Sandtown-born Joyce Scott learned quilting from her mother, Elizabeth Talford Scott, who learned it from her mother, on the South Carolina plantation where she grew up among a family of sharecroppers. Both went on to acclaimed careers as mixed-media fiber artists, though Joyce, named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and 2019 Smithsonian Visionary Artist, became more renown for her figurative statues, her jewelry, bead, and glasswork—and, in Baltimore, the massive Memorial Pool installation at Druid Hill Park, which honors the park’s historic segregated swimming pool.

In 2018, the ever-evolving Scott created a towering 15-foot sculpture of Harriet Tubman with a mixture of soil, clay, and straw that was designed to disintegrate into the land near where Tubman led enslaved people to freedom.

With all this and more in mind, the Baltimore Museum of Art presents a 50-year career retrospective of one of the country’s most important working artists today. “Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams” opens as a special ticketed exhibition March 24 and runs through July 14 before moving to the Seattle Art Museum.

I recently saw the BMA’s exhibition of your late mother’s work, which will run concurrently with yours through April. The combination builds on your joint 2019 BMA show: “Hitching Dreams to Untamed Stars.”
My mother was born in 1916 and saw amazing change in the world. I lived with her until she passed away [in 2011]. I went to graduate school and traveled and those things, but we were very close. We had that through line of the visual and performing arts, which gave us something to relate to, to talk about, and to build on. For some people, it’s cooking, but for us, art was our conspiracy and our invitation to others. Because once we make it, we share it.

The BMA tells us you’re creating a site-specific installation at the entrance of the retrospective. A small house?
I don’t know what drove this, except I was thinking of a sweat lodge or a gathering space where people would commune in the everyday sense, but also maybe spiritually. It’s a huge four-sided building—picture a yurt—that has quilts on the outside. One in each panel of my mother, grandfather, grandmother, and godmother. The inside is turned out with beaded pieces I did…There’s also a figure who is holding a needle and reaching out with the thread, which represents where I came from and the way that I give as an artist and teacher. And there’s a chair covered in books and tchotchkes from my life that have influenced me.

And you and others may appear inside the “yurt,” greeting people and performing?
Yes, it’s a place where I can sit or, if a storyteller or musician comes in, they can sit and commune with visitors. Sometimes I’m going to come and just sit and talk trash until they throw me out. The guards are already giving me the stink eye.

That’s funny. Can I ask about the nature and themes of your work? How craft or folk art blends with so-called high art or fine art? There are quilts, figurative statues—which are intricately done—jewelry, clothes, dolls. But the titles, “Strange Fruit,” “None Are Free Until All Are Free,” “Lynching Necklace,” make you look twice and reflect on what at first glance may not be obvious.
I’m an artist-craftsperson. I don’t separate them. I’m always doing both. It’s the same impulse, the same creative feeling or setting that makes me make a cup and makes me make a piece of sculpture. There’s not a hierarchy that I ascribe to. I’ve always liked figures and my mom was a doll-maker, too. The work must be created wonderfully, not always beautifully, just wonderfully, so that the person is mesmerized by it. Then they realize, that’s a lynching, or that person is shooting a gun.

You’ve traveled to Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, mixing these diverse influences into different mediums. At the same time, it all remains, intrinsically, your art.
That’s it. I don’t want to be a one-trick pony. I don’t want to be a pony at all…My best voice for communication is as an artist and those influences [and mediums] represent different approaches to art and life that hopefully make me a better person, a more well-rounded, approachable, knowledgeable person. I can’t say it’s enough that I’m alive, that I should eat good food, look good. I think I’m supposed to be on this quest. I feel I am supposed to make this world better for others in whatever way I can.

I was seven years old, standing by the cash register at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., with three dollars wadded in my hand, free to choose anything I wanted from the gift shop. My sights were set on the space ice cream—the obvious choice of any red-blooded child of the 1980s. A Neapolitan wafer of Styrofoam-like sugar, it was the next best thing to bouncing weightlessly around the moon’s potholes.

This was no mere souvenir. Instead, my crinkly package of freeze-dried dessert was a tangible thread connecting my little-kid body to the superheroes who ascended into the stars. And from that instant, it was official: I was hooked. Not on the space ice cream—it’s pretty disappointing, actually—but on the magic of the museum gift shop.

