The Imaging Research Center at the UMBC  is partnering with the Maryland Historical Society to create an interactive 3-D representation of Baltimore as it was a few years after the War of 1812. It's called "BEARINGS of Baltimore, circa 1815."

WYPR host Sheilah Kast recently visited the Maryland Historical Society to check out the interactive map. She spoke with Kristin Schenning, Education Director at the historical society, and Dan Bailey, professor in UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts and Director of its Imaging Research Center.

Listen to the story by clicking this link.

IMDA alumnus and adjunct professor Gary Kachadourian interviewed by UMBC Visual Arts Professor Mark Alice Durant.

From the introduction to the interview:

Laconic is a word that comes to mind when not only speaking with Gary Kachadourian but also when engaging his artwork. He is eminently likable and articulate but seemingly allergic to self-promotion, Gary could be a charter member of Understaters Anonymous. As an arts administrator, curator, and now active visual artist himself, he has been a constant and vital presence in Baltimore cultural life for most of his adult life.

His drawings are an index of the urban quotidian, dumpsters, utility boxes, weeds, empty lots, port-o-potties, jersey barriers, and parking booths, rendered precisely without a trace of subjectivity or editorial comment.  His largely black and white installations are as funny and familiar as they are ambitious and labor intensive. To step inside one is an experience in quiet disorientation; suddenly the world of color and three-dimensionality somehow seems alien, as if we have been living in the wrong dimension all along.

              - Mark Alice Durant