Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore is the first career retrospective of artist Amos Badertscher in the United States. Between the 1960s and 2005, Badertscher documented hustlers, club kids, go-go dancers, drag queens, drug addicts, friends, and lovers who were part of LGBTQ+ life in Baltimore.
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents States of Becoming, an exhibition curated by Fitsum Shebeshe and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI). States of Becoming examines the dynamic forces of relocation, resettling, and assimilation that shape the artistic practices of a group of 17 contemporary African artists who have lived and worked in the United States within the last three decades, and informs the discourse on identity construction within the African Diaspora.
The Black in the Americas Series presents Maya Quilolo, a Maroon artist and researcher whose investigations address and explore the intersections between art, anthropology, and black and indigenous cosmologies through film, photography, drawing, performance, literature, and sculpture. She will host a four-part workshop series, Beyond the Eyes: Embodied Methodologies into an Environmental Image.
Join us for UMBC’s 13th annual Livewire new music festival, an exploration of new sounds presented in six concerts over four days, October 18 to 21. What is the role of music in our society? What are the inherent powers that lie within music to transform our lives? These are the questions that will be pondered in this year’s Livewire 13: Transformation festival through music, featuring ensembles and works that specifically address music’s role in bringing about transformation on a personal and global level.
BLACK HOLE — Trilogy And Triathlon is a multidisciplinary performance choreographed by the award-winning movement artist Shamel Pitts, co-created and performed by his Brooklyn-based arts collective TRIBE. BLACK HOLE constitutes the final installment of Pitts’s “BLACK Series” triptych. Deeply inspired and infused by the spirit of Afrofuturism, this contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk combines dance, original sound, video projection, and light design in a tale of vitality and tenderness, darkness and light, personal growth and collective empowerment.
As the computer, the printing press, or the quill pen was to the book culture of other eras, slavery was to ancient Rome. From the Late Republic through the High Empire, members of Rome's literate elite made use of enslaved research assistants and stenographers to write books, enslaved copyists and binders to make new copies and maintain old ones, and enslaved readers to read aloud for convenience or in social settings. This talk by Joseph Howley ’06, ancient studies, will examine enslaved reading in Rome, situate that practice in histories of reading and of slavery, and look at how the questions this practice raises relate to the current moment of interest in generative AI.
Philosophers Anonymous presents the UMBC Philosophy faculty in a philosophical debate that intends to open your mind to see how philosophy affects you in daily life. Going head-to-head with the most introspective minds UMBC has to offer — the professors who teach philosophy themselves!
The second of six events in UMBC's annual Livewire new music festival features Ruckus, the faculty new music ensemble. The evening's performance includes three world premieres of works by professor of music Linda Dusman, alumna Karena Ingram ’16 and exchange student Vittoria Tchotche from Piacenza Conservatory.
In this third of six concerts on UMBC's annual Livewire new music festival, the ensemble Duo della Luna presents a program that explores transformation within music. For this performance, the Duo, comprised of soprano Susan Botti, and violinist Airi Yoshioka, will be joined by harpist Jacqueline Pollauf and percussionist Dustin Donahue as guest artists. The program features works by Rahilia Hasanova, Kathryn Blake, Ashkan Behzadi, Susan Botti, Kaija Saariaho, and Wes York.
In the fourth of six concerts on UMBC's annual Livewire festival, the New York City-based chamber music collective Decoda presents a transformative program of new works by an array of groundbreaking American composers for flute, clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano. Their performance will include works by Anna Clyne, Mario Diaz de Leon, Valerie Coleman, Christopher Ceronne, Andy Akiho, Brad Balliett, and by incarcerated people in Lee Correctional Institution and Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
The fifth of six concerts in Livewire: Transformation will feature works by UMBC student composers Ida Dierker, Valarous Lingham, Aaron Statham, and D'Juan Moreland (in addition to works by Mark Appelbaum, Juri Seo, Margaret Brouwer, and Yaz Lancaster), and performances by student musicians Brandon Gouin, Brendan Witt, Angela Hayward, Henry Smith, Ida Dierker, Lucas Rose, Joshua Epstein, Logan Miller, Gaby Echiverri, Nicole Johnson, and the UMBC Percussion Ensemble.
The finale of the Livewire: Transformation festival features the ensemble Stick&Bow, a Montreal-based marimba and cello duet known for their riveting performances. Their program brings pieces from the past and the present, featuring artists from another era who tried to make this world a better place through the power of their voices, ranging from Beethoven to David Bowie.
The Black in the Americas Series presents Roberto Zurbano Torres, a Cuban-Haitian essayist, cultural critic, and anti-racist activist. The film Zurbano and His Racial Conscience, produced in 2022 by the University of Missouri and directed by Juana María Cordones-Cook, will be shown at the event.
In this talk, public historian and curator Orilonise Yarborough will analyze the concept of sankofa, time jumping and time collapse through the use of oral history and archival research, positing that Black concepts of time have never been linear. This is the third in a series of six lectures, Beyond the Veil: Making Sense of the Spirit World.
Today, the figure of the guide dog has become a ubiquitous cultural symbol signifying blindness perhaps best shown by the fact that guide dog emojis commonly appear alongside those for wheelchairs and prosthetics. This talk will explore the role of popular culture in reshaping public responses to the figure of the guide dog and the human handler.
