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Opening Reception: Friday, September 25 from 6pm to 10pm
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This fall the Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park, presents New Arrivals 2015: Collecting Contemporary Art at the University of Maryland. On view September 21 through December 18, 2015, the exhibition features ten artworks by six emerging and mid-career artists. Nearly all completed within the last two years, these works explore intersecting contemporary experiences of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, global conflict, and personal identity. Spanning photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and multimedia construction, they incorporate materials as diverse as gold leaf, asphalt paper, shrink wrap, crude oil, and repurposed furniture.
Highlights include:
- Baltimore-born, New York-based artist Derrick Adams’s Game Changing, a suite of four richly textured screenprints with gold leaf that examines themes of royalty and African-American experience by transforming the king of hearts, queen of clubs, jack of diamonds, and ace of spades found in a traditional deck of playing cards into precious objects.
- A photograph from Iraqi-born, New York-based artist Wafaa Bilal’s The Ashes Series, initiated in 2003 when the artist began collecting press images of private spaces destroyed in the Iraq War. These he reconstructed by hand as miniature, three-dimensional models, then he dusted them with ashes and translated the results into luminous photographs.
- Two sculptures from Bilal’s Lovely Pink series, in which the artist reflects on recent destruction by ISIS of ancient art and artifacts by manipulating miniature reproductions of some of the most recognizable sculptures in Western art history—in this case, Michelangelo’s David (1501–1504) and Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa (c. 1554)—covering them in heated industrial shrink wrap and petroleum-based enamel paint.
- A large-scale drawing related to Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project, for which Kaphar sketched in chalk the faces of Sean Bell, Michael Brown, Amadou Diallo, and Trayvon Martin—all individuals tragically killed in the United States by law enforcement or a vigilante actor—layering them one on top of the other so that they blur and blend on a ground of asphalt paper.
- DC-based artist John Paradiso’s Fairy Collage Quilt, which explores experiences of “growing old as a gay man” by combining erotic male figures and floral motifs in a gridded, mixed-media collage that incorporates fabrics and traditionally “feminine” techniques of quilting.
- Three photographs from Elle Pérez’s The Outliers series, a project for which the Maryland Institute College of Art-graduate traveled across the United States considering notions of gender and photographing individuals who identify as Genderqueer and their communities.
- DC-based artist Ellington Robinson’s Oath of the Imperialists, a mixed-media construction that features an up-ended tabletop covered with map-like diagrams and punctured with repurposed carving knives as if laying claim to an imagined geography.
After the exhibition closes, the artworks will be installed in the study spaces, lounges, and corridors of the Adele H. Stamp Student Union—Center for Campus Life for the daily study, inspiration, and enjoyment of students, staff, faculty, and visitors.
Gallery Hours:
- Mondays–Thursdays: 10 am–8 pm
- Fridays: 10 am–6 pm
- Saturdays: 11 am–4 pm
The Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland is located at 1220B Adele H. Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. For more information visit thestamp.umd.edu/stamp_gallery.
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