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.

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

Assistant Professor Gary Rozanc was awarded funding from the prestigious AIGA DEC Design Faculty Research Grant program. Professor Rozanc’s grant project is “Web Designer Competencies Inventory and Recommendations for Inclusion in Design Curricula.”

His research will help identify and validate sets of core competencies that need to be effectively taught to students preparing to pursue careers as interaction and user experience designers. He will interview a select group of interaction design educators and professionals to determine, contextualize and prioritize these competencies.

Gary Rozanc is an Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design emphasis, in the Department of Visual Arts.

Between You and Me is a solo show in three parts by multidisciplinary artist Christine Ferrera. Counter-posing live and recorded performance, this piece contemplates art, humor and feminism. 

 An artist befriends a global coffee conglomerate, confronts her anxieties by attempting a stand-up comedy routine and battles a belligerent version of herself in a series of strange phone calls. Counter-posing live and recorded performance, Between You and Me is a solo show that contemplates art, humor and feminism.

Maurice Berger is a Research Professor at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at UMBC and a well-known cultural historian, curator and author who writes the Race stories series for the Lens Blog at the New York Times.