In our new Walk & Talk web series, we send a reporter and a local tastemaker to a Charm City cultural event and record their real-time reactions. 

This week, arts contributor Kerry Folan met up with Baltimore Jewelry Center director Shane Prada at The Walters Art Museum for a preview of the new exhibition Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture—a major showcase for the 39-year-old self-taught jewelry maker, whose designs for the 2018 movie Black Panther put her in the international spotlight.

On view April 18 through August 9, the exhibit explores the self-taught metalsmith’s jewelry as a powerful narrative tool in art, Black identity, and visual storytelling. As part of the opening day celebration on April 18, instructors and artists from the Baltimore Jewelry Center will lead a free workshop in which participants learn more about narrative jewelry and storytelling through art making.

A re-creation of the jeweler’s bench Douriean Fletcher used when she first began metalsmithing, back when she was in her early twenties and working at an arts nonprofit in New Orleans, sits at the start of Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture.

I am not a jewelry maker, or even generally very handy, so among the tools laid out here I recognize only the hammer. But I’m with Baltimore Jewelry Center director Shane Prada, who knows quite a lot about jewelry, and about Fletcher.

Prada names the objects I don’t know—the butane torch, the wire cutter, the cowrie shells, beads, metal sheets, rooster feathers, and wire used in the designs. There is also an old T-shirt of Fletcher’s, and the mattress she used to sleep on if she was working late.

Prada is visibly energized to see the ephemera from Fletcher’s early life, including nearby family photos, her mother’s bible, and the tiny church dress she wore as a child.

“I get very excited by shows that include objects from the artist’s life and tell a narrative,” Prada says. “The choice to put day-to-day objects in this show really grounds it in an understanding of the person who’s making the art. Like, Fletcher was raised in the Seventh Day Adventist tradition, which doesn’t believe in adorning the body. That is a really interesting thing to know about someone who grew up to be a jewelry designer.”

We’re on the ground floor of The Walters Art Museum on an unseasonably warm April afternoon to view the Douriean Fletcher exhibition before it opens to the public this weekend.

The deep purple-painted temporary exhibition gallery feels lushly cool in contrast to the hot day—a smart design choice for a show that will be on view through the dog days of a Baltimore summer. It also has the effect of making Fletcher’s large-scale gold pieces glow in the dim room. (I think of Junichiro Tanizaki’s classic essay “In Praise of Shadows,” which famously challenges the Western insistence on equating white with all things good and argues for the aesthetic superiority of the dark.)

A glimmer from a case of earrings catches Prada’s eye, and we move towards it.

“Ooh, there are some really excellent compositional choices here,” she says of a pair of big brass ear cuffs adorned with colored beads, in what look to me like abstract patches.

I ask what she likes about them. “So, they’re asymmetrical, but they’re still relatively balanced. The choice of color is quite pleasing.”

She points out the way the beads are organized in both a linear way when you zoom in (they’re lined up neatly in rows like beads on an abacus), and a more organic way when you zoom out, with the colored patches positioned incongruously on the brass plate, breaking any kind of grid.

“You can tell this is a person who has a deep knowledge, or deep natural sense, of materiality, composition, and color,” Prada says. “Jewelry is a small package, so understanding how to play with small elements of composition and color really matter.”

These earrings demonstrate the type of work the Pasadena native artist was doing when renowned costume designer Ruth E. Carter discovered her in 2015 and invited her to collaborate on the Hollywood productions Fletcher is now famous for—particularly the Black Panther movies, which imagine the fictional world of the wealthy and powerful African country Wakanda. Mannequins displaying those iconic costumes are in the next room. Prada and I head in their direction.

“This is a really cool piece,” Prada says, stopping in front of a long, pale pink cape and dress with an open-work silver bodice cage worn by Queen Ramonda in Wakanda Forever. Again, I ask her what she likes about it.

“Well, as someone who loves clothing as much as I love jewelry, I like the idea of taking this exoskeletal costume piece and elevating a garment, which is the fun thing about contemporary jewelry. It’s often very large.

“I mean, you can see the earrings that I’m wearing almost reach my shoulders,” she says gesturing to a pair of dangly oversized chain links that appear to be made out of some kind of hard plastic, “and yet it’s rarely made of fine material. It approaches sculptural art.”

As we look at the rest of the costumes—including an enormous gem-laden headdress, a copper necklace and bracelet worn by Okoye during T’Challa’s funeral, and faux jade necklaces inspired by ancient Mayan earthenware figures on display nearby—I ask Prada what she thinks makes Douriean Fletcher, the Douriean Fletcher.

