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Center for Art Design and Visual Culture - UMBC

Exploratory Research Residency: Pedagogy Study Hall

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.

The city of Baltimore has a rich, archived, and living history to be explored to help us understand a rubric for identifying the outcomes for funding public visual arts and humanities efforts. Art history is a social history, and we want to see what it looks like from the establishment of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities – federal level funding – to the state level, city level, and then what that means among community-based organizations. We’d like to record these stories, and facilitate private and public discussions with Baltimorians – both transplants and multi-generational – where they can share their reflections on what the public arts and humanities have meant in public space to them as participants in schools for the arts and programs that may no longer exist. It is important to document these histories so that we can turn that lens, this logic, this structure, onto other cities and communities. Because across the country, this experience of rapid divestment is having real impacts on educational and human outcomes for everyone.

– Tomashi Jackson

Pedagogy Study Hall Events

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.

Learn more about the exhibition, Tomashi Jackson and Nia K. Evans: Pedagogy Study Hall

View Exhibition