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Lewis Hine in Maryland

Sepia photograph of a boy sitting at a canning machine.
Lewis Wickes Hine, Dangerous Business. Boy working at canning machine with open gearing. Many such machines and boys too. J. S. Farrand Packing Co., Baltimore, Maryland, 1909. Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), P858

August 24  – December 18, 2026

From 1908 to 1924, documentary photographer Lewis Hine (American, 1874–1940) traveled throughout the United States, using his camera to document child labor on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). He photographed children working in coal mines, cotton mills, farms, tenements, and city streets. The NCLC used Hine’s photographs and eyewitness reports to support its campaigns for labor regulation and reform. His images appeared in pamphlets, posters, traveling exhibitions, and lantern-slide presentations across the country. Ultimately, these searing photographs helped shape labor legislation in the United States and established a model for documentary photography.

In July 1909, Hine visited Maryland, photographing child workers at Bottomley berry farms in Anne Arundel County and at the J. S. Farrand Packing Company in Baltimore. Drawn from UMBC’s Photography Collections, this exhibition explores the places and people behind these photographs. A selection of Hine’s most iconic and enduring images situates his Maryland work within the broader context of his documentary project. The exhibition also examines how Hine’s photographs functioned as tools of visual persuasion, working in tandem with captions, pamphlets, slogans, and posters to shape public opinion—and ultimately legislation—regarding the changing role of children in the workforce and in American society.

This exhibition commemorates MD250 and the US Semiquincentennial, exploring themes foundational to the nation’s history, including immigration and migration, the power of documentary photographs, and social justice.

Public Programming

Curatorial tour and opening reception

Thursday September 17, 5:00 p.m. Free and open to the public

Panel Discussion: Food and Labor in Maryland

Thursday October 22, 6:00 p.m. Followed by a reception. Free and open to the public.

This event is co-organized with Department of American Studies and the Orser Center for Public Humanities at UMBC

Closing reception

Thursday December 4, 6:00 p.m.

Lisa Oppenheim/ Lewis Hine: Spine/ Verso

August 24  – December 18, 2026

Lewis Hine in Maryland is accompanied by an installation of two works from artist Lisa Oppenheim’s Spine series, in which she appropriates images by Lewis Hine from the Library of Congress. Enlarged to life size, the photographs depict the backs of adolescent textile workers whose bodies were curved and misshapen by their labor. Oppenheim has bifurcated each image along the vertical axis of the spine, emphasizing the physical impact of repetitive work on the body. Lisa Oppenheim/Lewis Hine: Spine/Verso places Oppenheim’s works in dialogue with a selection of photographs from UMBC’s Lewis Hine Collection, displayed with their versos—or backs—visible to viewers.

In 2023, with support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation Assistance Grant, Special Collections staff undertook a major initiative to rehouse the Lewis Hine photographs and digitize their versos. The backs of the photographs bear captions, annotations, and inscriptions by Hine and others employed by the NCLC, testifying to their use in the organization’s publications and promotional campaigns. Together, these materials reveal the many forms of labor documented in Hine’s work and the ways that labor is imprinted upon—and remains legible within—the bodies of his subjects.

Black and white photograph of a woman with her bare back showing. A line divides the image in half where her spine is.
Lisa Oppenheim, Correct posture for 4663. Need for advice of examining physician, 2016. Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 41 3/4 x 61 1/2 inches; 106 x 156.2 cm (overall). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

Lisa Oppenheim was born in 1975 in New York, New York. She received a BA in art and semiotics from Brown University in 1998 and an MFA in film and video from Bard College in 2001. She attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program for studio art in 2003. Oppenheim’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at MUDAM, The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (2025); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2017), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2016). In 2014, Oppenheim was the recipient of the AIMIA|AGO Photography Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Shpilman International Photography Prize from the Israel Museum. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

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Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81

Woman lying in bed looking at magazine.
Mary Ellen Mark, [Mona with Michael Douglas’s Picture, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, USA], 1976. © Mary Ellen Mark, courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation.

January 26 – May 22, 2026

In 1976, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark and sociologist Karen Folger Jacobs spent thirty-six days living in the Oregon State Hospital, where they photographed the residents of Ward 81, the hospital’s all-female, high-security psychiatric unit. Their unprecedented access allowed them to create a deeply nuanced portrayal of women navigating psychiatric care in the mid-1970s. Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 brings together Mark’s photographs, Jacobs’s newly uncovered audio recordings, and rare archival materials, offering an intimate and expanded view of this landmark documentary project.

