Calendar of Events

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents an exhibition of work by artist John Ruppert entitled LAB: Empirical Evidence: John Ruppert. The exhibition will span the artist’s recent explorations with installation, sculptural objects, photography, and sound as it relates to the world around us. Influenced by his intense interest in natural phenomena, Ruppert’s overarching investigation will focus on the intersection of the natural world and humanity. In a broader sense, he seeks to develop a heightened consciousness of our precarious existence on the planet.

LAB: Empirical Evidence: John Ruppert represents the first exhibition in a new series where an individual artist is invited to orchestrate his or her pieces and/or series within the CADVC’s main gallery space to produce a unique and comprehensive installation blurring the lines between art and science. Future exhibitions will explore the connections between textiles, drawing, painting, and sculpture, and the natural sciences, engineering, technology, and cultural politics.

Over the past 35 years, John Ruppert has been working in cast metals; manufactured materials such as chain-link fabric; mixed media; and more recently, video, digital 3D printing and digital composite photography — all in response to where natural order and human decision-making meet, and the paradoxes that lie between. His work stems from a long tradition of artists who have been inspired by the grand and sublime beauty of the land, from the ancient Chinese poets and artists of Tao to the 19th century American landscape painters and more recently, to artists working directly in the landscape considering our relationship to the environment.

Ruppert’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums, sculpture parks and galleries both in the United States and abroad. Reviews of his work have been published in Art in America, New Art Examiner, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and The New York Times with feature articles in Art China and most recently Sculpture magazine.

Ruppert has participated in several artists in residency programs and has received numerous awards including five Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist grants, the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, which included an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and most recently, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. He is a professor and former chair of the Department of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has been on the faculty since 1987.

Gallery tour and conversation
With John Ruppert and Dr. Stephen Freeland, an evolutionary biologist
and Director of the Individualized Study Program at UMBC
Tuesday, February 12, 4 p.m.

Plan Your Visit
Admission to the exhibition, the opening reception, and all related programming is free and open to the public.

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is located in the Fine Arts Building. The exhibition will open for regular viewing hours on Friday, February 1, following the opening reception on January 31.

For more information call 410-455-3188.

For evening and weekend visits to the CADVC (including the Opening Reception), free parking is available near the Fine Arts Building in Lot 8. For daytime visits, we recommend parking at paid visitor parking in either the Walker Avenue Garage or the Administration Drive Garage

The UMBC Jazz Ensemble is joined in concert by New York City-based drummer/composer/teacher Allison Miller, who engages her deep roots in improvisation as a vehicle to explore all music. Described by critics as a charismatic and rhythmically propulsive drummer with melodic sensibility, Miller has been named “Top 20 Jazz Drummers” in Downbeat Magazine and her composition, Otis Was a Polar Bear, is on NPR’s list of The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women. Miller is Monterey Jazz Festival’s 2019 Artist in Residence, alongside Derrick Hodge.

Miller is a three time Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department and has been appointed Arts Envoy to Thailand for her work with Jazz Education Abroad. She is on Yamaha’s Top 30 Clinicians List, conducting clinics and master classes throughout the world, and teaches at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in NYC, Stanford Jazz Workshop, and is the Artistic Director of Jazz Camp West. Her lessons and writings have been published in The Huffington Post, Modern Drummer, Jazz Times, DRUM, Tom Tom, and Drummer UK. Her instructional videos are produced and published by Reverb.

$15 general admission, $10 seniors, $5 students, free for UMBC music majors and music faculty/staff, available online or at the box office one hour prior to the performance.

Three award winning writers, poet Samiya Bashir, journalist and author Alia Malek, and fiction writer Susan Muaddi Darraj will perform short excerpts of their work. After the performance, they will join Dr. Mejdulene B. Shomali for a moderated conversation on writing, gender, race, and religion in the U.S. During the conversation, writers will discuss the useful and dangerous ways racial, ethnic, and religious identities do and do not overlap; how race, gender, and religion inform the writing and reception of their work; and how they use genre and form to navigate cultural expectations for their writing, especially when those expectations are tied to their perceived or real identities.

A book signing and reception will follow the program.

Samiya Bashir is the author of three books of poetry: Field Theories, Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, and experienced. Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. Bashir lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Reed College.

Susan Muaddi Darraj‘s short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. It also won the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. In 2018, United States Artists awarded her a Ford Fellowship for creative writing. She is Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College, and she also teaches in the MA Program in Writing at Johns Hopkins University.

