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April 8 – June 30, 2015

The work of Abbott Miller merges graphic design and typography with spatial design, interactive media, and curatorial projects. Through design and art direction as well as writing and curating, Miller’s work embraces exhibitions, digital media, environmental graphics, textiles, identities and publication design. Trained as an artist and designer, Miller’s projects reflect his interests in art, performance, photography, fashion, architecture, and history. This exhibition is based on his recently published monograph “Abbott Miller: Design and Content” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014). The book argues that designers inhabit a critical space between form and content. Miller sees the role of the designer as a performer and interpreter, using words and images to dramatically stage content. He has collaborated with renowned artists, performers, and curators to create publications, digital media, and exhibitions that dramatically embody their content. He has also written extensively on design and the role of the designer as an author and editor, a figure who mediates and shapes narrative environments, whether in the space of a book or an exhibition.

Abbott Miller is a partner in the New York City office of the international design studioPentagram. Since 2000 he has also maintained a satellite studio in Baltimore, where he also serves as a Visiting Artist in the MFA Graphic Design program at Maryland Institute College of Art. He is the author and editor of several books on design, including Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design, co-authored with Ellen Lupton. In 2014 Miller was awarded the AIGAMedal, his profession’s highest honor. His work has won numerous awards and is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliotheques National de Paris.

Installation Views

January 26 – March 25, 2015

The history of American slavery is considered in ​A Stirring Song Sung Heroic​, an exhibition of 80 black and white silver gelatin prints by photographer William Earle Williams. These images document mostly anonymous, unheralded, and uncelebrated places in the New World – from the Caribbean to North America – where Americans black and white determined the meaning of freedom. Archives of prints, newspapers, and other ephemera related to the struggle accompany the work. The presentation of this exhibition marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished slavery nationwide following the conclusion of the American Civil War.

William Earle Williams is the Audrey and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts, and Curator of Photography at Haverford College. He received his M.F.A. degree from Yale University School of Art and holds a B.A. in history from Hamilton College. His photographs have been widely exhibited at diverse institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and UMBC. His work is held in many public collections including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and UMBC’s Special Collections. Williams has also received numerous fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2003 – 2004.

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Public Program

4:00 p.m. Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Artist’s Talk​: William Earle Williams

The lecture, co-sponsored by the Dresher Center the Humanities and the Library Gallery, will be presented as part of the Humanities Forum.

August 27 – December 17, 2014

Victoria Sambunaris received her MFA from Yale University in 1999. Each year, she structures her life around a photographic journey crossing the American landscape. Her most recent project has been working in South Texas photographing the intersection of geology, industry, and culture encompassing the international boundary and energy industry. She is a recipient of the 2010 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and the 2010Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of ModernArt, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Lannan Foundation. Radius Books published her first monograph in April 2014.

Victoria Sambunaris has traversed and documented the vast United States landscape for more than a decade, viewing the intersection of geology, industry, and culture, as both a record and a metaphor for the American experience.

In ​Taxonomy of a Landscape​, forty-one of the artist’s large-scale photographs reveal the mystery and unease of a country where human intervention and natural beauty inspire wonder in equal measure, while additional materials – video, books, maps, mineral specimens, journals, road logs, and photographic sketches – provide an intimate view of the artist’s life and work on the road.

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Public Program

4:00 p.m. Wednesday

October 8, 2014

Artist’s Talk​: Victoria Sambunaris

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Installation Views

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The exhibition ​Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape​ originated at the Albright-KnoxArt Gallery in Buffalo, New York and was organized by Christie Mazuera Davis, ProgramDirector, Contemporary Art and Public Programs at the Lannan Foundation, and Albright-KnoxCurator for the Collection Holly E. Hughes. The Museum of Contemporary Photography atColumbia College Chicago’s presentation and subsequent tour of ​Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape​ has been generously supported by the Lannan Foundation, SantaFe, New Mexico.

The presentation of ​Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape​ at UMBC is supported in part by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Lannan Foundation, Friends of the Library & Gallery, the Libby Kuhn Endowment, and individual contributors.

 April 7 – May 31, 2014 

Conceived of as a global conversation about truth and lies held through the medium of works of art and poetry, Butler invited artists to use the lie to explore our relationship with the truth. Book of Lies examines the lie as a human strategy using examples drawn from life situations including childhood, love, and war. Seventy-eight artists responded to these questions in unique and provocative ways, resulting in a body of work curated by Butler and Corazon del Sol titled Book of Lies. 

Book of Lies is curated by Corazon del Sol and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Pasadena, California. 

Public Program

6:00 pm Wednesday

April 16, 2014

Examining the Book of Lies: Truth, Lies and the Construction of Reality

Corazon del Sol, Artist and Curator

Reception to follow.

This event is free and open to the public.

Exhibition View

January 27 – March 23, 2014

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

Public Program

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

This event is free and open to the public.

September 16 – December 20, 2013

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

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

Artist’s Talk: Johanna Drucker

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

Reception to follow

September 16 – December 20, 2013

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

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

Public Program

Artist’s Talk: Ashley John Pigford

6:00 p.m. Thursday, November 21

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

Reception to follow

April 8 – May 31, 2013

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

6:00 p.m.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Symposium on Print Media, Photography & Art

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

Jed Kirschbaum Baltimore Sun, Photographer, Retired

Tom Beck AOK Gallery, UMBC, Chief Curator

Christophe Corbett Department of English, UMBC, Professor

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

January 28 – March 24, 2013

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

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

Public Programming:

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

5:30 PM

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

This event is free and open to the public.

Installation Views

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

September 4 – November 25, 2012

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

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

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

PublicProgram

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

Artist Talk​: Craig Barber

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Exhibition views

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