After all, Fletcher is the first jewelry designer to be included in the Motion Picture Costumer Union, a sought-after collaborator by luxury department stores and brands, and one of the only living jewelry makers I can think of to get a solo show at major museums. I can name dozens of fashion designers off the top of my head, but the only jewelry lines I can think of are brands, like Cartier and Tiffany. How does a young, self-taught artist emerge to be such a star in this field?

“We don’t have many Douriean Fletchers, right? But she clearly was doing things like these editorial shoots,” Prada says, referencing a photograph from 2016 where Fletcher is modeling some of her creations. “That costs money. It also shows she’s valuing herself as a creator and as a designer. That takes a lot of believing in yourself and positioning yourself, like, ‘Yeah, I made this.’”

Later on, at the official press preview, I am able to ask Fletcher the same question.

“I think that what sets me apart is being my own model, being the person that was telling the story of the jewelry, and being very specific about what I wanted to say,” she tells me. “All my work was coming from my own personal experience. My first few pieces came from this dream I was having, and from my own personal desires. So I just put myself in the middle of my story.”

As the exhibition demonstrates, this is something Fletcher continues to do to this day.

As Prada and I round the corner to the final section of the show, which focuses on Fletcher’s current personal practice, we are confronted with several striking blown-up photographs of Fletcher posed on a dark background, wearing the gleaming gold pieces from her 2021 Messenger Collection. Prada gravitates towards a particular necklace, with what looks to me like an enormous crystal strapped with wire to a squiggly gold plate. She points out its relationship to Fletcher’s earlier pieces.

Fletcher was inspired by the jewelry of Alexander Calder and Art Smith, who were known for preferring wire wrapping to soldering or welding techniques. She was also influenced by two specific ancient Egyptian rings in The Walters’ collection (on display near the exhibition entrance), which Fletcher discovered through a Google search in 2008, back when she was just starting. Like Fletcher’s necklace, the rings use wrapped wire in their designs.

“So, in fine jewelry, your hardest stone settings will be something like a bezel or a channel—these settings that require a lot of exactitude,” explains Prada, referring to settings where the metal rims the stone, protecting it and securing it in place. “There are rules about the way that you should do them. To me, this is all so connected to a kind of cultural supremacy, this ‘right’ way of doing something. But truly, we don’t have to follow rules like that, especially when it comes to art.

“And in this case, when we encounter a simple way of capturing a stone that has not been cut and faceted in this very traditional, more Western style, the raw beauty of the stone gets to be seen and shown off.”

Prada finds this really exciting, especially for a self-taught artist looking for alternative approaches to traditional jewelry making.

“[Fletcher is] getting elevated in a place like Bergdorf Goodman with designs that she didn’t perfect through a refined goldsmithing education or years in art school,” she says. “To me, it’s like she’s announcing that it’s okay to do things your way. While we see this often in art, we see it less so in craft education, and I think there’s something really freeing in witnessing this kind of jewelry in a museum.”

We head back towards the entrance, where we left our bags and where The Walters’ ancient Egyptian rings are displayed. As we gather our things, preparing to leave, Prada stops to admire one of the rings that Fletcher found on Google all those years ago—that in so many ways brought her here to Baltimore.

An engraving of the Egyptian god Ptah in green jasper stone sits in a gold swivel ring. Wire wraps the sides of the ring shank, adding a layer of texture and interest.

“Wow—see, nowadays, we would mimic a texture like that by using a motorized tool,” Prada says, remarking on the craftsmanship and unknowingly echoing Fletcher’s own comments on the ring in the museum’s press release (which I have read, but she hasn’t).

Fletcher is quoted there describing the mark of the hand on these 2700-year-old pieces as deeply inspiring to her: “You can tell someone physically wrapped the wire—that actual hands have worked on it, as opposed to a soldering iron,” she says. “The representation of handcrafted art in museum spaces is so important.”

Prada continues, leaning in for a closer look.

“We so often think about antiquity as very boring. But, no. They were just like us, and they wanted things to be fun and interesting. We should all be looking to history for our jewelry.”

Just a few days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Baltimore-based writer Jung Yun embarked on a family cruise aboard the real-life ship from The Love Boat.

“Until my feet were actually on the plank walking up to the ship, I was sure we were going to cancel,” recalls Yun, who has channeled the surreal dissonance of that experience into a sensitive and surprisingly funny new novel, All the World Can Hold—a 9/11 book that’s not about 9/11.

