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.
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.
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.
Recent Residency Activities at CADVC:
Levester Williams
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.
More information can be found on UMBC News
Paul Rucker
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.”
Art Research Residency-Related Past Events
December 5, 2024: On December 5, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture celebrated the release of “Cockeysville to Baltimore,” a special booklet accompanying the exhibition “Levester Williams: All Matters Aside,” which had been on view since September 20. The exhibition was curated by Lisa D. Freiman, professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The booklet featured the essay “Scrubbed Clean: The Pursuit of Purity in Baltimore” by Michelle Diane Wright, examining the histories of racial inequity and the cultural imaginary of Cockeysville marble in Baltimore. The publication marked the inaugural project funded by the Maurice Berger CADVC Program Fund, supporting research into histories of race, representation, and justice in visual culture, with the goal of creating accessible public programming.
This celebration took place as part of a December 5 tribute to Maurice Berger.
September 19, 2024: Opening of Levester Williams: All Matters Aside.
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presented the early-career survey Levester Williams: All Matters Aside, an exhibition curated by Lisa D. Freiman, professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University. The exhibition was on view at the CADVC gallery from September 20 through December 14, 2024.
The opening event took place on September 19 from 5 to 7 pm, featuring Levester Williams alongside Michelle Diane Wright, followed by a gallery tour with Lisa D. Freiman.
March 5, 2024: Levester Williams was in conversation with collaborators Sheila Gaskins and Savannah Knoop on his current work in progress, “Dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore” (2021-2024).
This series of conversations was hosted within the context of a course in the UMBC American Studies department AMST 430/680 “Seminar in American Signs: Place-Based Artistic Research” This public humanities seminar explored the work of of contemporary artists and other cultural practitioners whose work responds to place-based contexts. From landscapes to environmental art to discourses of “placemaking,” this research-based production course considered a variety of artistic media, asking the question: how are places understood through the interconnected imperatives of publics, aesthetics, cultural institutions, and the historical imaginary? Students analyzed a range of material representations of American places through the arts, and learned about how these creative works are both representative and constitutive of the historical and social contexts in which they are produced and consumed.
February 29, 2024, at 6pm: Presentation of artist Levester Williams’s experimental public projection work, “Dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore” (2021–24) at CADVC gallery at UMBC, followed by a conversation between Williams and independent curator Lisa Freiman. Free and open to the public. Please see this webpage for more details.
February 20, 2024: Tomashi Jackson held a discussion about her present research. Jackson was in conversation with Dr. Nicole King, Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture at UMBC.
February 13, 2024: Paul Rucker and artist Kim Rice participated in a public discussion about their research into the history of urban redlining. Rucker and Rice discussed a project-in-process focused on discriminatory real estate practices and the power of art to change spatial injustice.
February 9, 2023: Tomashi Jackson, CADVC exploratory artist in residence, discussed her research activities on the topic of arts pedagogy, and reflected on her recent Neuberger Prize exhibition SLOW JAMZ in conversation with CADVC Director Rebecca Uchill, who interviewed Jackson for the Neuberger Museum catalogue. This conversation about public presentation of research and video artwork coincides with CADVC’s own exploratory research into presenting public art, including video, in the UMBC Fine Arts building amphitheater.
Find out more about a this program: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/the-evolution-of-brown-ii
Portions of this residency program have been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Culture and the Citizens of Baltimore County, and the CAHSS Dean’s Office Big Ideas initiative.