UMBC IMDA MFA Program alumnus Jaimes Mayhew ’10 and Rahne Alexander will discuss their Baltimore Museum of Art installation Queer Interiors, presented as part of the BMA’s Commons Collaboration initiative related to the exhibition Imagining Home. The project conceived and produced by Rahne Alexander and Jaimes Mayhew is comprised of a larger-than-life bed, shelving and other furnishings, personal artifacts, and a multimedia wall quilt known as the Baltimore LGBTQI+ Home Movie Quilt. This component of the installation pays homage to Baltimore album quilts and the AIDS Quilt, with the aim of presenting a crowd-sourced multimedia portrait of the city’s LGBTQI+ communities. The exhibition is now on view at the BMA through August 31, 2017.

Rahne Alexander is a video artist, musician, and performer. Her film and video art has been screened in galleries and festivals across the country, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, MIX (NYC), Freewaves (LA), Homoscope (Austin) and Cinekink (NYC) and she is an alumna of the Experimental Television Center residency program. Rahne was featured in the 2010 documentary feature Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance, and she performs frequently with several bands, including Santa Librada, Guided By Wire and The Degenerettes. She is a former curator/organizer of Baltimore’s avant-garde Transmodern Festival and the long-running, award-winning queer cabaret Charm City Kitty Club. From 2011-2015, Rahne led operations and development for the Maryland Film Festival.

Jaimes Mayhew is an intermedia and digital imaging, is an internationally exhibited interdisciplinary artist and arts organizer. He has worked both independently and collaboratively on research-based socially engaged projects. Mayhew’s recent project, Samesies Island, explores the possibility of an imaginary separatist island built by and for transmen, collaboratively produced with input from other transgender men. He has collaborated with such notable groups as The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a Boston-based art research collective, and The Museum of Transitory Art, a Slovenian artist collective. In 2012, Mayhew collaborated with Kristen Anchor to produce a two-part exhibition featuring queer Icelandic and American artists that was exhibited in Reykjavik and Baltimore. As a solo artist, Mayhew has received funding for projects from The Fulbright Commission of Iceland, Provisions Library (DC) and The Maryland State Arts Council.

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 catered lunch, with vegetarian options, will be provided by CIRCA.