Aboard a fictionalized version of Yun’s own trip, three unrelated characters, each unhappy in their own way, experience a life-changing voyage. With no way off the boat and tragedy looming in the background, they are forced to reconsider what they can’t control, and what they must.

Yun, who was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in North Dakota, has lived in Baltimore for the last decade, after accepting a job teaching creative writing at D.C.’s George Washington University. She is the author of two critically acclaimed previous novels—Shelter (2016) and O Beautiful (2021), but she says this is the book she’s been working on the longest.

After of its release via Simon & Schuster’s 37 Ink on March 10, we spoke with the Otterbein resident about how this story finally came to fruition.

9/11 is a fraught moment, both in the grand scheme of American history and on a personal level for those of us who lived through it. What made you want to write about it?
9/11 was a history-changing moment, but I think the reason why it has such personal significance to me is that it pushed me to make a lot of big changes in my own life. Witnessing so much destruction, so much loss of life, made me feel mortal for the first time. I was 29 years old and working all the time [in New York]. Not sleeping, not eating well, and smoking a bunch of cigarettes. I kind of thought I was immortal.

The events of 9/11 disabused me of that notion very quickly. Within nine months, I quit my [nonprofit] job, I sold my apartment, I went back to grad school to start a creative writing program in my 30s, which everyone thought was crazy. I’m not sure if I would be writing today if 9/11 hadn’t forced me to look inward and realize I didn’t like what I was doing with my life.

Despite the grave subject matter, I would say this is the funniest of your three novels. Do you agree?
I have been wanting to write about my experience of 9/11 for 25 years, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that without becoming utterly grief-stricken. Leaning into the surreality of the cruise was, I think, the turning point when the book started to become a novel that I could see myself writing and finishing.

A lot of the humor is just straight realism about things that I remember from the ship, like the men’s sexy leg contest. Particularly in the early 2000s, when there were no smartphones, the cruise crew existed to entertain you, distract you, keep you busy, keep you happy, etc. And they went to great—sometimes hilarious or absurd—lengths to do that.

The image of the cruise ship also offers a powerful metaphor in this novel.
Yes. In the context of horrific tragedy, what can these people do except make choices about their own lives? When we first meet them, I think all three characters are kind of being carried along. And this event forces them to actually make some choices, which they haven’t been doing, and to be greater agents of their own future.

Do readers need to be familiar with The Love Boat to get the book?
You don’t need to know what The Love Boat was in order to appreciate this book, but I hope that it’s a fun Easter egg for people who do know the show, and know that there were always three main storylines that hit a landing point by the time the cruise ended. That said, I don’t necessarily consider this book to have a Love Boat-style happy ending. How the reader leaves each character and reads what happens to them next is largely dependent on the reader’s sense of optimism or pessimism in the world.

You’ve been thinking about this novel for decades. What was your practice when you finally sat down to write?
I’m an early morning writer, usually starting at 5 a.m., but I can only sit at my desk for about three or four hours before I need to leave the house. A big part of my writing process is thinking about scenes or sections that I still have to write, which I do while walking around the city. My favorite loop is the longest, hugging the harbor all way from our home in Otterbein to the waterfront park in Canton.

Last year, we adopted a dog. Buddy gets me out of the house even more, which is good for the brain and the lower back. We also like to hit the pocket parks in our neighborhood, walk up Howard Street, or out to Locust Point, and I always come back to my desk feeling ready to write again.

Baltimore Center Stage’s Stevie Walker-Webb is making it his mission to turn Baltimore into an incubator for world-premier theater. Last season, in his first full year as artistic director, he programmed two hugely successful productions: Matthew Weiner’s John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only and Jordan E. Cooper’s Oh Happy Day, which went on to a successful run at New York’s Public Theater in 2025.

Continuing that momentum, this season, Walker-Webb brings longtime friend Lena Waithe—the Hollywood showrunner (The Chi), producer (Dear White People), writer (Master of None), and actor (Westworld), perhaps best known for being the first Black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing—to Baltimore for her theatrical debut.

Opening in previews at Baltimore Center Stage (BCS) on Feb. 12, trinity, written by and starring Waithe, focuses on three characters confined to a single room and the trifecta of relationships that dominates their lives: family, friends, and lovers.

