Research

2017 (Spring) semester-long Research and Scholarship Award, the Graduate School, University of Maryland.

From the New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning title The Poet X comes a dazzling novel in prose about a girl with talent, pride and a drive to feed the soul that keeps her fire burning bright. Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions – doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.

Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.

An American Consciousness: Robin Holder’s Mid-Career Retrospective features sixty five prints at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park [UMCP]. An American Consciousness will be on view from October 8 through December 11, 2009. The public opening reception will be held on October 8, 2009 from 5:00-7:00PM at the Driskell Center’s gallery, 1207 Cole Student Activities Building, UMCP. 

Curated by the Center’s Deputy Director, Dorit Yaron, the exhibition features works by New York based printmaker, Robin Holder, highlighting her unique approach to uniting aesthetics with sociopolitical ideas, connecting personal and universal experiences, and reflecting on nature and spirituality. Robin Holder’s self-reflective images are a meditation on identities, women’s empowerment, and social realities, as she draws from her identity as a woman of myriad ethnic, sociopolitical, and spiritual influences. Holder’s awareness of self and American social culture yields an engaging perspective on the struggles of life and acceptance in America.

Curated by the Center’s Curator-in-Residence Dr. Adrienne Childs, the exhibition will examine Pogue’s artistry from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. Pogue mastered the technique of color viscosity etching through which she created images with, multidimensional surfaces in vivid colors. Often highly decorative, her work reflects her interest in nature, spirituality and Eastern themes and motifs. Throughout her career as an artist she revisited the theme of the female body as universal and particular. Her work intersects with the Pattern and Decoration as well as the feminist art movements in American art of the 1970s and postmodernist sensibilities in the 1990s.

The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland is proud to present Collectors’ Legacy: Selections from the Sandra and Lloyd Baccus Collection. The exhibition features 68 works from a gift of more than 280 works gifted to the Center by Mrs. Baccus. The exhibition will showcase a diverse range of media–sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, print, and object–from an array of prominent African American and African Diasporic artists. The exhibition opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 10th, from 5 to 7PM; the exhibition will be on display at the Driskell Center until Friday, November 20th, 2015. 

Upon the Center’s receiving the Baccus collection in 2012, the David C. Driskell Center’s Executive Director, Professor Curlee R. Holton, remarked, “This gift illustrates in full measure the impact that the dedicated collector plays in ensuring the safe guarding of our cultural legacy.” Collectors’ Legacy, the first exhibition to be solely curated by Professor David C. Driskell at the Driskell Center since its opening in 2001, is designed to explore and celebrate that impact. Professor Driskell, one of the world’s most prominent and influential champions of the canon and narrative of African American and African Diasporic art, has selected a body of work that tells an important story. Works by Charles Alston, Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Kevin Cole, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, and Betye Saar speak of the rich, varied, and deep heritage and community shared and created in the United States over the past century.

Creative Spirit: The Art of David C. Driskell, is co-curated by Dr. Adrienne L. Childs, Independent Scholar, and Dr. Julie L. McGee, Curator of African American Art, University Museums, University of Delaware, and the author of David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar (Petaluma: Pomegranate, 2006). The exhibition features 60 works, completed from the late 1950s-2010, which represent Driskell’s transition through a multiplicity of media in his artwork throughout the past 60 years. Creative Spirit opens to the public at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland on September 15, 2011, with an opening reception from 5pm to 7pm. The program includes an hour long conversation between Professor David C. Driskell and Artist Carrie Mae Weems. In addition to Driskell’s artworks presented in Creative Spirit, the Center will display about 15 photographs taken by New York-based photographer Frank Stewart which depict David C. Driskell over the course of four decades. David C. Driskell through the Lens of Photographer Frank Stewart will be on display in the Center’s Gallery lobby. The exhibition will stay on display until Friday, December 16, 2011. The Gallery will be open three additional Saturdays, October 22, November 12 and December 10, 2011 from 11am - 4pm. 

Creative Spirit, reveals the totality of Driskell’s artistic practice, celebrating a life lived in the service of what he often refers to as his “priestly calling.” The exhibition highlights and explores seminal themes: Americana, Africana, nature, self-portrait as memoir, celestial music, and the figure. In an interview with co-curator Julie L. McGee, Driskell comments, “Color, my love of nature, and African iconography have all remained vital to my work.” At times inspired by racial politics and at other times by his long held comfort in nature, all of his works display the truly creative spirit of David C. Driskell. Co-Curator Adrienne L. Childs states, “Driskell lives his life in tune with the rhythms of the natural world, which represents for him more than just a subject or a decorative motif.” Driskell takes annual trips to Maine where the natural beauty of the area has inspired him time and time again.

Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera, showcases 90 vintage photographs from the Amistad Center for Art & Culture’s historical collection of art and artifacts with photo-based art by contemporary African-American artists. The exhibition Organized by the Amistad Center for Art and Culture at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of art in Hartford, CT, opens to the public at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland on Thursday, January 20, 2011. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday January 19, 2011 from 5pm to 7pm. The exhibition will stay on view until Friday, March 11, 2011. The Gallery will be open two additional Saturdays, February 5 and February 26, 2011 from 11am - 4pm. Please Note: Entrance to the Driskell Center is through the set of doors under the Driskell Center sign. 

