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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amos Badertscher, Frank Grundhal, 1975. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
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.
Selected works
Left to right, top to bottom: A 70’s Fairy Tale, 1979; A Little More Keith Haring, Less Jasper, ca. 2001; Dennis and the Ladder, 2001; A Letter from Jail, 1979; One of the Stories Billy Had to Tell Me #1, 2001; West$Side Billy #1, 2001; Voice Wafers in Time #1, 1975; Stoney, 1982. All images courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate.
Between 1964 and 1967, American psychiatrist Dr. Jule Eisenbud conducted experiments with Ted Serios, a man from Chicago with the purported ability to psychically transfer his thoughts onto Polaroid film in a process he named “thoughtography.” Questioning the limits of the human psyche, the supposed objectivity of photography, and notions of scientific neutrality, Mind’s Eye presents a selection of Serios’ mysterious photographs, along with ephemera and experimental data from the Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios and Thoughtographic Photography, a highlight of the Special Collections at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Farm, Washington, D.C., 1975
March 27—June 30, 2023
With a voice born in the mountains and shaped by the hard times she lived and saw, Ola Belle Reed (1916-2002) established herself as a significant and influential banjo picker, singer, and songwriter of old-time mountain music.
An estimated two million migrants, including Reed and her family, left Appalachia during the Great Depression in search of work in industrial centers of the northern United States. They brought with them ways of life, including musical traditions, that maintained a connection to their southern home and transformed the cultures of their adopted cities.
In 1936, Reed started her career as a professional musician when she joined the North Carolina Ridge Runners, and refined her talent as a member of the New River Boys. With a powerful voice, lyrics that spoke authentically of her rural roots, and her straightforward musical approach, Reed became a groundbreaking solo artist whose passionate songs resonated in the folk-revival movement of the 1960s. As the co-host of a radio program and both a proprietor of and performer at local concert venues, Reed played a critical role in establishing and maintaining a vital bluegrass community along the Mason-Dixon Line. She was a culture bearer who created and helped conserve the unique musical traditions of Appalachia. Reed left an enduring legacy: her 1973 album Ola Belle Reed was added in 2019 to the National Recording Registry, her songs have become anthems of Appalachian life, and she is widely recognized as one of the most influential female bluegrass and folk musicians of all-time.
Co-curated by the Library Gallery’s Curator of Exhibitions Emily Cullen and Media and Communications Studies Professor Bill Shewbridge with Tim Newby, author of Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound & its Legacy (McFarland and Company, Inc. 2015).
Promotional poster for LP recording, Ola Belle Reed & Family, 1977. Offset lithography. Ola Belle Reed collection, Maryland Traditions Archives, Collection 122.
Public Programming
Film Screening: “I’ve Endured”: The music and legacy of Ola Belle Reed
Thursday May 11, 2023 5pm
AOK Library Gallery – UMBC
I’ve Endured”: The music and legacy of Ola Belle Reed is a new 45 minute documentary exploring the life and work of nationally recognized bluegrass and old-time musician Ola Belle Campbell Reed (1916-2002), directed by Bill Shewbridge.
Free and open to the public, reception to follow
“I’ve Endured,” a concert honoring the music and legacy of Ola Belle Reed
This concert will celebrate Ola Belle’s life and legacy by bringing together musicians and family members who worked with her, along with those who continue to carry on in the tradition of old-time music.
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903–1991) was one of the most influential figures in the development of photography as an art form during the twentieth century. This exhibition, drawn from UMBC’s Photography Collections, traces the formation of this artist’s unique photographic vision from early documentary works made in Harlem as a member of the New York Film and Photo League in the 1930s to his breakthrough explorations of abstraction in the 1940s and 1950s, which led to a sustained investigation of the camera’s capacity to frame new visual forms. The 55 works on display represent every period of the artist’s career, including architectural studies made on Martha’s Vineyard, the exuberant series, Terrors and Pleasures of Levitation, featuring images of divers’ bodies suspended in air, and impressions from his travels throughout Europe and Latin America. Through his photographs and his role as an educator, first at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and later at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Siskind made an indelible mark on the field, uncovering expressive possibilities from the raw material of reality
Sonya Clark (b. 1967) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores issues of identity, race, cultural heritage, and collective memory. This exhibition presents five works in which Clark applies fiber-art techniques to the medium of hair, a material laden with cultural and metaphorical significance. In these works, strands of hair represent ancestral bonds, hairstyles connote intimacy and convey Black visibility and identity, and combs bare teeth to show how hair has been an instrument of political resistance across the African diaspora. Clark interweaves her material with historical, literary, and musical allusions ranging from the biography of Madam C. J. Walker, the first female self-made millionaire, whose wealth derived from her business selling hair care products to Black women, to the hymn “Life Every Voice and Sing,” known as the unofficial Black National Anthem. Engaging craft traditions, Clark unravels the narrative threads that bind issues of contemporary importance to the past and refashions potent cultural symbols from everyday objects.