While the BCS production will feature three Black female actors (Courtney Sauls and Fedna Jacquet, in addition to Waithe), Waithe says she intentionally wrote the script with flexibility built in for casting, so that the characters can be played by anyone—a choice she hopes will help the audience focus on humanity over identity.

At a press conference last week, Walker-Webb, who is directing the show, described trinity, “as if Jean Paul Sartre and Adrienne Kennedy had a baby…with all the swagger that is Lena Waithe.” He added, “It is definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever worked on”—high praise coming from the Tony-nominated director of Ain’t No Mo’.

In anticipation of trinity’s three-week run beginning next month, we spoke with Waithe—who has been in town since early January, rehearsing daily and hitting up Mama Koko’s—about the excitement and vulnerability of her theatrical debut, and why Baltimore was the obvious choice to start this new phase of her artistic life.

What made you decide to venture into theater after so many years in film and TV?
I love TV. I love film. But also, I felt a little too contained in the film and TV space. There’s so many places you can go [with theater]. Being from Chicago, Lorraine Hansbury is one of our favorite writers. Her characters have been embodied by so many different actors and interpreted so many different ways. In theater, you have to, literally, revive—to bring something back to life for a new generation. To me it’s really special and interesting, and I almost wonder if my play would be more timeless than my TV shows or films.

Along with the excitement of your stage debut, was there an intimidation factor?
Yeah, it was intimidating. That’s why I had conversations with Matthew Lopez, with Lynn Nottage, and Martyna [Majok]. I wanted to talk to these playwrights who have inspired me and ask, “What should I know?” I got really great advice. Matthew Lopez said, “Always be chasing a better play.” Martyna said, “There are no rules.” And Lynn Nottage said, “Let people know that there’s a ticking time bomb underneath the bed within the first 15 minutes of the play.”

What was the draw to Baltimore?
Stevie is the person who I wanted to collaborate with, and when he asked if it could be [at BCS], I thought that would be amazing. This theater is on hallowed ground. It’s very sacred. Lynn Nottage opened here. August Wilson [has been here]. These walls, these theaters, these spaces feel like home.

“I almost wonder if my play would be more timeless than my TV shows or films.”

Stevie has spoken with us previously about exactly that, wanting the audience to feel “at home” at BCS. Is that unusual for theater, in your experience?
I think theater has sort of gotten to be this thing that people think of as elitist. I’m from Chicago, and theater is very much in the DNA of our city. Theater just always felt accessible, like our birthright. That’s what I really want theater to be for people. Sometimes when you get into other spaces, you feel very much like you have to be buttoned up. You have to be of a certain ilk. [At BCS], everyone’s welcome. I think that’s what I like so much about Baltimore, as well.

Stevie has also said he wants to create an audience atmosphere that is active. He’s described his ideal theater experience as “a mix between a raucous Southern Baptist church and an Orioles game.” Do you have a similar goal for how the audience will react to trinity?
You know, I’m a big believer in not telling people how to receive your work. That’s up to them. There’s emotional nudity in this play, and [BCS] will have to protect us—you gotta put your phones away because of what we’re revealing on stage. But that’s the only rule.

“This theater is on hallowed ground. It’s very sacred. Lynn Nottage opened here. August Wilson [has been here]. These walls, these theaters, these spaces feel like home.”

Did you discover any big differences between writing for the screen and writing for the stage?
On the screen, every scene has to be short because the attention spans are short. Every scene has to have blood, guts, nudity, sex—something. When I’m watching cuts of the shot, I gotta watch it with my phone in hand. If I find myself looking down or getting distracted, that means we may not be doing our job. In theater, [the audience] has to use their imagination. The beginning of our play starts in outer space. All you have to do [to create that setting for theater] is have some lights and imagination. It brings out the inner child in you when you go see a play.

Personally, one of the reasons I find theater so compelling is because it’s one of the only moments in my life when my phone is absolutely inaccessible. To be in a room with hundreds of other people, all of us focused on the same thing, feels unique and powerful in our culture.
I think now, because there’s so much [online] content coming at us, that live entertainment is something that is going to come back with a vengeance. There’s a time to isolate, there’s a time to gather, and now it’s time for us to gather.

“I think now, because there’s so much [online] content coming at us, that live entertainment is something that is going to come back with a vengeance.”

You’ve said that your intention with this play is to explore humanity, rather than identity. Can you talk more about that?
I’m just so focused on being a human being. It doesn’t mean I’m not proud. I love being Black. I identify as a woman. I identify as a queer person. I come from a working class family. All of those things make up my personality.

