Skip to content
Center for Art Design and Visual Culture - UMBC
A woman with a dark skin-tone stands on a a silver ladder facing the camera. She is wearing a khaki-colored apron and pink pants. Behind her on a white wall are text decals in the midst of being installed. To her left is a taller red ladder.
Artist Tomashi Jackson paints a mural in the CADVC gallery containing a timeline of significant moments resulting from her research.

Tomashi Jackson and Nia K. Evans: Pedagogy Study Hall

October 9–November 22, 2025

The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at UMBC (CADVC) presents Pedagogy Study Hall, a collaborative exhibition and public research project by artist Tomashi Jackson and policy analyst Nia K. Evans.

The project is the culmination of a multi-year Exploratory Research Residency at CADVC, where Jackson and Evans have reimagined the gallery as a study hall in which teaching, learning, and collective inquiry unfold in real time. Drawing on their shared history as educators in Inglewood, California in the early 2000s, they expand their classroom philosophy of resource sharing, mutual respect, and collaborative discovery into the context of Baltimore’s arts and humanities. For Jackson and Evans, pedagogy is not only a practice of teaching but also a civic activity: a process of exploring how knowledge is built, who has access to it, and how cultural infrastructure sustains—or erodes—democratic life.

Building a Living Archive

At the core of Pedagogy Study Hall is a growing oral history. Over the course of their residency, Jackson and Evans have conducted dozens of hours of recorded conversations—alongside many more informal exchanges—with artists, educators, curators, publishers, and historians in Baltimore and beyond.

These dialogues trace how cycles of investment and divestment have shaped the arts and humanities for more than a century, rooted in institution-building, legislation, and acts of collective preservation. Voices include legal scholar Matt Cregor, historian Davarian Baldwin, Baltimore Museum of Art curator Leila Grothe, Maryland Institute Black Archives founder Deyane Moses, artist-archivist Savannah Wood of Afro Charities, and Baltimore-born artist-publisher Kandis Williams, among many others. Together, the interviews reveal how education, cultural life, social infrastructure, and civil rights remain inseparable.

In the gallery, excerpts from these interviews appear as multi-channel video installations alongside a hand-painted timeline mural. Over the course of the exhibition, new data points and archival fragments will be added, building a working archive that remains responsive and in process—showing how the unfinished promises of civil rights–era cultural policy continue to define the precarity of the arts and humanities today.

Freedom Stories: From Boston to Baltimore

Alongside this living archive, Jackson and Evans, with designer Cierra Peters, extend their publishing project Freedom Stories: Long Format, first realized in Boston through the Bay State Banner. There, they reclaimed advertising space in the city’s historically Black newspaper to bring forward histories often absent from mainstream coverage. By inserting these texts into the pages of community press, the project makes the stakes of cultural policy legible in everyday civic spaces.

In Baltimore, the project continues with a full-page print of the 1965 legislation that established the NEA and NEH in the Baltimore Beat. During the exhibition, copies of the paper will be available in the gallery through a Beat Box—a “take what you need, leave what you can” community distribution kiosk designed by The Beat in partnership with Open Works. These boxes embody a civic model that blends journalism with mutual aid and underscore the role of community press as cultural infrastructure.

A group of individuals stand painting paint letters onto a white wall from a projected document.
Jaslyn Tabourne, Elle Jones, and Andrew Liang paint the “Pedagogy Study Hall” timeline at the CADVC gallery, August 2025. Courtesy of Tomashi Jackson
A woman with short black hair and a dark skin-tone stands with a blanket wrapped around her. She stands against a multicolor printed backdrop.
Tomashi Jackson, “Nia in The Morehouse Creed,” 2022. Single-channel video with sound. Courtesy of Tomashi Jackson and Tilton Gallery.

