola Museum of Art.

The exhibition is curated by Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections at UMBC, and Anna Wall, Chief Curator of the Pensacola Museum of Art.  

The presentation of this exhibition at UMBC 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 Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributions.

View exhibition prospectus here


Additional Venues:

Pensacola Museum of Art, Pensacola, FL, September 16–December 4, 2022

University of Northern Iowa Gallery of Art, Cedar Falls, IA, January 7-February 24, 2023

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Press for Shae McCoy: West Baltimore Ruins

Follow the links below to listen and to read more about West Baltimore Ruins.

https://omny.fm/shows/on-the-record-1/capturing-west-baltimore-ruins