Of course, these abound in Baltimore, a city of world-class museums that run the gamut from industrial history to postmodern art. And inside each one, the gift shop is another curated collection, tailored to reflect the people, objects, and stories that make that museum special.

Some are cool. Some are whimsical. Some are surprising. All of them distill the contents of their collections to human size, offering a little bit of the extraordinary to fit into our everyday lives. Their curios let you take some of that wonder home with you, as well as, often enough, the vibrancy, diversity, and unmistakable je ne sais quoi of Baltimore.

Every time I’m in town, I make sure to stop into at least one. A trip to the museum just isn’t complete without them.

American Visionary Art Museum

The G.O.A.T. of Baltimore museum shops is without a doubt Sideshow at the American Visionary Art Museum in Federal Hill. Owned by renegade retailer Ted Frankel, aka “Uncle Fun,” Sideshow is one-part outsider art gallery and one-part tchotchke dreamscape.

Local filmmaker John Waters describes it as “the best museum gift shop you’ve ever been to in your life,” and clearly the man knows what he is talking about. A funky riot of color, objects, books, clothing, antiques, and crafts, each surface and cupboard is bursting with everything you never knew you needed, be it for gag gifts, artsy gifts, kids’ stuff, grown-up stuff, and even stuff for your own home.

There’s a working Zoltar machine, hundreds of novelty sunglasses in the most improbable shapes and colors, whoopee cushions and miniature naked baby dolls, carved coconut monkeys and a stuffed tiger the size of a loveseat. You can spend hours opening tiny drawers full of glass eyeballs or perusing the world’s most robust supply of trick buzzers, squirt cameras, and fart powders.

But the true heart of Sideshow—and where it most closely reflects AVAM’s philosophy of joyful self-expression—is found in the rotating exhibits of artworks by contributing artists from across the country.

It was in this section that I found my favorite museum shop find of all time, a Christmas tree angel crafted from a National Bohemian beer can. To me, that little topper encompasses the spirit of AVAM’s Sideshow—a celebration of the wonder, whimsy, and imagination of those who are called to create. And how Baltimore is that?

Baltimore Museum of Art

Think of it as the Metropolitan Museum of Art—in miniature. The BMA’s collections include 97,000 works that span the art of ancient Egypt to some of the most significant works of modern-day.

The breadth is the point. By developing, maintaining, and now broadening a deep, global collection of the best 18th-, 19th-, and, increasingly, 20th- and 21st-century art and making it accessible to the public, the BMA continues to cultivate a vibrant and healthy city. After an hour or two of edification in the museum’s collections, with the help of free admission, I cultivate my civic duty with a stop in the BMA’s expansive gift shop.

Snag some Cone Collection-inspired journals, prints, and notecards, and don’t sleep on the shop’s jewelry section, which bypasses “statement” and goes right to “declaration.” Collars of acid-treated brass, necklaces of blown-glass globes, and geometrical wire bracelets mirror the Calders in the sculpture garden and Matisse paintings in the galleries.

The shop transforms with each changing exhibition (this past summer’s The Culture hip-hop show had an epic selection), so check out the latest and plan your shopping list accordingly.

I always come prepared to be enchanted and am never disappointed, with my best BMA purchases being a pair of ever-chic punched gold earrings with tiny metallic rays and a postcard of Vincent van Gogh’s painting of hobnailed boots. Pinned above my desk, the latter transports me in an instant to the cool, quiet beauty of the museum’s halls.

Baltimore Museum of Industry

“Industrial chic” is a recent trend, but at the BMI in Locust Point, it was always in style. Their exhibits feel like a Barry Levinson film set come to life—I love to wander through recreated historic shopfronts, printing presses, and workrooms under the glow of neon signs from bygone businesses, traveling back in time each time I turn a corner.

And the museum shop celebrates the city’s long tradition of manufacturing, too, with merch featuring the likeness of the neighboring Domino Sugars sign and books detailing the story of Baltimore’s packing houses, steel mills, and umbrella factories.

