CIRCA Catalyst with Mark Alice Durant and Guenet Abraham
Monday, April 10, 12:00 – 1:00 PM
Dresher Center Conference Room (216)
Performing Arts and Humanities Building

Visual Arts Department professors Mark Alice Durant and Guenet Abraham will discuss their collaboration on Durant’s 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography published by Saint Lucy Books. The publications mark a new direction for Saint Lucy a website devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art. Founded in 2011, Saint Lucy features essays, portfolios and wide-ranging conversations with artists, writers, and curators.

27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography is a series of linked essays that weave memoir with photographic history and theory, to examine how photographs are inextricably bound in our personal and collective histories. Illustrated with a broad spectrum of images from family snapshots, photojournalism and Hubble space imagery to the work of artists such as Josef Koudelka, Julia Margaret Cameron, Larry Sultan, Maya Deren, Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz and Chris Marker, 27 Contexts describes a life immersed in the quotidian, the political, and the enigmatic powers of photography.

Mark Alice Durant’s essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Art in America, Aperture, Dear Dave, and Afterimage, and many catalogs, monographs and anthologies, including Vik Muniz:Seeing is Believing, Jimmie Durham, Marco Breuer: Early Recordings, and The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. He is author of 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography, Robert Heinecken: A Material History and McDermott and McGough: A History of Photography. With Jane D. Marsching, he was co-curator and co-author of Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal. He was co-curator and co-author of the traveling exhibition Some Assembly Required: Collage Culture in Post War America, and Notes on Monumentality at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, and Syracuse University. He is a professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Maryland. In 2011 he started the website Saint-Lucy.com which is devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art. In 2016 Durant founded Saint Lucy Books.

Guenet Abraham started her career as a graphic designer at Random House in NYC. She was senior designer at W. W. Norton and Company. Her work as a book designer has been recognized by national design organizations including the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), American Association of Museums (AAM), and University College & Designers Association (UCDA). Guenet continues her practice as a book designer. The list of her clients include, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, St. Martin’s Press, Hyperion, Viking, and New Press, CADVC and most recently Saint Lucy Press. Guenet is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UMBC teaching in the Graphic Design emphasis and continues to work as a book designer. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UMBC. Professor Abraham received her M.F.A. in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

CIRCA Catalyst is an ongoing series promoting conversations around transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research that fuses the performing and visual arts with other fields of inquiry and scholarship. A lunch with vegetarian options will be provided by CIRCA. This event is free, and open to the public.

Admission is free.

Directions and parking information
UMBC is located about 10 minutes south of the Inner Harbor along I-95. For this event, paid visitor parking is available in the Administration Drive Garage — please see here for additional information.