Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, Artist-in-Residence, Wins Herblock Prize 

Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, artist-in-residence, has been awarded the 2015 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. The Herblock Prize honors artists who use editorial cartoons to preserve freedom of speech and the right of expression.

The judges called KAL’s work “clear, thoughtful, [and] forceful” and praised his cartoon on Edward Snowden. “His portfolio reflected his dual editorial-cartoonist roles, and impressed the judges with his ability to jump between macro-international policy issues to Baltimore mayor’s stonewalling about the accuracy of its speed cameras,” the Herb Block Foundation said.

“I consider the Herblock Prize to be a special honor,” KAL said. “I am honored and  humbled to have been selected for this extraordinary award.” KAL was also recognized this year by Europe’s Grand Prix Award with Europe’s cartoon of the year award.

Remember zoetropes? They may be a bit before your time. The zoetrope, derived from the Greek root words for "life" and "turning," is an optical toy invented before the days of film and cinema. The tool displays a progressive sequence of drawings or photographs, thus creating the illusion of motion. Most often the images are arranged on a cylinder which then spins, setting the pictures spinning.

While zoetropes experienced their heyday before the dawn of motion picture technology, one contemporary artist is bringing the retro medium back in a radical new way. Meet Eric Dyer, the modern master of the zoetrope.

Photo credit: Jaclin Paul

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program has announced that Dr. Maurice Berger, Research Professor + Chief Curator for the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is one of the recipients of its 2014 grants. 

Maurice plans to conduct research on Robert Frank, focusing on contact sheets, notes, and shooting scripts for a two-part essay on Frank’s representations of race in The Americans. He will also conduct research for essays exploring parallel developments in African American, Latino, and Asian American photo-based art and photography from the 1960s to the present, focusing on the ways this work has challenged stereotypes and prevailing ideas about identity.

Designed to support writing about contemporary art, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts. The grant supports research for Maurice Berger’s monthly column, “Race Stories,” for the Lens Blog of the New York Times. The blog explores the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, and social or regional issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media. 

Portrait Garden is a series of audio and photographic portraits of eleven women incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, MD, culminating a 1-1/2 year long collaboration between Ruby Award winning artist and Associate Professor of Visual Arts Lynn Cazabon. In the collaboration the inmates created perennial gardens on the prison grounds consisting of plants chosen to represent each woman, and Professor Cazabon recorded interviews with each about the selected plants and her past and present experiences with gardening. The completed portraits are photographs of the selected plants that were planted and cultivated over the course of a year, displayed with a short textual excerpt from the audio interviews and QR codes, which when scanned with a mobile device, play the full interview with each woman. The complete set of images and audio interviews are available through the project website: http://portraitgarden.org

For the month of December, Portrait Garden will be displayed as a series of 100 posters in trains within the Baltimore Light Rail system. This public dissemination is conceived as a moving gallery designed to bring the women metaphorically into the community of Baltimore City.