Laid, Placed, and Arranged explores recent work made by six University of Maryland MFA alumni — Laurel Farrin, Hiroyuki Hamada, Francie Hester, Meg Mitchell, Ellington Robinson, and Wilfredo Valladares — who attended University of Maryland, College Park from 1990 to 2010, and have gone on to become significant voices in the realm of contemporary art and academia.   

The exhibition’s theme is derived from Michel Foucault’s influential text The Order of Things. In it he [Foucault] references the act of linking seemingly unrelated objects “in which a large number of possible orders glittered separately, in the lawless and uncharted dimension of the heteroclite. […]; in such a state, things are ‘laid,’ ‘placed,’ and ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a common place beneath them all.”

Financial support provided by the Dorothy and Nicholas Orem Exhibition Fund and a generous grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. 

A panel discussion with artists Hiroyuki Hamada, Francie Hester, Ellington Robinson, and Wilfredo Valladares, along with moderator and exhibition curator Taras W. Matla, will take place on Thursday, November 9th, 2017 at 6:30pm, at the University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection. More information on this event can be found here.