The Betty Mae Kramer Gallery presents A Time for Collaboration, a series of virtual performance art exhibitions in the Spring/Summer 2021! The first exhibition in this series focuses on the importance of togetherness and inspiration during this season of isolation. Join us for the performance on Monday April 26!
Curated by: Heloisa Escudero, on behalf of AHCMC
Exhibition Description
In this time of separation to ensure safety we need to emphasize the spirit of working together and inspiring each other. With this online exhibition we look at two projects by Rachel Schmidt and Susan Main that emphasize the importance of collaborating and working together to achieve a greater purpose.
“TRIADS: Arrangements in Site & Sound”by Rachel Schmidt with collaborator Hannah Davis, explores the relationships between performances of classical music, physical sites, and the communities surrounding them. View the work here
“Meeting Ground”is a collaborative collection of projects that considers the ground as a point of entry to shared space where interconnection between earth and self, individual and other is made visible. Artists, curators and activists Susan Main and MJ Neuberger invite participants to look down and attend to the spaces they walk upon. View the work here
Rachel Schmidt is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC region. She uses timebased media and installation to explore urbanization and its impact on ecosystems, future landscapes, and the role that myth plays in our understanding of the environment. Rachel received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore before moving to Warsaw, Poland for a year of artistic research.
From 2012-2016 Rachel worked as an Exhibition Coordinator at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and has been an artist in residence at the Arlington Arts Center, Taipei Artist Village, Vermont Studio Center, and the Taller Portobelo Norte in Panama.
She is currently a fellow at Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington DC and recently completed the Jon Schueler Fellowship for a 3 month residency on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. She has exhibited internationally and throughout the US and has been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, Washington Post, and numerous other print and online publications.
Hannah Davis is a curator, photographer, bookmaker, and designer residing in Baltimore, Maryland. She recently graduated with an MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and her recent projects include Everyday, Everyday, Everyday, Everyday Freedoms at theMeyerhoffGallery in conjunction with the For Freedoms50 States Initiative, Bodily Constructs at Pilot Primer Demo, and TRIADS: Arrangements in Site & Sound.
Susan Main
Susan Main’s multi-disciplinary work explores individual and social contracts between space, time, and attention, pairing the unmediated event with tools that attempt to measure, define, locate and orient. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Main received an MFA in Painting from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MFA in Interactive Media and Digital Arts from the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
In addition to an active studio practice, Main is a curator, educator, and founder of Cultivate – an evolving collection of interdisciplinary artists, writers, and researchers driven by investigations of landscape, place, and the commons.
MJ Neuberger’s work arises from her ritual attempts to return to a body abandoned in childhood trauma and abuse that she traces in part to colonial history in her mother’s native Philippines. Referencing indigenous ceremonies and elemental processes and incorporating both found and organic materials, including her own hair, Neuberger’s installations, sculptural work and images suggest acknowledging shared vulnerability and reconnecting with an indigenous, nature-based self as a path toward healing and integrating traumatic memory.
Neuberger has presented work at a Gathering of the Tribes, Art Resources Transfer, and the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Maryland and exhibitions in North Carolina and Indiana and curates The Great Wide Open art/performance series.
Neuberger has won multiple awards, including a teaching fellowship at the University of North Carolina. Her writing has appeared in theVillage Voice,SPIN, andThe Nationand her work as an editor has been cited by bell hooks.
Sobia Ahmad’s interdisciplinary practice maps how the personal and the political intersect. By weaving personal and communal narratives with current and historical socio-political contexts, she highlights the inseparability of the self and larger power structures. The work poses questions like: What confirms or dissipates our sense of belonging? What effects do policies have on our individual and collective psyches? And how can our deeply intimate struggles of belonging inform larger conversations about national identity, notions of home, cultural memory, and gender?
Born and raised in Pakistan, Sobia Ahmad moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. She graduated in 2016 with Honors from the Bachelor’s in Studio Art Program at the University of Maryland College Park. Her work has been reviewed in several major publications such as Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post and has been included in multiple collections. She has exhibited internationally—including at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York, Queen Mary University in London, and the Women Filmmakers Festival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. Ahmad received a Vermont Studio Center fellowship award in 2018, was the 2019 recipient of the Next Generation/Sanctuary Artist Fellowship at VisArts in Rockville, MD, and was a 2019-2020 Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow in Washington DC.