Alia Malek is a journalist and former civil rights lawyer. She is the author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria and A Country Called Amreeka: US History Re-Told Through Arab American Lives. She is the editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustices and EUROPA أوروپا : An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, NewYorker.com, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, Jadaliyya, McSweeney’s, Guernica and other publications.

Mejdulene B. Shomali is a Palestinian-American poet and assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Women’s, Sexuality Studies at UMBC. She received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2015 and an MA in Women’s Studies from the Ohio State University in 2009. Her creative and scholarly work centers on femininity, queerness, and Arab cultural production in a transnational perspective. Her academic monograph in progress, Moving Femininities: Queer Critique and Transnational Arab Culture, underscores femininity and sexuality as sites for cultural and political negotiation for Arabs, immigrant and indigenous.

The Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) presents a CIRCA Catalyst event featuring Amy Cavanaugh and Doreen Bolger. CIRCA Catalyst is an ongoing series promoting conversations around trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research that fuses the performing and visual arts with other fields of inquiry and scholarship.

The presenters will discuss the evolution of curatorial work over forty years, beginning in the 1970s with Bolger’s work on historic American Art, continuing with Cavanagh’s efforts with living artists, and concluding with their recent collaboration on MAP’s 2018 exhibition Repurposed with Purpose: Making and Meaning in the Materials of Art. They will consider substantial changes in curatorial intention, from sometimes esoteric art historical research to community impact and engagement, and comment on opportunities and challenges offered by technology and its innovations.

Amy Cavanaugh,the niece of color-field artist James Hilleary and daughter of sculptor Carolyn Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh was born in Washington, DC, and trained there as a classical cellist at Catholic University of America. She then toured and worked in the recording industry, playing with the instrumental band, Yeveto, composers of experimental rock music. In 2004, Cavanaugh joined Washington’s ARCH Development Corporation as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. There in 2007 she opened the Honfleur Gallery, now recognized as one of the region’s leading platforms for emerging and mid-career local, national, and international artists. In 2012, she became the Executive Director of Maryland Art Place (MAP), the anchor arts organization in Baltimore’s Bromo Tower Arts and Entertainment District. MAP places emerging and mid-career artists in the spotlight with professionally-staged exhibitions and programs as well as community outreach. In 2014, Cavanaugh boldly returned MAP to its original home, a five-story historic building on Saratoga Street, after some peripatetic years, most spent in the Inner Harbor.

Doreen Bolger retired in 2015 after 17 years as Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art, a center for 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art, where she redefined its artistic focus, placing greater emphasis on its world-class collection; initiated major traveling exhibitions; expanded educational programs; and eliminated general admission fees. She also led a major BMA renovation, including the transformation of galleries and essential infrastructure, improved visitor amenities, and the addition of a new education center that offers creative experiences for visitors. Bolger, a supporter of the city’s emerging art scene, plays a leadership role in the region’s cultural community, serving on the boards of the Creative Alliance and Maryland Citizens for the Arts. She was previously Director of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, and served as a curator at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Bolger received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of The City University of NY, M.A. from the University of Delaware, Newark, and B.A. from Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA.

Lunch provided. Admission is free and open to the public.

Separated from his mother, a young refugee called Anon journeys through the United States, encountering a wide variety of people — some kind, some dangerous and cruel — as he searches for his family. From a sinister one-eyed butcher to beguiling barflies to a sweatshop, Anon must navigate through a chaotic, ever-changing landscape in this entrancing adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.

Performances:
Friday, March 8, 8 p.m.
Saturday, March 9, 2 p.m.* and 8 p.m.
Sunday, March 10, 2 p.m.* and 8 p.m.

$15 general admission, $10 students and seniors. Tickets will be available at tickets.umbc.edu (February 2019) or at the box office one hour before the show.

*Complimentary tickets will be available for UMBC students for the 2 p.m. matinee performances. These tickets will become available online Wednesday, March 6 at noon.

All ticket sales benefit the UMBC Department of Theatre Scholarship fund.

In the spirit of armchair travelers everywhere, the Voyager Ensemble explores a new country of the world every concert by combining standard repertoire along with a commission by a composer from the region. This year’s concert focuses on Argentina, with directors Airi Yoshioka and David Yang joined by eminent Argentine musicians Alejandro Drago and Juan Sebastian Delgado, performing works by Argentine composers.

Starting with Astor Piazzola’s unique southern blend of jazz and indigenous tango in Four for Tango, the quartet then turns to Osvaldo Golijov’s intensely modern and spiritual Yiddishbbuk. Following this is the world premiere of Palomitas by Fernando Severo Altube (pictured), based on the composer’s childhood memories of a brutal massacre of civilians by government forces in 1976. The concert ends with Alberto Ginastera’s irresistibly rhythmic and driving String Quartet No. 1, a classic of genre.