Mary Ellen Mark, [Carol T. in the Mirror, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, USA], 1976. © Mary Ellen Mark, courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation.

Public Programming

In Conversation: Dr. Kaitlin Booher (Associate Curator of Photography, Columbus Museum of Art) and Dr. Holly Avella (Media and Communication Studies, UMBC)

Thursday, April 2, 5:00 pm, Library Gallery

Followed by a reception.

Free and open to the public.

Mary Ellen Mark, [Mona and Beth in the shower, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, USA], 1976. © Mary Ellen Mark, courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation.

Curator tour and opening Reception

Thursday, February 12, 5:00 pm, Library Gallery

Followed by a reception.

Free and open to the public.

Mary Ellen Mark, [Laurie in the Bathtub, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, USA], 1976. © Mary Ellen Mark, courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation.

Categories

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 [closed] 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/

Symposium resources

Panel recordings:

Collection list from UMBC Special Collections open house

Shareousel slideshow presentation

UMBC Special Collections LGBTQ+ research guide

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 Baltimore; Omar 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.

Man wearing glasses reading book

Alexander D’Agostino

Invoking and Embodying (queer) Archives through ritual, dance, and exhibition

Alexander D’Agostino is a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist investigating the queer and otherworldly through dance, ritual, teaching, and visual art. A 2009 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, his work has been presented at Vox Populi (Philadelphia), the Walters Art Museum, Transformer DC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (Solo Exhibition, 2022). His solo exhibitions include the Target Gallery (Alexandria, VA), the Bromo Artist Tower (Baltimore), VisArts (Rockville), and Hillyer Gallery (Washington, DC). D’Agostino is an Artistic Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a recipient of the 2025–2026 Ruby Artist Award in Baltimore.

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.

Learn more about Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories.

Book cover of Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories

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

Black and white photograph of a group of children in bathing suits in and around a car
Addison Scurlock, Picnic, #78, [Highland Beach, Maryland], c. 1931, printed 1982. Gelatin Silver Print, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P82-17-014)

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.

Explore the Exhibition
Couple hugging next to car

Photographer Unknown, Couple Hugging, Packard, 1950s. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Stanley B. Burns Archive.

Public Programming

Panel discussion: Documenting Black Leisure and Preserving Community Archives

Thursday, December 4 at 5pm, Library Gallery

Followed by a reception.

Free and open to the public. No registration required.

Panelists:

Sophia Blessit-Sotilleo

Ms. Sotilleo is a seasoned academic librarian currently serving as the Vice Provost and Dean for the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery. She is a library leader known for her advocacy of intellectual freedom, First Amendment rights, and innovative, student and research-centered library services. Ms. Sotilleo is passionate about connecting people to libraries and advocating for equitable access to information and the freedom to read.

Man with a beard and glasses wearing a suit.

Corey Lewis

Corey Lewis joined the Maryland State Archives in 1999 and was appointed Assistant State Archivist in 2022, becoming the first person of color to hold an executive leadership position at the agency. Throughout his career, Mr. Lewis has pushed for access, efficiency, and partnership. In his current role, he oversees Appraisal and Description, Constituent and Interagency Services, and Digital Acquisition, Processing, and Publication departments. Additionally, Mr. Lewis serves as a liaison to the Information Technology department and leads Community Collection initiatives.

Woman wearing yellow shirt holding a paper.

Ashley Minner Jones

Dr. Ashley Minner Jones is a community-based visual artist and folklorist from Baltimore, Maryland. Her interdisciplinary practice is deeply rooted in place and is focused on honoring and celebrating everyday people by lifting up their stories. Ashley’s extensive research done in collaboration with her home community—the Lumbee Indian community of East Baltimore—is being archived as “the Ashley Minner Collection” in the Albin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she was formerly a Professor of the Practice in the Department of American Studies and the inaugural Director of the minor in Public Humanities. Photo by Jill Fannon.

Woman with short hair and glasses standing with arms crossed in row of boxes.

