All posts by: Tom Moore

This fall, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC), celebrates the launch of four significant projects by research professor Maurice Berger, who through his curatorial work frequently explores issues of race, society, and culture, examining difficult subjects through the lens of art, photography, and visual media.

The new projects include the unveiling of exhibition websites for For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights and Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, the creation of a online home for Berger’s “Race Stories” essays, and the extension of a national tour of For All the World To See through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ On the Road program — all of which will broaden public access to this research.

“I have a lot of faith in visual media to communicate powerful and even life-changing ideas about this country,” says Berger, whose previous work includes exhibitions such as Notes in Time: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (1995), Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999); Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000 (2002); White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (2003); For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2012, photo above); and Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television (2016). Since 2012, Berger has contributed monthly “Race Stories” essays for the Lens Blog of The New York Times, exploring the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race, and complementing many of the issues explored in his curatorial work.

The online version of the exhibition Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, which toured nationally from 2015 to 2017 and was co-organized by CADVC and the Jewish Museum in New York, explores how modern art served as an influence and a model for shaping the new medium, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Visit the site here.

For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, co-organized by CADVC and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened in 2010 and continues to travel in a smaller, lower-security version through the NEH on the Road initiative. The exhibition was the first to comprehensively explore the historic role of visual culture in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for racial equality and justice in the United States from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s. Visit the new online version of the critically acclaimed exhibition here.

“Websites are incredibly valuable teaching tools,” explains Berger on the importance of these new resources. “They reach more people than come in the door of the average museum. Most exhibitions actually have a relatively small audience. For All the World to See is the exception, which has had a million visitors and counting. That’s virtually unheard of. The typical art or visual culture exhibition, no matter how many venues, will probably reach no more than 100,000 visitors. A website is not bound by geography, or the fragility of art, or the enormous cost of shipping and maintaining an actual exhibition. Visitors can pop in from all over the world. Yes, there is nothing like experiencing real works of art or important examples of visual culture. But these online exhibitions augment the original exhibition in powerful ways, disseminating its ideas far and wide.”

The launch of the Race Stories webpage brings together in one convenient place links to Berger’s monthly “Race Stories” column, which explores the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, or social or regional issues around race not usually covered in the mainstream media. Visit the site here.

“I wanted to find ways to make the ‘Race Stories’ series available to as broad an audience as possible,” says Berger. “I think it’s important for college and university students to read these essays. So putting them on the CADVC website has made all of them available, in one convenient place, to our students at UMBC as well as the thousands of outside visitors to our website. I always write my essays for The New York Times and curate my exhibitions on race and visual culture with young people in mind. My ideal reader is a smart high school student — because if you can inspire a young person to see the world in new ways, then you can inspire anyone. I get a lot of emails from high school teachers and college professors, who tell me they routinely assign my ‘Race Stories’ essays to their students. I’m an educator, first and foremost. The principal purpose of my work is to teach racial literacy through visual culture.”

After a successful national tour, the exhibition For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights received support from the On the Road program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, providing the opportunity for it to continue to tour the country in a reduced format. NEH on the Road is designed to create wider national access to the ideas, themes, and stories explored in major exhibitions funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Recently, the NEH extended its support of For All the World To See through 2023, the first time the endowment has doubled the national tour of an exhibition, allowing travel to an additional 47 geographically diverse national venues through 2023. Information on the NEH On the Road version of For All the World To See is available here.

In 2012, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Baltimore artist David Hess felt compelled to accelerate the construction of an unusual series of sculptures: life-size mock assault rifles fashioned from everyday ordinary objects.

“This body of work is my personal awakening to the American obsession with weapons and the abstraction of violence,” says Hess. Taking discarded bits of things (“rescued” objects, he calls them) that most people would consider trash — a vacuum cleaner, the handle of a saw, an old black sneaker, a pink Barbie bike frame, a raggedy crutch, the body of an electric guitar, a turquoise sewing machine — Hess fashioned strikingly realistic-looking “guns” for exhibition, to prompt conversations about violence in America.

Hess’ work came to the attention of Kathy O’Dell, special assistant to the dean for education and arts partnerships, and associate professor of visual arts, art history and museum studies, who has organized an exhibition, simply titled Gun Show, of all 112 of Hess’ gun sculptures at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, opening on September 4 and continuing through October 14. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, September 7, from 5 to 7 p.m.

The exhibition displays the sculpture on the floor, laid out on tarpaulins, recalling the presentation of bodies awaiting identification following disasters, or the arrangement of confiscated weapons at police headquarters. Ranging in weight from 8 to 44 pounds, the mock guns include no shooting mechanism.

“The reason I felt strongly about convincing David Hess to hold this exhibition at UMBC is that it’s a research institution,” says O’Dell, “and research is what has driven David’s entire project, starting in the early 1990s through the present: What is a gun? What does it mean to hold one? What does it mean to make one? Who does or does not own them? Who should or should not own them? What are sensible reasons and safe ways to use them? What are the ramifications of their use or misuse? How do issues of race, class, gender identity, and age impact these questions?”

O’Dell continues, “Research is about asking questions and then attempting to answer them — as individuals and as groups working together to make sense of the world and to advance thinking.”

