CADVC hosts an Exploratory Research Residency that invites artists and interdisciplinary collaborators to take advantage of scholarly resources and to build partnerships at UMBC and in the Baltimore region. In 2025, CADVC hosts Tomashi Jackson’s “Pedagogy Study Hall” project as part of this program.
Tomashi Jackson is an expanded field painter whose multimedia work investigates the links between history, materiality, and current events. Her residency with CADVC, began in 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.
In Tomashi Jackson’s words:
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. Our 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.
Public programs associated with this residency:
February 25, 6-7pm: Conversation with Tomashi Jackson and Nia Evans, Lion Brothers classroom, downtown Baltimore.
Sign up for limited spaces will be available via this hyper-link.
April 8 evening: conversation about structures of cultural support with Ryan Patterson, Nick Hartigan, and Denise Griffin Johnson, at the Lion Brothers classroom in downtown Baltimore.
Registration details will be announced.
April 15, live online, evening: Panel on public funding in arts and education.
Registration details will be announced.