This exhibition was made possible in collaboration with Goya Contemporary Gallery and Sonya Clark
Cover Image: Sonya Clark, Hair Craft Project with Dionne, 2014. Pigment print on archival paper, 29 x 29 inches. Courtesy Goya Contemporary Gallery and Sonya Clark.
Public Programming
Harmonies of Liberty: Artist talk with Sonya Clark
In this talk, held in conjunction with the Dresher Center for the Humanities Daphne Harrison Lecture, artist Sonya Clark will discuss artwork inspired by the hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing” –work that she has produced in harmony with musicians that centers collaboration, innovation, craft, and design as a means to uplift suppressed voices.
Co-sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities; the Department of Visual Arts; the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts; and the Department of Africana Studies.
Image:Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, 2021. Diptych made of pigment print on punctured piano paper. 11 1/4 x 14in. each. Courtesy Goya Contemporary Gallery and Sonya Clark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Blmrlj928
Sonya Clark, For Colored Girls, A Rainbow, O1, 2019. Wig, cast plastic combs, wrapped thread, 12 x 12 x 3in. Courtesy Goya Contemporary Gallery & Sonya Clark.
Sonya Clark, Hair Craft Project with Anita, 2014. Pigment print on archival paper, 29 x 29in. Courtesy Goya Contemporary Gallery and Sonya Clark.
Biography:Sonya Clark is Professor of Art at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, she was a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts and Commonwealth Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where she served as chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department from 2006 until 2017. In 2016, she was awarded a university-wide VCU Distinguished Scholars Award. Her work has been exhibited in over 350 museum and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner award, an 1858 Prize, an Art Prize Grand Jurors Award, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Most recently, she was an inaugural recipient of the Black Rock Senegal Residency Fellowship.
Stephen Tourlentes, Wyoming State Death House Prison, Rawlins, Wyoming, 2000, from the series Of Length andMeasures: Prison and the American Landscape, 1996–ongoing
Courtesy the artist andCarroll and Sons, Boston
August 22–October 14
Most prisons and jails across the United States do not allow prisoners to have access to cameras. At a moment when an estimated 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S., 3.8 million people are on probation, and 870,000 former prisoners are on parole, how can images tell the story of mass incarceration when the imprisoned don’t have control over their own representation? How can photographs visualize a reality that disproportionately affects people of color, and, for many, remains outside of view? Coinciding with ApertureMagazine’s issue, “Prison Nation,” this exhibition addresses the unique role photography plays in creating a visual record of this national crisis, despite the increasing difficulty of gaining access inside prisons.
Since its early years, photography has been used to create and reinforce typologies of criminality, often singling out specific groups of people. Today, it is essential for photographers to provide urgent counterpoints and move beyond simplistic descriptions of the “criminal” or the imprisoned. Much of the work gathered here—from a recently discovered archive at San Quentin in California to portraits of prisoners participating in a garden program at Rikers Island in New York City or performing a passion play at Louisiana’s Angola prison, a facility located on the site of a former slave plantation—underscores the humanity and individuality of those incarcerated. Some projects explore the prison as an omnipresent feature of the American landscape, often serving as a local economic engine, or delve into the living conditions and social systems of prisons, while others address the difficult process of reentering society after incarceration. One series was produced in prison: Jesse Krimes made hundreds of image transfers with prison-issued soap while he served a five-year sentence.
Incarceration impacts all of us. Americans, even those who have never been to a prison or had a relative incarcerated, are all implicated in a form of governance that uses prison as a solution to many social, economic, and political problems. Empathy and political awareness are essential to creating systemic change—and through this exhibition, and the accompanying series of public programs, “Prison Nation” may provoke us to see parts of ourselves in the lives of those on the inside.
Prison Nation is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York. Nicole R. Fleetwood and Michael Famighetti, curators.
This exhibition was made possible with lead support from the Ford Foundation. Additional generous support was provided by the Reba Judith Sandler Foundation.
