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Center for Art Design and Visual Culture - UMBC

Exploratory Research Residency at CADVC

Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at UMBC (CADVC) hosts an exploratory research residency that allows artists and interdisciplinary collaborators to take advantage of scholarly resources and to build partnerships at UMBC and in the Baltimore region. Artists In Residence (AIRs) are invited to pursue open-ended outcomes, and their engagements may develop into workshops, artworks, or other future projects.

During this pilot program, CADVC welcomes three low-residency AIRs who are developing research and creative projects in UMBC and Baltimore. The visiting artists will offer programs open to the general public in the UMBC Lion Brothers building in downtown Baltimore.

A woman with a dark skin-tone. She wears a black face mask, glasses, and a floral shirt holds up a red duotone book. The title on the cover reads, "Tomashi Jackson: Brown II."
Nia K. Evans (left) and Tomashi Jackson. Photo by Tedd Henn

2025 Program: Tomashi Jackson and Nia K. Evans

Tomashi Jackson is an expanded field painter whose multimedia work investigates the links between history, materiality, and current events. Her residency with CADVC, ongoing since 2022, has been the site of a developing a body of research focused on the history of and advocacy for alternative art spaces.

In 2025, in collaboration with policy analyst and economic advocate Nia Evans, Tomashi Jackson’s “Pedagogy Study Hall” project will host a series of intermedia series of public discussions about investment and disinvestment in the arts and humanities, looking to Baltimore as a critical case study in grassroots organizing in a system of gross structural inequity.

Baltimore offers a critical forum for exploring a range of formal and informal organizational approaches to arts education and community development through the arts. It also provides an important model for exploring informal cultural economies that support local art education and production in the interstitials between, and in the absence of, major financial investment.

Pedagogy Study Hall Events

Recent Residency Activities at CADVC

Levester Williams is a multimedia artist whose artistic production is rooted in explorations of the relationships between the material and social worlds. His sculptural work and multichannel video projects have been exhibited in museums and art spaces nationally and internationally. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Williams made a series of visits to UMBC and Baltimore to complete a new filmic work under the project title “dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore.” Williams is researching the histories 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 movement art documented in Williams’s film is an embodied consideration of the labor histories, and mythologies, surrounding this complex material. 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 residency program developed into the exhibition Levester Williams: all matters aside, and the publication Cockeysville to Baltimore.

A man stands on a sunny city street, facing the camera. He wears a black sweater with lavender and orange accents.
Photo by Sizwe Ndlovu

Paul Rucker is a multimedia visual artist, composer, and musician. His practice often integrates live performance, original musical compositions, and visual art installation. For over two decades, Rucker has used his own brand of art making as a social practice, which illuminates the legacy of enslavement and its relationship to the US prison industrial complex. An avid collector of artifacts and archives, Rucker holds more than 15,000 pieces about the history of the United States. Items that address false narratives of US history and the strategic withholding of historical events are used as a tool of  “demonization for colonization.”

Black-and-white portrait of a man with a dark skin-tone and a beard. He is wearing a pale-colored newsboy has, wire-rimmed classes, and a patterned button up shirt.

Residency Press

UMBC

UMBC’s exploratory artist in residence Levester Williams examines history of Cockeysville marble in film project

Since 2014, multimedia artist Levester Williams has developed a personal connection and exploration with a natural material that is a historic staple of Baltimore life—Cockeysville, Maryland, marble.

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Past Residency Events