$15 general admission, $10 seniors, $5 students, free for UMBC music majors and music faculty/staff, available online or at the box office one hour prior to the performance.

The UMBC Wind Ensemble, directed by Brian Kaufman, teams up with The Sounding Board, Emmy nominated composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, singer-songwriter Diana Lawrence, UMBC’s Cleftomaniacs, and other special guests to present an interactive musical event that will explore how we can navigate the current polarization in America. Music, multimedia, and spoken-word serve as catalysts for an interactive discussion with performers and audience members moderated by Tom Hall, host of WYPR’s Midday.

The Sounding Board creates productions that integrate music with multi-media and commentary from noted public figures to inspire new perspectives and cultivate dialogue on today’s most pressing social issues. Performing music from Bach to hip-hop & addressing events from Guantanamo Bay to race issues in America, TSB provides a down and dirty look at current events with live music, special guests, and on-the-spot audience input. Past participants have included Pulitzer-prize winning composer & author Gunther Schuller, genre-bending composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, and luminaries from distinguished institutions including the United Nations, the Boston Mayor’s Office, The Boston Globe, The National Defense University, Tufts’ Fletcher School, Northeastern University and New England Conservatory.

Tom Hall joined the WYPR staff as the Host of Choral Arts Classics in 2003. After ten years as the Culture Editor and then host of Maryland Morning, in September, 2016, Hall became the host of Midday, the highly rated news and public policy program that features interviews with elected officials, community leaders, and thought provoking authors, artists, researchers, journalists, and scholars from around the world. He is also the Host of In the Bromo and What Are You Reading? on WYPR. In addition, he has served as the host of the Maryland Morning Screen Test, and the WYPR/MD Film Festival Spotlight Series. In 2006, as the Music Director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Hall received an Emmy Award for Christmas with Choral Arts, a special that aired on WMAR television, the ABC affiliate in Maryland, for 21 years. He has been a guest co-host of Maryland Public Television’s Art Works, and in 2007, he was named “Best New Broadcast Journalist” by the Maryland Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2009, the Baltimore City Paper named him “Best Local Radio Personality.” In 2016 and again in 2017, he was recognized as “Best Talk Show Host” in the Baltimore Magazine Reader’s Poll. Hall was appointed the Music Director Emeritus of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society in 2017.

Daniel Bernard Roumain’s acclaimed work as a composer and performer spans more than two decades, and has been commissioned by venerable artists and institutions worldwide. “About as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets” (The New York Times), Roumain (also known as DBR) is perhaps the only composer whose collaborations traverse the worlds of Philip Glass, Bill T. Jones, Savion Glover and Lady Gaga. Known for his signature violin sounds infused with a myriad of electronic and urban music influences, DBR takes his genre-bending music beyond the proscenium. He has been nominated for an EMMY for Outstanding Musical Composition for his work with ESPN; featured as keynote performer at technology conferences; and written large scale, site-specific music for public parks. DBR made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2000 with the American Composers Orchestra performing his Harlem Essay for Orchestra, a Whitaker commission. He went on to compose works for the Boston Pops Orchestra; Carnegie Hall; the Library of Congress; the Stuttgart Symphony, and myriad others. DBR’s commitment to arts education has garnered long-term relationships with countless universities, orchestras, and performing arts centers. DBR earned his doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Michigan.

Diana Lawrence is a Chicago-based pianist, singer, composer and music director. She has three albums to her name, both solo and with her band, Diana & the Dishes. As a singer/songwriter, Diana has been called a “drop-dead show-stopper” (Music Connection Magazine) and compared to the likes of Ben Folds, Fiona Apple and Regina Spektor (Chicago Sun-Times). As a composer and music director, her impressive list of credits includes a multi-playwright collaborative musical, Next Stop, performed at the 2013 Garage Rep After-Party; and her more recent musical, Mill Girls, showcased at the 2015 First Look Late Night. Lawrence also regularly composes for The Second City, a renowned comedy institution, as well as Storycatchers, an organization that helps youth in the juvenile justice system tell their stories through musical theatre. She has also worked as a music director and pianist for organizations such as ComedySportz, the Chicago Children’s Choir, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Porchlight Music Theatre, among many others. Known for her ability to perform a wide variety of musical styles and with performers of all kinds, her work has also included singing for many years with the Chicago Symphony Chorus, regular gigs with jazz combos and pop bands, and improvising as a pianist for theatre, dance, comedy, and performance poetry.