But what I have in common with you, with Stevie, with everyone, is that we all want love. We all want shelter. We all want community. We all want safety. And we want the pursuit of happiness. We have more in common than we like to admit, because when we admit that we all have the same needs, then society is actually subject to change. And the truth is, people that are in power don’t want that. Because once we realize that, the water’s gonna look really different.

At first, Peruvian artist Kukuli Velarde was reluctant to sell her sculpture, Wak’a del Agua—a five-tiered painted ceramic structure that resembles a precarious rock cairn. The work grapples with the impact of colonialism and references the Inca tradition of stacking stones to mark a place as a wak’a—a sentient entity embodied as a mythical ancestor hardened into earth.

Velarde now lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art, but her sculpture narrates her Indigenous origins through its five fired-clay layers, each linked to a unique period of history in her native country.

“It’s very much alive to her, so she had to be sure we would care for it and that it would be respected,” says Patricia Lagarde, Wieler-Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow for Art of the Americas and co-curator of The Walters’ new permanent collection exhibition, Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano.

Today, Velarde’s wak’a welcomes visitors at the entrance to Arte Latinoamerico, located in the second-floor galleries next to the Sculpture Court. Featuring more than 200 works from 40 cultures across North, South, and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, it’s the first permanent exhibition of Latin American art at The Walters. It’s also one of the few substantive displays of art of the Americas on the East Coast.

It’s an ambitious showcase, representing 4,000 years of history, bringing together the ancient past and the present. Organized by geographic area and theme, the installation mixes antiquities, many from the museum’s collection and others on loan, with current works made by living Latinos and Latin Americans—including Baltimore artists Jessy DeSantis, Edgar Reyes, and René Treviño.

“One thing that [co-curator Ellen Hoobler] and I have been trying to put forth with the installation is the idea that these are living cultures,” says Lagarde, pictured left, above. “These are not just old things from the past—they are things people are using to identify and write their cultural and historical narratives today.”

Historically speaking, this has not always been an easy story to tell. Museum founder Henry Walters began collecting during an era when the very concept of Indigenous American art was questioned, and he invested less in antiquities from Latin America than from places like Europe, Egypt, and Asia.

When the museum first opened in 1934, the Latin American art collection was displayed in a single drawer. But it was two significant  exhibitions and a major gift of 350 artworks in the 2000s that shifted their course. In 2017, they hired Hoobler as the museum’s inaugural curator of Art of the Americas. Lagarde’s position was created in 2023.

To ensure that Latino voices were authentically represented in Arte Latinoamericano, Hoobler and Lagarde initiated two Spanish-language focus groups and a 12-member Community Advisory Group to help shape the installation. Many of the show’s living artists wrote their own wall labels, which, like the catalogue co-authored by Hoobler and Lagarde, present English and Spanish text side-by-side.

This kind of commitment to Latin American art on the part of cultural institutions is important to Velarde, who sees the exhibition as significant—not just historically, but politically.

“Museums can help people to understand that we immigrants are not coming empty-handed,” she says.

And though the exhibition opened in May, it is already having an impact on the community. More than 1,000 visitors attended the exhibition’s opening, a day-long celebration featuring local Latino chefs, musicians, performers, and artisans.

“Many of our community advisors came to the opening and brought their families and friends, and to me, that is a huge metric for success, because they were proud of their association with the project,” says Hoobler, pictured right.

But perhaps the best part of the opening for her and Lagarde was watching artists like DeSantis and Velarde respond to seeing their work installed alongside the antiquities.

As Velarde later put it, “It was a magical experience to see my little wakita next to her ancestors, her predecessors, promising them continuity, letting them know that we, they, are still here.”

In true tech-legend style, Rebecca Rosenberg founded her company ReBokeh Vision Technologies out of her undergrad dorm room at Bucknell University when she was just 21 years old. Born with low vision, the New Jersey native had an idea for a user-friendly assistive technology that people could access through their cell phones.

“It’s like a photo-editing app, for real life,” explains Rosenberg, with users able to apply features like zoom, gray-scale inversions, and color filters, depending on their vision needs, to enhance a live image directly through their smartphone camera.

Rosenberg moved to Baltimore following graduation in 2020 and developed the ReBokeh app as a side project while enrolled in a master’s program at the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design and, later, as part of Towson University’s StarTUp Accelerator program.

