Saturday, October 16, 2010

Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts & Culture
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu

UMBC's Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) presents a lecture by Jamie Maslyn Larson, Director of West 8 New York, who will speak on selected works in urban landscape architecture and specifically about West 8's award winning design for Governors Island in New York's harbor. Her talk is entitled "Wooden Bikes and the Scale Girl: West 8 in America." West 8 is an internationally recognized Rotterdam-based architecture firm.

This event is co-sponsored by the Baltimore-Rotterdam Sister City Committee and the Ampersand Institute for Words & Images at the University of Baltimore, and is presented as part of Baltimore Architecture Month, organized by AIA Baltimore.

The lecture will be delivered at 6 pm at the University of Baltimore Student Center Auditorium, 21 W. Mount Royal Avenue at Maryland Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201. Admission is free.

About the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC)
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is dedicated to the study of contemporary art and visual culture, critical theory, art and cultural history, and the relationship between society and the arts. The CADVC serves as a forum for students, faculty, and the general public for the discussion of important aesthetic and social issues of the day. Disciplines represented include painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, digital art, video, film, television, design, architecture, advertising, and installation and performance art.

Since 1989, the CADVC has incorporated a number of public programs into its exhibition programming schedule to further impact the communities it serves. Symposia, lecture series, conferences, film series, visiting artist series, and residencies have all been fundamental in an effort to create an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture. The Center has also initiated a number of projects with Baltimore and surrounding schools to integrate the contemporary artist and their concerns into the classroom. These projects take place on-site at both middle schools and high schools and are team taught by the instructors at these schools, professional artists, and students from the CADVC's Internship Program.

The Center produces one to two exhibition catalogues each year. Each document is fully illustrated and contains critical essays on the given subject by a variety of distinguished professionals in the field. Recent publications include Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion and Paul Rand: Modernist Design. These books and catalogues are published and are distributed internationally through Distributed Art Publishers.

Since 1992, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture has actively pursued the organization of exhibitions that contain the aesthetic, theoretical, and educational potential to reach both a national and international audience. Over the years, the CADVC has traveled these exhibition projects to a broad spectrum of museums, professional non-profit galleries, and universities national and internationally. Recent traveling exhibitions include:

• White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (2003)
• Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations (2001)
• Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999)
• Bruno Monguzzi: A Designer's Perspective (1998)
• Minimal Politics (1997)
• Kate Millett, Sculpture: The First 38 Years (1997)

Beyond the scope of these traveling exhibitions, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture also undertakes projects such as the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership. As part of the educational mission of the CADVC, one graduate thesis exhibition and one undergraduate senior exhibition are presented each year.

This multi-faceted focus for presenting exhibitions, projects and scholarly research publications focused on contemporary art and cultural issues positions the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in a unique position within the mid-Atlantic region.

Public Information
UMBC Arts website: http://www.umbc.edu/arts
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture: http://www.umbc.edu/cadvc
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture phone: 410-455-3188

Images for Media
http://www.west8.nl/projects/all/governors_island_new_york/
Images in this release: West 8 designs for Governors Island, New York.

You may view or download this release as a pdf file.