The mission of the museum especially shines through in their “Made in Baltimore” section, where you can buy one-of-a-kind treasures crafted on-site. Definitely check out the wonderful handmade iron keychains of beech leaves made by volunteer blacksmith Bob Webber on the BMI’s own working forge. A lifelike little leaf hangs from my key fob, a reminder that I need to plan my annual BMI pilgrimage for 2024.

The BMI also hosts entrepreneur pop-up events throughout the year, where you can support local small businesses and artisans selling prints, crafts, food, artwork, and other goods, including the seasonal farmers market that takes place in its parking lot come spring.

Maryland Center for History and Culture

Who needs reproductions when you can get the real thing? It makes perfect sense that a museum shop celebrating Maryland’s history and culture would sell antiques and vintage clothing on consignment, which has my name all over it.

Just a few steps from the displays of Orioles team cleats and the New Look sportswear of Frederick fashion designer Claire McCardell, you can find your own Maryland treasures at the MCHC. Snap up period finds like chased copper julep cups from the glitzy brownstones of Mount Vernon or fabulous hats from the Hutzler’s department store.

The museum’s changing exhibits, like the recent retrospective on one-time Marylander Jim Henson, also infuse the shop with all sorts of unique state-centric goodies impossible to find anywhere else.

A few years ago, I picked up a jaunty straw clutch from the 1950s, imagining it tucked under the arm of some well-to-do lady taking in a few races at Pimlico. I carry it around in the summertime to channel a little bit of Baltimore’s post-war glamour. And I often think that would make the MCHC proud.

Reginald F. Lewis Museum

Long before there was the Smithsonian’s world-renowned National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C., there was the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, located at a cultural crossroads on the edge of historic Jonestown in downtown Baltimore.

The Lewis Museum features more than 400 years of Black Maryland history in its halls and, over the years, has highlighted both the past and present, such as midcentury painter Ruth Starr Rose, who documented Black life on the Eastern Shore to modern-day photographer and West Baltimorean Devin Allen, whose images have graced the cover of Time magazine.

This same sort of expansive oeuvre is on display in the museum’s gift shop, which offers one-of-a-kind ways to celebrate the icons and imagery of Maryland’s Black history. Frederick Douglass merch and original prints, jewelry, and artwork made by local artists of color, as well as children’s books introducing little readers to Maryland’s iconic Black musicians, artists, athletes, and visionaries, are all great reasons to take advantage of the always-free shop admissions. Inventory rotates weekly, so it’s worth popping in on a semi-regular basis. And while you’re there, be sure to stop a while and watch the city go by through its grand floor-to-ceiling windows along President Street.

The Walters Art Museum

The Walters has roots in a core collection of art and artifacts bequeathed to the City of Baltimore in 1934 by its namesake scion, Henry Walters.

Spanning seven millennia of art from around the world, much of the collections are personal in nature, providing glimpses of what museums looked like in the 19th century, when private salon-style exhibits blended artistic techniques and periods to suit individual tastes. The vast Classical and Egyptian galleries in particular make me feel like Claudia in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, with covetable Roman torcs and impassive sphinx figurines.

Fortunately, the gift shop provides the perfect place to scratch that same itch. Replicas of ancient Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Chinese, and Pre-Columbian earrings, cuff links, and pins in gold and silver are shockingly modern in their simplicity and design.

The paper and prints section echoes the global scope of the main collections, with illuminated Ethiopian holiday cards, Renaissance landscape prints, and notecards with delicate Japanese watercolors.

My personal favorites are the replica blueprints of the iconic Walters Museum building itself—the perfect insider gift for the Baltimorean who has everything.

Small But Mighty

Many of Baltimore’s smaller institutions boast their own wildly cool shops with mission-inspired inventories that are delightful to explore.

The B&O Railroad Museum, for instance, has gifts for locomotive lovers of all ages, from striped engineer caps and model train kits to 19th-century replica railway maps and vintage Rails Across America comic books.

At the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum, snap up Poe “Death Week” vigil candles, “Nevermore” highschool iron-on patches, and International Poe Fest swag.

At The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, find books, clothing, and souvenirs highlighting notable African Americans, like Baltimore’s own Billie Holiday.

And the T-shirt game at the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum is on point, featuring an homage to the baseball icon’s original period uniform and a “Call It” top commemorating the Babe’s epic prediction of his own home run hit to deep center field in 1932, both of which will leave baseball fans with plenty of ways to rep their native son.

