The Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents the exhibition Sonya Clark: Hair/Craft, on display from October 31 through March 12. Clark's multidisciplinary work explores issues of identity, race, cultural heritage, and collective memory. This exhibition presents five works in which Clark applies fiber-art techniques to the medium of hair, a material laden with cultural and metaphorical significance.

The Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents the exhibition Aaron Siskind: Formations, on display from October 31 through March 12. Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) was one of the most influential figures in the development of photography as an art form during the twentieth century. This exhibition, drawn from UMBC’s Photography Collections, traces the formation of this artist’s unique photographic vision from early documentary works made in Harlem as a member of the New York Film and Photo League in the 1930s to his breakthrough explorations of abstraction in the 1940s and 1950s, which led to a sustained investigation of the camera’s capacity to frame new visual forms.

In conjunction with the exhibitions Prison Nation and Portrait Garden at the Library Gallery and Oletha DeVane: Spectrum of Light and Spirit at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, the galleries present a panel discussion, Art from the Inside, featuring Lorenzo Steele, Jr., Lynn Cazabon, Oletha DeVane and Tadia Rice, who will discuss their experiences working with incarcerated individuals and the importance of art in giving a face to those behind bars.

The Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) presents Elaine Eff, who will speak on Baltimore Painted Screens: Understanding City Life through Urban Arts. Join Elaine Eff, the foremost chronicler of painted screens for a tour of the sidewalks of East Baltimore, in search of this homegrown folk art known in no other modern American city. An artful anomaly, a source of privacy and ventilation, painted screens grew from the handiwork of a single Northeast Baltimore grocer in the summer of 1913 to hundreds of thousands of colorful landscape scenes created by known and unknown hands on their neighborhood’s rowhouse windows and door screens.

Most prisons and jails across the United States do not allow prisoners to have access to cameras. At a moment when an estimated 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S., 3.8 million people are on probation, and 870,000 former prisoners are on parole, how can images tell the story of mass incarceration when the imprisoned don’t have control over their own representation? This exhibition addresses the unique role photography plays in creating a visual record of this national crisis, despite the increasing difficulty of gaining access inside prisons.