The UMBC Wind Ensemble has given performances with internationally celebrated guest artists including Glee pianist and music director Brad Ellis, Emmy-nominated composer and genre-bending violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, The American Brass Quintet, Canadian Brass veteran Joe Burgstaller, international tuba artist Oystein Baadsvik, Cleveland Orchestra trombonist Shachar Israel, Marine Band co-principal oboe Trevor Mowry, former Marine Band clarinetist Randall Riffle, and UMBC Professor of Violin Airi Yoshioka. The ensemble seeks to regularly perform music by living composers; the group recently recorded its debut album, which includes music the ensemble has premiered by Brad Ellis, Daniel Bernard Roumain, UMBC composition faculty Anna Rubin and Janice Macaulay, and 2016 American Prize Ernst Bacon Memorial Award finalist and UMBC alum Samuel Winnie.

Admission is free, but tickets are required and are available online.

n conjunction with the exhibition A Designed Life: Contemporary American Textiles, Wallpapers, and Containers & Packaging, 1951 – 1954, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) presents FACE OF A NATION: What Happened to the World’s Fair?, a film by architect Mina Chow that explores the controversy surrounding American participation in World’s Fairs.

FACE OF A NATION captures the erosion of the American image as the country loses sight of its vision and values. Probing deeply into national identity, architect Mina Chow investigates the controversy surrounding U.S. participation at World’s Fairs for the last 25 years. The film asks important questions about the country’s role in the world and perceptions of the American image. With our diminished presence at World’s Fairs, have we lost sight of what it means to be American?

Admission to the screening is free and open to the public.

For more information call 410-455-3188.

The Department of Visual Arts presents artist Laura Heit, a multidisiplinary artist who engages experimental animation, performance, installation, and writing. Disquieting and evocative, her work seamlessly crosses genres to unfold poetic visual narratives. Heit employs a strong handmade aesthetic, an irreverent sense of humor, drawing, puppetry, and animation, to bring together ideas and stories about ghosts, catastrophe, and invisibility. Screenings include Rotterdam IFF, Annecy, Hong Kong IFF, London IFF, Ann Arbor Film Festival (1997, 2012, 2015), Black Maria, Walker Art Center, MOMA, Millennium Film, and the Guggenheim Museum, REDCAT, Aurora Picture Show, Pacific Film Archive, and others.

Admission is free.

Pianist John Novacek regularly tours the Americas, Europe and Asia as solo recitalist, chamber musician and concerto soloist, and has presented more than thirty concerti with dozens of orchestras. He offers a stunning program, one which traverses a vast range of keyboard repertoire. Included are Beethoven’s teasing, witty 6th Sonata; Robert Schumann’s staggering panorama, Carnaval (“21 scenes on 4 notes”); excerpts from Shostakovich’s trenchant yet mystical Preludes & Fugues, a tribute to Bach’s ’48’; Ginastera’s Danzas argentinas, in which heart-pounding release answers piercing melancholy; and a set of Novacek’s own infectious, ‘finger-busting’ rags.

John Novacek’s major American performances have been heard in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall, 92nd Street Y, Columbia University’s Miller Theater, Merkin Concert Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Symphony Space, Washington’s The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Boston’s Symphony Hall, Chicago’s Symphony Center and Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Hollywood Bowl and Royce Hall, while international venues include Paris’ Theatre des Champs-Elysées, Salle Gaveau and Musée du Louvre, London’s Wigmore Hall and Barbican Centre, as well as most of the major concert halls of Japan. He is also a frequent guest artist at festivals, here and abroad, including New York City’s Mostly Mozart Festival, California’s Festival Mozaic and those of Aspen, Cape Cod, Caramoor, Chautauqua, Colorado College, Mimir, Ravinia, Seattle, SummerFest La Jolla, Wolf Trap, BBC Proms (England), Braunschweig (Germany), Lucerne, Menuhin and Verbier (Switzerland), Majorca (Spain), Sorrento (Italy), Stavanger (Norway), Toulouse (France) and Sapporo (Japan)

Often heard on radio broadcasts worldwide, John Novacek has appeared on NPR’s Performance Today, St. Paul Sunday and, as both featured guest composer/performer, on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. He was also seen and heard on television, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Entertainment Tonight and CNN International.

Mr. Novacek’s program will be announced.

$15 general admission, $10 seniors, $5 students, free for UMBC music majors and music faculty/staff, available online or at the box office one hour prior to the performance.