Oyinda Omoloja

Oyinda Omoloja is the Archives Assistant at Afro Charities, the nonprofit arm to the AFRO-American Newspaper Company. She liaises between the archives and the general public, providing reference services to researchers from around the world. Oyinda is committed to honoring the nuances of Black experiences and fueling curiosity as a means for deeper understanding.

Woman wearing glasses and a green shirt standing outside.

Elizabeth Patton

Dr. 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.

Woman wearing a red shirt standing outside.

Beth Saunders

Dr. Saunders is Associate Director and Curator of Special Collections and the Gallery. At UMBC, she is responsible for curatorial activities, campus and community partnerships, collection building and management, donor relationships, grant writing, and photographs. Beth previously held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Sotheby’s, New York. She holds a PhD and MPhil in Art History from The CUNY Graduate Center and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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.

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!

Book cover of Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories

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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Archive 192: Abstract Photographs by Women

Splotches in various shades of brown, white, yellow, green and black.

February 10 – May 31, 2025

Archive 192 is an independent archive dedicated to preserving and celebrating abstractionist works by women photographers established in 2015 by photographer Louie Palu and photo editor Chloe Coleman. The archive, which now holds over 200 prints, books and ephemera, challenges conventional narratives of the history of photography that center documentary realism and aims to counter underrepresentation of work by women in institutional collections.

This exhibition presents a selection of photographs from Archive 192 that explore the diverse techniques of abstraction, including framing, cropping magnification, and altering chemical processes. These visual strategies present unfamiliar views of real-world objects and change the appearance of photographic prints to create non-representational images. The photographs on view also represent the array of photographic processes employed by photographers in pursuit of abstraction over more than a century, including cyanotypes, C-prints, tintypes, and Polaroid color instant prints. Related ephemera including publications, artist books, and posters document the evolution of abstractionism in photography and the political contexts, such as the feminist movement, that impact women working within the medium.

 

Cover image: Claudia Fährenkemper, Sodium Chloride / Natriumchlorid, from the series Habitus, 2003. Gelatin silver print. © Claudia Fährenkemper.

Public Programming

Exhibition Tour and Artist Conversation

Saturday May 3, 2025

2:00 pm Exhibition tour with Louie Palu.

2:30 pm Artists Juliana Foster and Claire Warden in conversation, moderated by Chloe Coleman.

3:30 pm Reception

Free and open to the public.

Black and white photograph of sodium chloride crystals under magification
Claudia Fährenkemper, Sodium Chloride / Natriumchlorid, from series Habitus,
2003. Gelatin silver print.© Claudia Fährenkemper.
Claire A. Warden, Patterns in Performance, 2014. Pigment print. © Claire A. Warden.
Sara Angelucci, Coppley Patterns (DM), 2017. Chromogenic Print. © Sara Angelucci.

Sage Lewis, Drawing, 2013. Gelatin silver print. © Sage Lewis.
Categories

Revisions: Celebrating Fifty Years of the UMBC Photography Collections

Sepia toned black and white photograph of a sign shaped like glasses

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
Categories

Anastasia Samoylova FloodZone

Body of an alligator viewed through green water
Anastasia Samoylova, Gator, 2017. Courtesy of the artist © Anastasia Samoylova

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.

Palm trees falling into building
Black and white photograph of beached boat with onlookers
Left to right: Anastasia Samoylova, Pink sidewalk, 2017; Beached Boat, 2019; Barber Shop, 2018. From FloodZone © Anastasia Samoylova

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.
Categories

Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore

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.

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

Black and white portrait of a person with long hair holding a cigarette
Black and white photograph of a shirtless young man posing in front of a graffiti covered walll
Black and white photograph of man sitting in a ladder holding a camera to his face while a nude man viewed from behind kisses his neck
Black and white portrait of a nude man
Black and white photograph of topless young woman and shirtless young man kissing.
Man's bare torso with tattoo reading "West $ Side"
Black and white photograph of man with arms raised, looking down, with abstract splatter print and text reading: "Frank was born in 1955, the year I graduated from high school and died in 1992 of AIDS, at 37."
Black and white portrait of young man in white underwear
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.

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

Categories

Mind’s Eye: The Psychic Photographs of Ted Serios

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.

View exhibition prospectus here

Venues:

The Image Center, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada, January 25–April 1, 2023