CIRCA Presents: April Danielle Lewis, Artist’s Lecture

Date: September 16th, Noon – 1:30 PM
Location Dresher Center Conference Room PAHB 216
Free: catered event

April Danielle Lewis’ recent interventions, performances, installations and experiences have situated Baltimore at the center of dialogs around history, place, and identity sharpened with a social justice and community building lens.

Bio: April Danielle Lewis is an artist, visionary, and community cultivator.

Derived from a printmaking background, her performances and interventions often involve working in multiples, repetitive actions and building a framework that allows for works and performances to naturally evolve. Her work collaborates and invites her audience to be participants in engaging and building community.

Lewis earned a degree in art and design with a concentration in printmaking from Towson University and an Associate of Arts degree in visual art from Anne Arundel Community College. She serves as the Membership Manager at Open Works, a non-profit makerspace that makes tools, technology and the knowledge to use them accessible to all, volunteers as librarian at the Station North Tool Library and serves on the board of directors at Neighborhood Housing Services Baltimore. April lives and works in Baltimore.

IMDA alumnus and adjunct professor Gary Kachadourian interviewed by UMBC Visual Arts Professor Mark Alice Durant.

From the introduction to the interview:

Laconic is a word that comes to mind when not only speaking with Gary Kachadourian but also when engaging his artwork. He is eminently likable and articulate but seemingly allergic to self-promotion, Gary could be a charter member of Understaters Anonymous. As an arts administrator, curator, and now active visual artist himself, he has been a constant and vital presence in Baltimore cultural life for most of his adult life.

His drawings are an index of the urban quotidian, dumpsters, utility boxes, weeds, empty lots, port-o-potties, jersey barriers, and parking booths, rendered precisely without a trace of subjectivity or editorial comment.  His largely black and white installations are as funny and familiar as they are ambitious and labor intensive. To step inside one is an experience in quiet disorientation; suddenly the world of color and three-dimensionality somehow seems alien, as if we have been living in the wrong dimension all along.

              - Mark Alice Durant