Meanwhile, you can find chemistry kits and glow-in-the-dark skeletons at the Maryland Science Center, stuffed animals and shark-tooth necklaces at the National Aquarium, and all sorts of books, games, and puzzles at Port Discovery’s brand-new, minority-owned Snug Books.

Imagine walking inside an art museum to find men spitting chew tobacco on the floor, friends calling to one another across galleries, people singing, dogs barking, rowdy teenagers, and mothers soothing crying babies.

Though it might be hard to believe today, if the year were 1860 or thereabouts, this scene would be fairly typical.

But, with the rise of technology—and its subsequent noise (think telegraphs, typewriters, phonographs, sewing machines, and so on)—came the regulation of sound in public spaces like museums, as Asma Naeem asserts in her dissertation turned 2020 book, Out of Earshot.

“[Museum officials] were in effect encouraging aural behaviors associated with ‘cultured’ persons and discouraging those associated with the ‘lower’ classes,” writes Naeem, the Baltimore Museum of Art’s former chief curator, who was announced as its new director in January.

Today’s museums, like the BMA, are more like libraries or houses of worship, where the only sounds you might hear are hushed voices or quiet heels against empty halls and tiled floors. It gives museums a rarefied, impersonal air that does not truly reflect the art inside.

“I always think of art as having this aural component or a soundtrack,” says Naeem, “and I always thought museums were missing that.”

Only amplifying the silence in 2023 is the fact that, for the past two decades, museum attendance has been steadily declining across the United States. And while this downtrend is likely due in part to people finding entertainment through the internet (with an assist from the COVID-19 pandemic), museums have increasingly received criticism in recent years for their pretension, irrelevance, and gatekeeping that do not accurately represent America’s diversity of race, gender, class, politics, or ideas.

Throughout her career, Naeem, 53, has been working to dissolve some of those conventions. First, as a curator at the National Portrait Gallery, where she diversified the D.C. institution’s collection by featuring portraits of rappers, including one of late Baltimorean Tupac Shakur, which brought new dialogues and audiences to the space. And, more recently, at the BMA, where she has continued that effort by examining the. historical context of the museum and its collections while championing underrepresented artists—particularly people of color, women, and local artists, such as late Baltimore-based printmaker and sculptor Valerie Maynard, whose work Naeem co-curated for the artist’s first major museum exhibition in 2020.

In 2018, just before Naeem was hired as chief curator, the BMA deaccessioned seven artworks from its contemporary holdings in order to create space for work by underrepresented artists, i.e., those who were also women, Black, Indigenous, self-trained, or had connections to Baltimore. Over the next three years, the museum acquired 125 works by 85 artists—the majority of whom were represented for the first time in the collection.

Several of these new acquisitions were shown in the 2021 contemporary exhibit, “Now Is The Time,” including work by homegrown artists like Maynard, Jerrell Gibbs, and Theresa Chromati. The show provided the public with a visual account of the curatorial efforts led by Naeem, as well as those by Katy Siegel, former BMA senior programming and research curator, who has since left her post to join the staff at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Another deaccessioning in 2020 created a bit of a stir in the art world, and the BMA responded by taking the three pieces that were set to be sold, one of which was an Andy Warhol, off the table.)

“I want to build upon the fantastic work that the BMA has done in the past few years and continue to make the museum a space that is welcoming, equitable, dynamic, and engaging for our visitors and for our staff as well,” says Naeem about her vision as director, noting that efforts will be focused on exhibitions and collection practices, as well as programming and partnerships with the likes of schools, universities, arts organizations, and other community members. “It’s in these collaborations that I think we stand to make the greatest positive impact.”

A perfect example is the forthcoming exhibit, “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” which will fuse Naeem’s interest in the sound—or the lack thereof—of the art world with her passion for making it more inclusive. Co-curated by Naeem and on view at the BMA from April 5 to July 16 before moving to the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) for the remainder of 2023, the show comes during the 50th anniversary of the dawn of hip-hop and explores the genre’s past 20 years through sound as well as visual art, fashion, and ephemera. It was created in collaboration with BMA chief education officer Gamynne Guillotte, staff at SLAM, and a wide-ranging advisory board featuring creatives from Baltimore and around the world.