Today, ReBokeh partners with a growing list of organizations across the country, including the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, to provide ReBokeh’s app-enabled technology to users in highly visual spaces, such as museums, zoos, and performing arts venues.

In the celebratory wake of making this year’s Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list of standout entrepreneurs in the category of social impact, the Hampden resident spoke with us about her up-and-coming company, Baltimore’s energetic tech scene, and her mission to educate the world about the low-vision community.

How did your own experience with low vision inspire the idea for ReBokeh?
I’ve had low vision my whole life, so I don’t know the world any differently. Growing up, I really struggled with the available accessibility options. There were audiobooks, but I was a math and science girl, and it’s really hard to do math or understand science diagrams from an audiobook.

The only other option was these large glass magnifiers that were totally impractical. When I asked my teacher to teach me Braille, she told me my vision wasn’t bad enough to justify the resources. So I just felt like there was a real mismatch in what I was trying to do, which was to make the most of the vision that I have, versus the available tools.

So ReBokeh is designed for people like you, who may be low vision, or even legally blind, but retain some vision?
When we think about people with vision impairments, we often think about it as a binary. You either have normal vision, or you’re blind and have no sight at all. But 90 percent of people with any type of vision impairment retain some amount of functional sight, and that includes people who are legally blind.

So there’s this enormous population of people, including people who are experiencing vision changes as a result of age, who retain a lot of sight capabilities, and the only options that they are being offered from an accessibility perspective are audio or tactile. Those are good, and they absolutely serve a certain population. But people want to use their vision. It’s an enormous gap that we are trying to fill.

What kind of support is there for young tech entrepreneurs in Baltimore?
I truly do not believe that we would be where we are if it had not been for everything that Baltimore has to offer. There are great educational opportunities here, proximity to Philly and D.C. and New York—and [tech hub] UpSurge, which helped build the startup entrepreneurship scene in Baltimore. In addition to the funding and educational opportunities, the institutions around tech in the city are creating social spaces for the people in the community, like UpSurge’s weekly happy hour. That’s where we all get together, because we don’t have to plan it!

It sounds like the city is a hidden gem in the larger tech scene.
Absolutely it is. There’s a really good spectrum of people, and everybody wants to support everybody. It’s not just companies that are on their Series D [final funding round], or pre-seed companies [in the startup stage]—it’s everybody along the journey. You can find somebody to talk to about anything that you’re dealing with, which is really cool. There isn’t cutthroat competition. People are wonderful here and have been a large part of the reason why I’ve stayed in Baltimore.

As you grow, what does success look like for your company?
I think we have already been quite successful by making a tangible impact on the low-vision community. We have users in 115 countries around the world, and I get messages from people about what a difference ReBokeh has made to them. On the financial end, we have figured out how to directly tie our financial success with that impact, because we’re able to shift the cost burden away from individuals to organizations.

On a personal level, success is also bringing awareness to the low-vision community, because it’s so often something people misunderstand. I think people absolutely care, they really want to provide accessible options for people with vision impairments, but they’ve never had it explained to them that 90 percent of people with vision impairments have functional sight and want to use it. So I think there’s also this education aspect we do that will ultimately help create a world that is more visually accessible.

Curators Ellen Hoobler and Patricia Lagarde had families in mind when designing the galleries for The Walters Art Museum’s new permanent collection exhibition, Latin American Art/Arte Latinoamericano, which opens on May 17.

In the brightly painted space, bilingual children’s books are on hand for antsy kids. Benches with arms and backs—ideal for elderly visitors—are strategically placed throughout. Curious guests of any age can listen to an ancient musical instrument being played or sniff the copal incense used in traditional Mesoamerican rituals.

“We really meant for this to be a space for mothers, for children, for people who have mobility challenges,” Hoobler told us on a tour earlier this week. “It’s a space for all generations to enjoy.”

Tomorrow’s opening marks the first time works of art from Latin America will have a permanent home in the museum. “Henry Walters did not purchase as much from this area as he did from other parts,” Hoobler explained. Over the past decade, the Walters has been working to fill the gap in its antiquities collection and to complement that effort by purchasing important works by contemporary Latino artists.

The resulting exhibition represents 40 cultures from North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean, and was informed by a 12-member Latin American Art Community Advisory Group consisting of mostly local first- and second-generation Latino immigrants.

“The title of the installation and the colors you see on the walls were both chosen based on their essential feedback,” Hoobler said. “They also informed our decision to include bilingual texts, as well as photos on the object labels so that everyone from kids to adults can easily enjoy and learn about the works on view.”

