Portrait Garden is a series of audio and photographic portraits of eleven women incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, MD, culminating a 1-1/2 year long collaboration between Ruby Award winning artist and Associate Professor of Visual Arts Lynn Cazabon. In the collaboration the inmates created perennial gardens on the prison grounds consisting of plants chosen to represent each woman, and Professor Cazabon recorded interviews with each about the selected plants and her past and present experiences with gardening. The completed portraits are photographs of the selected plants that were planted and cultivated over the course of a year, displayed with a short textual excerpt from the audio interviews and QR codes, which when scanned with a mobile device, play the full interview with each woman. The complete set of images and audio interviews are available through the project website: http://portraitgarden.org

For the month of December, Portrait Garden will be displayed as a series of 100 posters in trains within the Baltimore Light Rail system. This public dissemination is conceived as a moving gallery designed to bring the women metaphorically into the community of Baltimore City.

Tom Beck, Chief Curator, in the Baltimore Sun and Republican American

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Tom Beck, Chief Curator, Library & Gallery, was recently quoted in The Baltimore Sun about the Library Gallery’s N. Jay Jaffee exhibit. The exhibit highlights a talented artist who has not received much recognition. “Jaffee never worked as a professional photographer,” says Tom Beck, chief curator at UMBC. “His career was in printing. So it was always a matter of balance between his business and personal obligations, his family. And he never worked very hard at getting exhibitions.”

Read the entire article here.

Beck was also quoted about Lewis Hine in the Waterbury, Connecticut Sunday Republican-American. The Library Special Collections holds 5,000 Lewis Hine child labor photographs.