“Music is a big part of my life, but I’m not a musician in any sense of the word,” says Naeem, who has been dreaming about this project for several years. “Hip-hop was just an incredibly energizing sound that I started to hear coming from the radio in the ’80s as a teenager. To hear this new way of rapping was amazing. I spent a lot of time listening to the lyrics. And I loved to dance. That’s how I primarily spent my youth: in dance clubs…And what really gravitated me toward this idea for the exhibition was the ways in which, as a cultural phenomenon, hip-hop has seeped into every aspect of our lives and created a powerful visual set of languages that are both obvious and not so obvious everywhere around us.”

“I ALWAYS THINK OF ART AS HAVING THIS AURAL COMPONENT OR A SOUNDTRACK.”

 

In a first for the BMA, the exhibition will include atmospheric soundscapes—not audio through headphones, as museums have embraced for years, but a sonic experience that envelopes visitors as soon as they step foot inside the show, with two recordings created by Baltimore musicians Wendel Patrick and Abdu Ali heard throughout the exhibition space.

“The Culture” will also highlight visual work by local artists such as photographer Devin Allen; filmmakers Nia June, APoetNamedNate, and Kirby Griffin; sculptors Murjoni Merriweather and Joyce J. Scott; and painters Ernest Shaw Jr. and Derrick Adams; plus art-world giants like photographer Carrie Mae Weems, mixed-media artist Mark Bradford, and late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; as well as pieces by global fashion designers like Vivienne Westwood and Louis Vuitton’s Virgil Abloh. Baltimore-born artist Shinique Smith will also create a commissioned mural near Lexington Market in conjunction with the show. Several other city creatives are included in the exhibition catalog, too, such as musician TT The Artist and cultural critic Lawrence Burney, who founded the local arts publication True Laurels.

At a pivotal time for museums, Naeem’s work is helping to shape and shift the BMA to become a better reflection of current culture. And she feels an exhibit like this will go a long way toward demonstrating that the BMA is serious about serving as a mirror of its community.

The BMA is not unique in its efforts to reexamine its mission statement and implement changes, as museums nationwide have been historically composed of majority-white leadership, boards, and featured artists. Internationally, museums have begun to “confront entrenched economic and racial inequities, and the ways in which those are encoded in museum collections, presentations, staffing and organizational cultures,” wrote museum advisor and journalist András Szántó in The Art Newspaper in 2020. Many are reframing their objectives to redress prior wrongs and ultimately make, says Szántó, “their buildings and campuses more hospitable to everyone.”

The current BMA staff is overwhelmingly made up of women, with people of color and gender-nonconforming people represented as well, ultimately making the museum more reflective of society as a whole. After Christopher Bedford’s departure as director last June, Naeem became interim co-director of the museum, alongside chief operating officer Christine Dietze, before being hired for the top post at the beginning of this year, making her the first person of color to lead the BMA.

On the surface, Naeem’s former life as a criminal prosecutor in New York City might seem at odds with her role as a museum director and curator. But the overlap is her desire to effect positive social change. After burning out on life as an attorney, she pursued a master’s degree in art history at American University in D.C., followed by a PhD in art history from the University of Maryland, College Park, ultimately returning to Baltimore, where she grew up after immigrating to the U.S. from Pakistan as a child.

“Asma is profoundly brilliant as a scholar, has a strong vision as an arts leader, and has tremendous and considerable personal warmth…[a combination] that’s rare to find at this level of work,” says “The Culture” co-curator Guillotte. “She’s not afraid to lead with her emotion because she knows that is part of where her intelligence as a scholar and a thinker and a leader is.”

When planning the exhibition, “it was essential that we include local artists, because hip-hop itself is a set of local histories,” says Naeem. “Baltimore has such an incredibly vibrant history of hip-hop. There’s no way that we could pay homage to this canon without including some of the incredibly talented Baltimoreans.”

And that includes visual artists who capture the spirit of hip-hop in their work. Like sculptor Murjoni Merriweather, for instance—a recent Maryland Institute College of Art graduate and Prince George’s County native turned Baltimore resident, whose sculpture “Z E L L A,” one of about 50 busts that the 27-year-old has created using various mediums, depicts a Black woman whose hair is pulled into a dramatic high ponytail woven entirely out of hair extensions.