“Some people will be excited to see their heritage reflected back at them, while other people will be excited to see some of the objects they may have studied in class, in-person. I really think this is an exhibition for everybody,” Hoobler added.

In that spirit, the opening celebration planned for Saturday, May 17 is a true community party—a free festival with artisan and food purveyors, performances, artist talks, tours, children’s art-making activities, and more. Bring the family and check out a few of these highlights:

Gallery Tours: On the top of each hour between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., visitors can enjoy a guided tour through the exhibition’s three galleries—spanning 200 objects and 4,000 years of Latin American art—with Hoobler and Lagarde.

Paco the Llama: Not only is Paco adorable, llamas and alpacas were critical in the ancient Americas, Lagarde explained. “They were the only pack animals, so they were the only way people could move across the mountainous landscape.” The curators believe Paco dates to 1000-1407 and was originally used as an effigy vessel—though they’ve now given him a new job as exhibition mascot.

Jessy DeSantis Artist Talk: In their painting Cintli, Corn, Maize (2020), Baltimore-based artist Jessy DeSantis draws connections between the stunning, multi-colored glass gem corn they grew during the pandemic and the lush and colorful feathers of the tropical quetzal bird—whose plumes were highly prized in ancient times and are still incorporated into headdresses and ritual objects today. DeSantis will be offering an artist’s talk in the gallery at 1 p.m.

Chocolate Maker Jinji Fraser: Beloved Baltimorean Jinji Fraser created a video for the exhibition demonstrating the chocolate-making process—which was essential to early American culture—and her own ancestral ties to a Guianan chocolate estate. Jinji Chocolate will be onsite—along with The Empanada Lady, Poyoteca, and several other food vendors—for the opening festival’s food and artisan market, where you can also shop Latin American products by local makers.

Family Art Making with COLOROLL STORIES: Designed by artist Pablo Machioli, this collaborative art project is part of his Coloroll series. Throughout the opening day celebration, visitors of all ages can work together to color in his 12-foot long coloring page, which will be on display at the museum after the event. Machioli will be onsite from 1-4 p.m. to guide the activity.

Entrance to the museum and all events and activities are free, but reservations are requested through the Walters’ website. And for those who can’t make it to Walters but would like to get in on the fun, the museum will be streaming all performances live via YouTube. Staff has provided the Southeast Branch of the Pratt Library in Highlandtown with kits that contain materials and art-making projects related to Latin American Art/Arte Latinoamericano—available while supplies last!

Stevie Walker-Webb claims to be an accidental theater director. With an undergraduate degree in sociology, he originally considered a career in public service. But his love of theater—its own kind of public service—won out. At only 38, the Texas native is already an internationally celebrated director with an Obie Award and a Tony nomination under his belt.

In his first full year as Baltimore Center Stage’s new artistic director, Walker-Webb has launched an electrifying lineup of productions, including the theater’s two best-selling shows since the 2020 pandemic, and introduced innovative community outreach programs. He’s just getting started.

From your perspective, what makes a great theater experience?
Something between a raucous Southern Baptist church and an Orioles game. I want everyone to feel at home here, and I want everyone to have a good time. Even if we’re looking at something that has heavy subject matter, it can still be held with a kind of buoyancy. I like to say you get more a-has from ha-has. I’m here to laugh you into epiphany.

I’ve been at multiple performances this season, and I can attest that the BCS audiences are raucous. What are you putting in the water that’s making the audience engage like that?
That is the Chesapeake Bay, that’s what that is. I have worked pretty much everywhere, and it’s not like Baltimore. I’m talking to Broadway producers and saying, ‘This is where you want to try out your play. . . . If you want to know if a show is good or not, you need to play it in front of a Baltimore audience.’ We have truly diverse audiences here—and they talk back! We will not give you a standard standing ovation, which I love.

Are there other ways the culture of Baltimore influences your decisions as artistic director? This year, we launched Lab401. We got exactly 99 early-career or first-time local playwrights to apply. Three of them will spend an entire year in residency with us and my hope is to produce one of their plays. I want to launch local writers out of Baltimore. The stories that come out of this city are so rich and powerful and good. People just need to get access to that.

Activism has been an important part of your artistic practice. How is that influencing your work at BCS?
The reason why I wanted this job so badly is because, more than any theater in this country, BCS has a sustained and proven commitment to the community through its social programs. For 40 years, the Young Playwrights Festival has been providing a free playwriting program that goes into Title 1 schools across the city.

