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.
Immerse yourself in the enchanting world of poetry set to music with “Poetry in Song,” a captivating concert featuring the extraordinary talents of tenor Andrew Sauvageau and pianist Hui-Chuan Chen. Prepare to be transported to a realm where words and melodies intertwine, as these exceptional musicians bring to life poetic compositions by Robert Schumann and Gustav Mahler.
One of the griots of Black radical tradition in Brazil, Diva Moreira is a political scientist and activist on social issues primarily concerning race, feminism, and the working class since the 1960s. She founded Casa Dandara, a cultural center promoting black self-esteem and leadership, for which she was awarded an Ashoka Fellowship.
The annual Mullen Lecture, part of the Fall 2023 Social Sciences Forum, presents Melissa Kearney, Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, who will speak on The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.
Trombone soloist James Justin Kent joins UMBC music faculty and students for a night of incredible brass music in the annual Brash Bash. The evening will feature a virtuosic solo set by Kent that culminates in a performance alongside a large UMBC student/faculty brass ensemble. Brass chamber and large ensemble works will also be performed throughout the program.
Join us for a retrospective screening of Joanna Priestley’s award winning short animated films with introductions and explanations of techniques by the artist. Priestley’s work maintains a high level of porosity between serious exploration of boundaries and intuitive whimsy, and she is dedicated to experimentation in technique, theme, and content.
Explore a musical adventure that traverses the realms of contemporary and classical compositions with the Inscape Chamber Orchestra, led by their esteemed conductor Richard Scerbo. Their program features Esa-Pekka Salonen’s ethereal Fog, Kaija Saariaho's mesmerizing Quatre Instants, and Carl Nielsen’s timeless Symphony No. 6.
The Human Context of Science and Technology program lecture, part of the Fall 2023 Social Sciences Forum, presents Juno Salazar Parreñas, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, who will speak on White Supremacy, Animal Advocacy, and the Longue Durée of Misanthropy.
Priestess and conjurewoman Toya Smith will trace the everyday cultural aspects of African Americans, exploring how those aspects are influenced by traditional African cultures brought over by ancestors. This is the second in a series of six lectures, Beyond the Veil: Making Sense of the Spirit World.
In a presentation by the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA), UMBC assistant professor of dance Ann Sofie Clemmensen will speak about her new series of short cinematic dance-for-camera works that communicate on a sensory, visual, and kinetic level new perspectives on the work being done by researchers at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) to protect and preserve healthy marine ecosystems. She will be joined by Allen R. Place and Vikram Vakharia, whose research data she brought into visual form using the moving body and cinematography.
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.
The Livewire 13: Transformation festival's inaugural concert features pianist Idith Meshulam Korman, who for ten years has taught piano in a correctional facility. Over the course of time, she has witnessed how music can empower individuals with a renewed sense of identity and life perspective, bringing about healing and reduced recidivism. In the spirit of kinship, Meshulam will perform works that have made the most impact on her students.
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 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.
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 and performers.
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.
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.
Spark 6: Refractions features the work of UMBC and Towson faculty, recent graduates, and current students in the historic galleries of The Peale in Baltimore City, sponsored by PNC. Refraction is the change in direction of a wave as it passes from one transparent substance into another — a phenomenon most commonly observed when light waves pass through lenses, magnifying glasses, and prisms. Each of the artists in this exhibition serves as an apparatus of refraction: focusing, magnifying, or redirecting our attention and experience of our world.
In conjunction with the exhibition States of Becoming, curated by Fitsum Shebeshe and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents a conversation with the curator and Jessica Bell Brown, curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The discussion, moderated by Rhea Beckett, founding director at Black Artist Research Space, will focus on curatorial approaches to African diasporic experience and migration.
The Department of Music presents the UMBC Jazz Ensemble under the direction of Matthew Belzer.
Amy Eva Raehse, executive director and partner at Goya Contemporary Gallery and writer, educator, and independent curator, will give us a behind the scenes view of her career and will answer questions about gallery practices, representation, and sustaining a contemporary art gallery in Baltimore.
Flutists Lisa Cella and Tessa Brinckman join forces to explore the extraordinary sonorities of alto and bass flutes in Ouroboros — Journeys in the Underworld as part of their project The Low Flutes Project, presenting works by Elainie Lillios, Tessa Brinckman, Jorge Sosa, Linda Dusman, Martin Lodge, Doina Rotaru, and Christopher Adler.
UMBC Theatre presents Dracula: a Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really by Kate Hamill, directed by Kathryn Chase Bryer. In this new adaptation of Dracula, the playwright-actor confronts the sexism in Bram Stoker’s original work, turning it into a feminist revenge fantasy.