“Hip-hop is such a huge part of Black culture, and it’s a fight to normalize who we are as people—what we create, what we wear, who we decide to be—which goes hand in hand with my artwork,” says Merriweather, whose works also often feature hoop earrings and metallic grills. “I don’t want people to see grills and think they’re intimidating or some type of danger. They are just teeth jewelry, at the end of the day. I want people to start thinking like that, instead of putting stereotypes on them and making us seem like less-than.”

To make the exhibit as authentic as possible, Naeem brought together a diverse selection of hip-hop experts to be a part of its advisory board, consisting of individuals across academia, music, fashion, and art, such as Martha Diaz, founder and president of the Hip-Hop Education Center at New York University; Tef Poe, a St. Louis-based rapper and activist; and Brazilian anthropologist and curator of Afro-Atlantic histories, Hélio Menezes.

Locally, Wendel Patrick has helped lead the charge. The Boom Bap Society musician has almost single-handedly brought hip-hop to Peabody Conservatory, where he serves as a professor. Part of his role with the BMA advisory committee, alongside fellow local artist Abdu Ali, was to ensure that hip-hop history was presented with accuracy.

“I’ve been an educator at the university level since 2001, so I’ve observed and absorbed the ways in which institutions tend to think about the dissemination of information,” says Patrick. Since the earliest days of hip-hop, which is said to have been invented on the streets of the Bronx by DJ Kool Herc in 1973, “There’s been a real beauty in the way that people have been able to ingest knowledge [about hip-hop] that hasn’t been in a traditional educational setting, where there is a curriculum where people have decided what is important and, by virtue of that, what isn’t.”

When hip-hop is documented in museums or studied in institutes of higher education, continues Patrick, “It’s important that it be accurate or represented in a way where opinions are representative of people who have been present for a significant period of time.” Which makes this exhibition perfectly timed, with its curatorial intention aligning with the more overarching refreshes and newfound mission of the BMA.

“ASMA IS PROFOUNDLY BRILLIANT AS A SCHOLAR, HAS A STRONG VISION AS AN ARTS LEADER…”

 

The exhibit will also include an archival aspect that goes beyond its comprehensive catalog. Fans and artists will be encouraged to share their experiences by scanning and uploading documents—old ticket stubs or concert fliers, for instance—and telling their own stories, which will appear as an online collection. Items can be scanned either inside the exhibit space or from a phone or computer offsite.

“It was so valuable to have [the idea of] education in the room from the jump, because typically in the way exhibitions come about, education comes into the process once the artworks are decided, the checklist is decided, the floor plan is laid out, and then we come and do the icing on the cake,” says Guillotte. “Asma wanted to bring this in early on in the process.”

Every time the curators got together, their discussions centered around inclusivity and accessibility: Why is this relevant to our visitors? Who is the audience? How will we be engaging with them? What kind of context do they need to be able to understand what we’re presenting? What kinds of barriers do we need to remove to that understanding?

“The Culture” is merely one lens through which to see how the BMA is shifting—in terms of its subject matter, which audiences it’s trying to reach, and whose work is and isn’t included. Last spring, the museum launched the “Guarding the Art” exhibition, envisioned by Naeem and curated by its own security department, and last July, the nearly 140 employees also voted to form a union, becoming Baltimore’s first local institution to do so.

Asked what she thinks the role of an art museum is today, Naeem says, “That’s the million-dollar question that all of us, as stewards of a collection, are trying to work toward, making sure we’re preserving the integrity of our communities around us. What we need to be doing as museum leaders is building a collection of artistic excellence that goes beyond certain cultures and histories that have previously been championed.”

She points to the ways in which, up until the 20th century, women artists did not have access to art schools or artistic materials like oil paints or canvases and would resort to what is known as the decorative arts, a topic which will be discussed in an upcoming exhibit, titled “Making Her Mark.”

“When I think of the ways in which we can tell a far more inclusive story of art-making in our current day, that means interweaving a number of different kinds of art forms,” says Naeem, suggesting incorporating the likes of fashion, and not just couture—but streetwear, too. “If we are going to be including in our permanent collection and displaying 19th-century African jewelry, why can’t we be displaying 21st-century African-American jewelry inspired by hip-hop?”

