CADVC Demos Public Video Art Projection Gallery

On select evenings in late February and early March, 2024, UMBC visitors will get a sneak peek of a new public video art gallery! Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC), the research center and art gallery based at the College of Art, Humanities, and Social Sciences, will be running “demos” for a new video art projection gallery in the Fine Arts Building amphitheater. The work featured in these demonstrations is Levester Williams’s “dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore” (2021-2024).

Artist Levester Williams

The work is the result of the artist’s Exploratory Research Residency at CADVC, ongoing since 2023. During this time, Williams has been researching the histories and mythologies of Cockeysville (Maryland) marble, a material used in many salient objects in the local built environment, including the Washington Monument and iconic exterior steps of Baltimore rowhomes. The film results from this research as well as movement workshops and other activities that included the participation of UMBC students and other Baltimore residents. Artist Nia Hampton, a current IMDA graduate student, and her mother, artist and arts advocate Sheila Gaskins, are featured performers. The filmic work was assisted by IMDA graduate student Bao Nguyen and artist Savannah Knoop, who worked on the project as an intimacy coordinator and facilitator.

“dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore” is an embodied consideration of the labor histories, and mythologies, surrounding a marble building material that appears throughout Baltimore’s built environment. In the movement experiments surrounding the film work, participants negotiated relationships to public space, monumental form, and connections to history. In Williams’s words, the project underscores the “intertwined history of African-Americans’ plight to self-determined agency and full citizenship, and a rather benign stone.”

This public display of an art work-in-process is consistent with CADVC’s commitment to showcasing the experimentation of artists and the visual culture of interdisciplinary research. Currently, CADVC’s gallery is exhibiting “Spectrum of Process,” highlighting UMBC faculty approaches to art and culture through rigorous, experimental processes.

With funds provided by the Maryland State Arts Council’s Public Art Planning Grant, CADVC has been researching this site as a forum for public art presentations and video art projections for over a year. Last spring, CADVC hosted a series of public forums on public art as part of its planning grant activities. Curator and artist Rahne Alexander, an alumna of the IMDA program, served as moderator and convener. CADVC also worked with a number of consultants and specialists in projection mapping, AV technologies, and fine art projection. UMBC colleagues in Event Services, Facilities, IT, Visual Arts, Student Affairs, the office of Research and Creative Achievement and beyond also contributed to these planning activities. The CAHSS Dean’s Office funded this year’s build of the CADVC projection art gallery now underway.

The demos will be visible between roughly February 27 and March 6, 2024. A public event celebrating the demos will be held on February 29, 2024, 6-8pm. Snacks and refreshments will be served.