Cover Image: Stephen Tourlentes, Wyoming State Death House Prison, Rawlins, Wyoming, 2000, from the series Of Length andMeasures: Prison and the American Landscape, 1996–ongoing. Courtesy the artist andCarroll and Sons, Boston
Public Programming
Panel Discussion: Art From the Inside
September 27th, 5-7pm
Lorenzo Steele Jr., Lynn Cazabon, Oletha DeVane and Tadia Rice will discuss their experiences working with incarcerated individuals and the importance of art in giving a face to those behind bars.
Zora J Murff, Megan at 16, 2014, from the series Corrections, 2013–15. Courtesy the artist.
Jamel Shabazz, Pretrial detainees all part of the “House Gang” (sanitation workforce) pose in the day room of their housing area, Rikers Island, 1986. Courtesy the artist.
Left: Deborah Luster, Mary Bell (Anna), from the series Passion Play, 2012–13. Courtesy the artist and JackShainman Gallery, New York. Right: Chandra McCormick, Young Man, Angola Prison, 2013. Courtesy the artist.
Photographer unknown, Prison Rock Band, San Quentin State Prison, June 26, 1975.Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.
Beginning in the sixteenth century many nations embarked on a mission to find the Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that would facilitate efficient travel around North America. As explorers reached increasingly northern extremes in the nineteenth century, a different goal materialized: that of being the first person to set foot on the geographic North Pole. American explorer Robert E. Peary (1856-1920) claimed to have clinched this title on April 6, 1909. North Pole Narratives revisits Peary’s Arctic expeditions through photographs in UMBC’s Wendorff Collection.
Robert E. Peary. Permanent monument erected at Cape Columbia to mark the point of departure and return of the North Pole sledge party. ca. 1909. Gelatin silver print. The Photography Collections of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P78-118-087).
Cover Photo: Robert E. Peary. Sledging. ca. 1886-1909. Collodion print. The Photography Collections of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P78-118-126).
Robert E. Peary. Family group of Peary Caribou (Rangifer tarandus pearyi) arranged by “frozen taxidermy” and photographed by flashlight. ca. 1886-1909. Gelatin silver print. The Photography Collections of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P79-01-021).
Captured between 1891-1909, these photographs document landscapes and geological forms, Arctic flora and fauna, Peary’s expedition team and equipment, as well as candid scenes and ethnographic studies of Inuit people. Used to illustrate published accounts of Peary’s journey, the photographs bearing his editing marks reveal how the explorer, his publishers, and ghostwriters shaped the narrative of Peary’s achievement. Like many subjects they depict, the photographs were pressed into serving a singular purpose- fulfilling a colonialist fantasy of discovery and conquest of the North Pole in which Peary was the triumphant hero.
The success of Peary’s mission was due to his adoption of Inuit technologies, methods, and equipment, and to the Inughuit (Polar Inuit of Greenland) who traveled with his team to the North Pole.
Robert E. Peary. Pinnacle Near the Shore. ca 1886-1910. Gelatin silver print. The Photography Collections of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P87-118-143).
Rereading these images in light of changing societal values and information uncovered since 1909, this exhibition exposes the role of photography in writing history.
Robert E. Peary. Henson with Raven and Blue Fox. ca. 1886-1897. Gelatin silver print. The Photography Collections of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P78-118-127).
A note on the captions:
This exhibition considers the construction of narratives through photographs, specifically those used to illustrate Northward over the ‘Great Ice’ (1898) and The North Pole (1910), two published accounts of Robert E. Peary’s Arctic exploration. The captions that accompany the photographs in these books were written by Peary, his ghostwriters—including novelist and poet Elsa Barker and journalist A. E. Thomas—and his publishers. As a result, some of the language presented here reflects the culture and context in which these historical documents were created, and may be racist, harmful, or offensive.
We are aware of the importance of language and its effect on users and viewers of our materials and those represented within them. We have chosen to follow the Library & Archives of Canada’s “Writing titles for descriptions of Indigenous-related archival materials” guidance. When the caption or title is problematic, we have supplied a title that respects Indigenous peoples’ rights and cultures. The supplied title will be enclosed in square brackets. The original caption (derived from Peary’s publications or annotations on the prints) will follow in italics. We have also supplied titles in brackets for photographs that do not have original captions.
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.
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.
Public Programming
Participatory Installation & Panel Discussion: Geopolitics and Geology in the Arctic
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. NathanKurtz 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).
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.