The exodus of more than six million African Americans from the rural South to the North, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970 was one of the most significant movements of people in U.S. history. Although chronicled by painter Jacob Lawrence in The Migration Series in 1941, as well as journalist Isabel Wilkerson in her award-winning 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, the Great Migration also remains one of America’s unexplored stories of the 20th century.

Through January at the Baltimore Museum of Art, this epic saga is the subject of a new, large-scale, already acclaimed exhibition, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. Co-curated by BMA contemporary art curator Jessica Bell Brown with Ryan N. Dennis, artistic director for Center for Art and Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art, it features works by 12 artists, including internationally recognized stars Carrie Mae Weems and Mark Bradford, as well as MICA graduate Akea Brionne, Baltimore-based Zoë Charlton, and Silver Spring-born photographer Larry Cook, among others.

The diverse, historically informed, and deeply personal works point not to the past but to the continuing influence of the Great Migration, both in the South and beyond, including cities like Baltimore.

The Great Migration is such a rich subject for artistic exploration. When did the idea arise for a joint exhibition with the Mississippi Museum of Art?
I started at the BMA in the fall of 2019, and when I was interviewing, I heard there was a desire to do a project around the Great Migration. It was in discussion by then-BMA director Chris Bedford and the current director of the MMA, Betsy Bradley, [as both cities] are associated with the Great Migration. One of the first studio visits I had was with photographer and archivist Webster Phillips, looking at his grandfather’s photos, some of which were published in Baltimore magazine’s Great Migration cover story [February 2020]. So, there was already a conversation happening around the Great Migration and Baltimore and this wider history when I got here. It was kind of amazing.

Do you have a family connection to the Great Migration?
I had never really considered my family, who stayed in the South, as having a migration narrative. But when you reframe it and ask the question differently [not why people left, but why they stayed], it allows for a more expansive understanding of the kinds of choices that folks had to make for their survival and for their thriving.

Larry Cook, whose work includes vintage pictures of his family and photographs he shot while exploring his Southern roots, is one of the many artists who stands out. He teaches in D.C., at Howard University, and is an incredible conceptual photographer.
The vernacular side of his photography has been unfolding and, for the Great Migration, he focused on his paternal side of the family for his investigation. All the artists were asked to think about their relationship to the Great Migration, their relationship to the South, and unpack how it shows up not only in their personal stories, but also their work. What emerged out of it for Larry was a reckoning with his estranged relationship with his father.

Can you tell us about Mark Bradford’s entry?
People here will recall his 2018 BMA show, Tomorrow Is Another Day. Mark talked about his family history in ways that are painfully common across many of the artists’ families—and many families of the Great Migration. He wanted to honor the spirit of his mother and maternal ancestors, who were entrepreneurs and self-starters and truly made something out of nothing. He dug into [The] Crisis magazine, which was the publishing arm of the NAACP, and his whole project is about language, space, and history.

He found deep resonance with one advertisement for a place called Blackdom, New Mexico, a town incorporated just before the start of the Great Migration, which was trying to attract Black families to start a new life in a new place with no Jim Crow laws. The top line of the ad just said, “WANTED,” which also evokes fugitive posters, criminality in general, and enslavement. The power of his painting is that it looks like it’s on fire, it looks alive. It’s so commanding, and the simplicity of that ad makes you think and dig deeper. It makes you realize, while there are so many stories of oppression and trauma, there’s also resilience and fortitude and abundance that we Black folks are constantly thriving toward.

As curator of American art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Virginia Anderson is particularly focused on the last few words of its mission statement—to create “a museum welcoming to all,” with a goal of assembling exhibitions that center on the voices and experiences of historically marginalized groups.

One of the keys to that success? Her BMA colleagues.

“There are so many things you have to balance as a curator working with different departments to make the art and the narrative shine,” says Anderson, 51, formerly assistant curator at the Harvard Art Museums. “I’ve experienced collegiality at every museum I’ve worked in, but I think intellectual resourcing is having a moment.”