O’Dell notes that the power in Hess’ use of “rescued” objects is their familiarity. “Every object fits into a story with which each viewer can relate,” she says. “Yet each story is personal. A Barbie bike seat will have a different meaning to me than it will for a young man whose sister had a bike like that. Contemplating a personal story leads to contemplating one’s personal position on what the bike seat has been made to represent — a gun. The ‘rescued’ objects allow us to ‘rescue’ memories and, on the basis of memories, build thoughts and positions in the here and now.”

David Hess’ work has been exhibited at Goya Contemporary in Baltimore and the John Elder Gallery in New York. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections, including the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore/Washington International (BWI) Thurgood Marshall Airport, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sinai Hospital, Montgomery College, Kaiser Permanente, and the Emerson Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition, he has completed over twenty public art commissions in and around Baltimore, Rockville, and Germantown, and Washington, D.C.

Kathy O’Dell, curator of Gun Show, teaches and writes on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on performance and global art. The author of Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), she has published numerous articles and reviews in Art in America, Artforum, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and other journals. Currently, she is writing a book titled The Dot: A Small History of a Big Point and is co-writing, with Duke University Professor Kristine Stiles, a survey text titled World Art Since 1933. She serves on the Board of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the Maryland State Commission on Public Art.

Read more about Gun Show on UMBC’s Arts and Culture Calendar.

All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC except detail of sculpture courtesy of Geoff Graham.

Hailed as “groundbreaking” by The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik, Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, the first exhibition to explore how avant-garde art influenced the look and content of network television in its formative years, is on display at the UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) through December 10.

From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, the pioneers of American television adopted modernism as a source of inspiration. Revolution of the Eye looks at how the dynamic new medium of television, in its risk-taking and aesthetic experimentation, paralleled and embraced cutting-edge art and design.

Highlighting the visual revolution ushered in by American television and modernist art and design of the 1950s and 1960s, Revolution of the Eye features over 260 art objects, artifacts, and clips. Fine art and graphic design (including works by Saul Bass, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Andy Warhol), as well as ephemera, television memorabilia, and clips from historic television programs and film (including Batman, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and The Twilight Zone) are on view.

 
Early on, television opened its doors to appearances by avant-garde artists — from John Cage performing a musical composition on I’ve Got a Secret to Salvador Dali as the mystery guest on What’s My Line. Revolution of the Eye examines the diverse ways modern artists, designers, and critics used the medium as a significant vehicle for self-promotion to a broad national audience. Viewers will experience rare clips of Cage, Dali, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Ray Eames, Roy Lichtenstein, Ben Shahn, George Segal, and other renowned artists.

During the exhibition’s premiere in New York, The New York Times commented, “We may think of TV before All in the Family as a vast wasteland, but the more than 260 items in the exhibition — clips, advertisements, art pieces, publications, merchandise — reveal the influence and even the input of artists from Duchamp and Dali to Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.”

Revolution of the Eye examines television’s promotion of avant-garde ideals and aesthetics exemplified by the integration of Dada, Surrealism, and other experimental genres into the aesthetically and conceptually rich series The Twilight Zone and The Ernie Kovacs Show by such pioneers as Rod Serling and Ernie Kovacs. Both embraced avant-garde ideas that broached broad social or cultural issues — from the politics of the Cold War to the corporate ambitions of the networks. Their work was artful and sophisticated, exemplifying the best of early television. Their influential programs reflected the medium’s potential to alter the way Americans understood the world.

The exhibition also features work by Stan VanDerBeek, a professor of art and film at UMBC from 1975 until his death in 1984, when he chaired the Department of Visual Arts. A pioneer in the development of experimental film and live-action animation techniques, VanDerBeek contributed early in his career to Winky Dink and You, an interactive Saturday morning show that aired on CBS from 1953 to 1957, clips of which are shown in the exhibition.

“Many critics speak of present-day television as kind of a new golden age in which the medium is seen to have surpassed film as a major venue for artistic experimentation and quality,” says exhibition curator Maurice Berger, CADVC research professor. “Revolution of the Eye reminds us that the desire for outstanding, artistically important programming was in television’s DNA from the beginning.”

 
The exhibition is organized by UMBC’s Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture and the Jewish Museum, New York, where it was on display in 2015 prior to a national tour that included the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and the Addison Gallery of American Art.

More information Revolution of the Eye is available here. The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is located on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building and is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., on Thursdays until 7 p.m., and on Sundays from 12 to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

Lynn Spigel, professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, who wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog, will speak about the exhibition on Thursday, November 17, 4 p.m. in Performing Arts and Humanities Building (room 132). Additional information about her lecture is available here.

Read the reviews:
UMBC’s ‘Revolution’ reminds us that small screen had big visual ideas (The Baltimore Sun)
‘Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television’ Review (The Wall Street Journal)
‘Revolution of the Eye’ Examines Art’s Influence on Early TV (The New York Times)

Revolution of the Eye is made possible by the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Skirball Fund for American Jewish Life Exhibitions, the Stern Family Philanthropic Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other generous donors. The exhibition’s presentation at UMBC is supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences.

Top Image: Batman and Robin, 1966. Image provided by 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, New York.

Exhibition images by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.