Programs: A Living Study Hall

Pedagogy Study Hall is grounded in a robust series of public programs, all free and open to the public,

Together, these events bring students, community members, and civic leaders into dialogue, extending the exhibition’s commitment to shared study and collective participation. The exhibition’s accumulation of interviews, drawings, program recordings, and archival fragments is not an endpoint but a stage in an ongoing process. These materials will grow into a book, anticipated in 2027, that extends the project’s research beyond the gallery.

View More Programsexternal link
Two women sit behind a table with a black tablecloth reading "Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture" in white text. At left is a woman with a dark skin-tone with an olive green beanie and a black button up shirt. To the right is a woman with a dark skin-tone with long braids and wearing a white t-shirt. She holds a microphone up to her mouth and is speaking.
Nia K. Evans (left) and Tomashi Jackson.

An image still from a split-screen video. To the left, an individual with a dark skin-tone with a black durag, sunglasses, and a khaki vest raises his right hand and head in front of a portrait of two woman. At right, a woman with a dark skin-tone and a colorful blouse sits in a blue chair and looks in the distance to her left.
Tomashi Jackson and Tommy Tonight, “On My Own (Devotions in the BMA & at Lisa’s House in Roxbury),” 2023 Single-channel video with sound, produced during Jackson’s CADVC residency. Courtesy of Tomashi Jackson and Tilton Gallery
A woman with a dark skin-tone is seated before a larger group, holding up her cell phone to take a selfie. The woman wears tan glasses and a white t-shirt featuring a black-and-white photograph. The group behind her poses and smiles in anticipation of the photograph.

Learn more about Pedagogy Study Hall and the Exploratory Research Residency

Learn More
Two women with a dark skin-tone are seated at a wooden table. At left, a woman with longer braids and a white t-shirt sits in front of an open laptop. At right, a woman in an olive green beanie and a black button up shirt raises her hands to her masked face.
A woman with a dark skin-tone wears an olive green beanie and a black button up shirt. She holds a microphone up in her right hand and gesticulates with her left.
Two women with a dark skin-tone are seated at a wooden table. At left, a woman with longer braids and a white t-shirt sits in front of an open laptop and raises her hand in gesticulation. At right, a woman in an olive green beanie and a black button up shirt turns to face her companion.
Two women with a dark skin-tone are seated at a wooden table. At left, a woman with longer braids and a white t-shirt sits in front of an open laptop. At right, a woman in an olive green beanie and a black button up shirt raises her right hand in a pointing motion.
A woman with a dark skin-tone wears an olive green beanie and a black button up shirt. She holds a microphone up in her right hand and gesticulates with her left.
Two women with dark skin-tones and black face masks are seated at a table with a powerpoint projected behind them. The woman to the left wears an olive green beanie and a light blue long-sleeve shirt. At right, a woman with longer braids wears a red-and-white floral shirt.
Tomashi Jackson and Nia Evans during the “Pedagogy Study Hall” residency project at CADVC, leading workshops and meeting with community stakeholders. Photo: Tedd Henn

Past Events for Pedagogy Study Hall

Program Support

This program is sponsored by the Wagner Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences and the Citizens of Baltimore County, and the Arts+ initiative at UMBC.

Gridded orientation of sponsor logos. Clockwise: the Citizen of Baltimore County, the Wagner Foundation, the Arts+ Initative at UMBC, and the Maryland State Arts Council.

About the Artists

Tomashi Jackson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work merges painting, printmaking, video, and performance with research into histories of policy, segregation, and civil rights. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, ICA Philadelphia, the Parrish Art Museum, and in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the High Museum of Art.

Nia K. Evans is Executive Director of the Boston Ujima Project, a member-run cooperative building solidarity economies through cultural and financial infrastructure. With a background in education and policy, Evans’s work emphasizes facilitation, access, and democratic participation. She is editor of the forthcoming Pedagogy Study Hall publication.

Visitor Information

Our exhibitions and events are free and open to the public for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University’s nondiscrimination policy.

If you need specific accommodations at one of our events, whether in person or online, or to experience an exhibition, please contact CADVC at cadvc@umbc.edu or 410-455-3188 as soon as possible.