Panel Discussion on Transmodernism with James Mahoney, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC, Catherine Pancake, Independent Filmmaker and Musician, Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Chicago.Moderated by Preminda Jacob, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC

Transmodern is a term that came into use in the early 1990s to denote emerging attitudes, values, and aesthetics that seemed to move past postmodernism’s canon of critique into more intriguingly open areas of cultural inquiry and practice. The rise of the Internet has networked a transmodernity that includes green perspectives and liberation theology, alternative music, multiculturalism in every form, and a re-engagement with the question of symbols in art, etc. In essence, the transmodern is a proactive recasting of the primal modernist condition, one in which, as Karl Marx said, All that is solid melts into air.