Double Exposure, curated by guest curators Lisa Henry and Frank Mitchell, illuminates the persistent interplay between the past and the present in African American photography. The exhibition highlights and explores the African American experience by bringing together photographic works from the 19th and 20th centuries by artists who expressed the experience of race through the use of personal, cultural and historical images. The exhibit delves into the interconnected reality of the past and the present for African American photography as well as concepts of identity and memory through visually theorizing the shifting relationships between black cultural memory and contemporary photographic storytelling.

Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell highlights for the first time the prints of the renowned Distinguished University of Maryland Professor Emeritus of Art, David C. Driskell, an Artist, Art Historian, Collector, Curator, Educator, and one of the most recognized and respected names in the world of African American art and culture. 

Organized by the David C. Driskell Center, “Evolution” is the inaugural exhibition of the David C. Driskell Center at its new home in Cole Student Activities Building (aka Cole Field House). 

The exhibition includes more than seventy five prints by Driskell as well as several works on paper which will provide insight into Driskell's artistic process and development. In addition, the exhibition includes several woodblocks used to produce the prints. “Evolution” is curated by the David C. Driskell Center's Curator-in-Residence, Dr. Adrienne L. Childs, a graduate of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Prof. Driskell studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and received his undergraduate degree in art at Howard University (1955) and a Masters in Fine Arts degree from Catholic University (1962). He joined the faculty of the Department of Art at the University of Maryland in 1977 and served as its Chair from 1978-1983. He has been a practicing artist since the 1950s and his works are in major museums throughout the world, including the National Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery, to name a few. In 1976, Driskell curated the groundbreaking exhibit “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950” which laid the foundation for the field of African American Art History. Since 1977, Prof. Driskell has served as cultural advisor to Camille O. and William H. Cosby and as the curator of the Cosby Collection of Fine Arts. In 2000, in a White House Ceremony, Prof. Driskell received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton. In 2007, he was elected as a National Academician by the National Academy.

Limited Editions: Joseph Holston Prints, 1974-2010, A Retrospective organized by the David C. Driskell Center and co-curated by Lisa Hodermarsky, the Stuphin Family Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Yale University Art Gallery and Dr. Robert E. Steele, Executive Director of the David C. Driskell Center, the exhibition features 72 prints by Maryland based artist Joseph Holston. The exhibition is presented at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland. Limited Editions will open on Thursday, April 21, 2011, with a reception from 5pm to 6:30pm. The Tenth Annual David C. Driskell Distinguished Lecture in the Visual Arts; Jock Reynolds, The Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, is to present his lecture “Afro-American Presence in American Art: From the Battle of Bunker Hill to Now,” at the Driskell Center on Thursday, April 21, 2011, beginning at 6:30pm, immediately following the exhibition opening reception. The exhibition will stay on display at the Driskell Center until Friday, June 17, 2011. The Gallery will be open three additional Saturdays, May 7, May 21 and June 11, 2011 from 11am - 4pm. 

Limited Editions, features a view into the life and works of Joseph Holston. Throughout his career, his colorful screenprints, black and white etchings, and collagraphs have been able to express emotions which viewers are able to immediately identify with. As noted by curator Lisa Hodermarsky, “…along with this simplification of form came a heightening of expressiveness in Holston’s work: of movement, emotion, and feeling. Even the artist’s monochrome etchings became increasingly more colorful as the years passed, and as the forms and lines became more simplified they simultaneously took on a more emotive form of expressiveness.” 

The exhibition, featuring prints from 1974 to 2010, highlights “Holston’s ongoing quest for a mastery of line, color and form in printmaking,” as described in Prof. Driskell’s words. Limited Editions also includes four copper plates, four color separation plates, and seven progressive prints for the etching Man in Boat, highlighting the creative process of printmaking. Commissioned by the David C. Driskell Center, Man in Boat was a collaboration between Joseph Holston and Prof. Curlee R. Holton, the David M. '70 and Linda Roth Professor of Art and Founder of Experimental Printing Institute at Lafayette College at Easton, PA. In addition, Limited Editions includes works from Color in Freedom: Journey along the Underground Railroad, one of his most recent accomplishments. Color in Freedom tells the story of the crusade to reach freedom through the Underground Railroad. The series is presented in four parts: “The Unknown World”; “Living in Bondage–Life on the Plantation”; “The Journey of Escape”; and “Color in Freedom;” each enticing the viewers’ emotions through his extraordinary use of color as well as expressive line and form. Holston’s Color in Freedom series was inspired by his appreciation for symphonic structure, as he was listening to classical music, as well as jazz, while creating the series. Effortlessly leading viewers through this journey, Holston’s works celebrate all phases of life.

The exhibition catalogue, Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection, contains essays contextualizing the exhibition objects, as well as Driskell's activity as scholar and collector, within the broader arena of American art. Art history scholars Juanita Holland, Sharon Patton, Richard Powell, Allan Gordon, and Keith Morrison apply a contemporary lens to Driskell's efforts as artist, critic, mentor, and collector. Object entries for each of the 100 works in the exhibition contextualize specific works within the larger picture of the artist's life and career, connecting them with the various societal influences surrounding their creation. Each object entry is accompanied by a color reproduction. The catalogue serves as a valuable reference guide to over a century of African American art and provides a chronology of the life and career of each artist and an extensive bibliography.