This year, we’re also launching the Juvenile Justice Drama Club, where we’ll be in residency at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center working with young people for a full year, and the hope is to create a pipeline for them to have paid internships at BCS. Using theater to improve, empower, and give back to the community—that’s really what I’m here for.

Until now, you’ve spent much of your directorial career traveling to produce a show, and then moving on to the next project somewhere else. So this must be really different for you, being rooted in one place, programming for a specific community long-term. It’s like you’re suddenly in a marriage with Baltimore.
Yeah, a marriage with a whole bunch of kids! As a traveling director, I would get to create these little culture pods, and then I would go away from them. Whereas now, I get to really grow one—and be grown by it. It’s not six weeks now. It’s six years, or 16 years. It’s however long I’m blessed to be in this position. The commitment to that is really scary, but also super exciting.

Is there one word that encapsulates your intention for your first full BCS season?
I’ll do three words: service, to our community. Joy, in how we work and what we offer. And connection. At some point, “universality” became this dirty word. We’ve become so obsessed with a fear of appropriation of each other’s cultures that we’ve lost our ability to celebrate what makes us similar, what makes us connected. If we can make people feel more connected to the theater, more connected to themselves, more connected to each other? I would sell both of my kidneys for that.

Take a drive down President Street this week and you’ll notice a new banner of Frederick Douglass gracing the side of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum—but this is a Douglass you likely haven’t seen before.

The portrait of the iconic abolitionist—who was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and spent years working in the Fells Point shipyards before escaping to freedom in 1838—is two stories tall and depicts him dressed in a modern suit and Converse sneakers, flashing a fancy watch, and popping a “rap squat.” It’s an image that Lewis Museum President Terri Lee Freeman hopes will provoke conversation about race, art, and identity.

Titled Liberty, the banner is a reproduction of a linocut crafted by Utah-based entrepreneur-turned-artist Adam Himoff, who is white. It ignited a flare up of local controversy when it was displayed last November in Easton, near where Douglass was born. 

One of the most photographed people of the 19th century, Douglass wrote about his belief that dignified images of Black people could challenge race perceptions and work in favor of abolition. Some community members found Himoff’s contemporary portrayal of Douglass to be disrespectful and publicly called for its removal. 

“Frederick Douglass never wanted to be viewed as an amiable slave or viewed as a Black man on his knees,” Tarence Bailey, a Douglass descendant, told the Washington Post last year. 

But Himoff says the goal of the work is to bring Douglass into the present and to “wonder about who this great man might be if he were still alive.”

“How would he live, how would he dress, and, most importantly, what work would he be doing today to fight injustice and prejudice?” Himoff tells us. “The fact that people are debating what pose he would be in or what type of sneakers he’d be wearing means that people are doing the work of actively reflecting on his powerful legacy—and that’s fantastic.” 

So far in Baltimore, the response has been largely positive, as indicated by the 300-plus likes that an image of the work first received on the museum’s Instagram.

“I really like the ‘new school’ aesthetic,” Baltimore native Jackson Montgomery, 20, told us when asked his opinion outside of the museum last weekend. “It relates to us more. We only know him through the history books, so I mess with it.”

His friends Brandon Stevens, 19, and Jabar Whitehead, 19, concurred. “It shows what he’d be like nowadays,” Stevens added.  

The museum also took to the streets earlier this week to seek feedback from local residents. The resulting video captures young Baltimoreans responding to the image with enthusiasm, while an elderly man laments Douglass’s footwear. 

But opinions have ultimately varied, regardless of age. “[Douglass] wanted to challenge racist stereotypes about what it meant to be Black,” commented one Instagram user. “Some might argue that this image is directly what he was pushing back against.”

According to Lewis Museum president Freeman, this mix of reactions can be a good thing, as far as getting people to think and talk about race.

“I really want people to look at it as they’re driving down the street and go, ‘Wow,'” she says. “Then go home and say, ‘I just saw this portrait and I don’t know how I feel—is it really cool, or should I feel some kind of way?’”

Liberty will be on display through February 2025. Meanwhile, the Lewis Museum is making plans for public forums with the artist and other subject matter experts to discuss the ways that race and identity impact the work’s themes. 

When asked if the artist’s race matters in this context, Freeman responds, “I really liked the work, and I admit I was a little taken aback when I learned the artist was white. But then I had to ask myself—why? In the end, these are exactly the kinds of questions we’re hoping to encourage.”