Comparing notes and research with colleagues across multiple departments allows Anderson to present exhibitions of American art that showcase a more inclusive art history, both in the selection of objects and in the display itself. Since arriving at the BMA, she has curated four exhibitions—two solo shows, with works by female contemporary artists, and two group shows, showcasing art movements, such as women modernists. And each has been created with the help of her first hire—curatorial assistant Sarah Cho, an art history major hired straight out of Princeton University.

The duo’s most recent collaboration is the first time that Cho has fully stepped into the role of co-curator. Three years in the making and up through October 2, Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears occupies three galleries in the museum’s Contemporary Wing, showcasing cross-disciplinary works by the bicoastal artist-researcher, including the first-ever virtual reality-sculpted and 3D-printed objects exhibited at the BMA. Glow examines histories of Indigenous, Chinese, and Black communities as they relate to the Chesapeake Bay tobacco trade, recasting the white depiction of the region’s history.

Anderson and Cho hope that people will attend the exhibit, read the accompanying wall text, and be inspired to continue learning more about the substance of Glow’s work.

“What Virginia and I wanted to do is spotlight aspects of Beatrice’s research,” says Cho, 26. “One of the major goals of Beatrice’s work is highlighting solidarities between Asia and the Americas.”

Both women are the exhibit’s co-curators—or “thought partners,” as Cho describes them—but they’re quick to point out that Glow’s exhibition would not have been possible without the entire museum staff.

“The museum can function as a kind of lab,” says Anderson. “Just as within the sciences, you have collaboration and research from a team of people that supports a particular project or angle of inquiry…This collaborative approach to research can only benefit our audiences.”

he last time the Baltimore Museum of Art was in the headlines (excluding director Christopher Bedford’s resignation announcement in February,) it was for the deaccessioning scandal that rocked the art community. So it must’ve been a happy surprise—maybe even a bit of a relief—when, last July, the museum announced its new “Guarding the Art” exhibit, and there was so much enthusiasm, it crashed the museum’s website.

It’s not so much the content of the new exhibit that makes it remarkable, though the works do come from the 108-year-old Charles Village institution’s world-class collection of over 95,000 objects, some of which have never been shown before—but rather those who have chosen it.

The exhibit, to be on display in two large galleries adjacent to the museum’s famed Cone Collection starting on March 27, is being curated by 17 of the museum’s security guards.

Ranging from a grandmother of nine to a Towson University senior majoring in classical voice performance, the participating museum guards bring a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences to this innovative exhibit. One guard is a former healthcare worker, another a bartender, another an adjunct instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, who teaches courses on horror movies. It’s these unique perspectives that the museum aims to put on display, along with the actual artworks.

“Being a guard is so much more than telling people to turn off their flash, to take a step back,” says Elise Tensley, who has been a security guard at the BMA since 2017. “This isn’t just a show about the BMA’s collection, it’s a show based on what we have to offer.”

After all, the security guards might be more familiar with the museum’s collection than most people who walk its halls.

“They probably spend more time than anyone at the museum thinking about and connected with the art,” says Amy Elias, a BMA trustee who conceived the exhibition with chief curator Asma Naeem. The two also enlisted the help of noted art historian and curator Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, currently the Kress-Beinecke Professor at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, who also provided mentorship to the guards.

“I WAS IMMEDIATELY STRUCK BY THE
FRESH EYES THAT THEY CAST ON WORKS FROM
THE MUSEUM’S COLLECTION.”

“I was immediately struck by the fresh eyes that they cast on works from the museum’s collection,” says Sims. “Hearing their intensely personal rationales for their choices of objects revived my initial feelings of love and awe in museums, and reminded me why I got involved in art and curatorial work in the first place.”

The guards were given access to the BMA’s full collection, including its massive digital database of material, only a very small percentage of which is ever on display. Each guard could pick up to three objects of their choosing—an individualized, intimate alternative to the typically academic process.

But from the outset, the idea was to have the guards do more than just pick the art. They’d be involved in designing the installation, developing the accompanying catalog, working with the conservation team, and planning the relevant programming. For all that extra work, they’d also be paid, in addition to their salaries. Fundraising for the exhibit, which was ultimately financed by a lead grant from the local Pearlstone Family Foundation, included imbursement to the guards for their involvement.

Tensley, a painter herself who has sold commissioned work, chose “Winter’s End,” a 1958 painting by the late Abstract Expressionist and Park School graduate Jane Frank that has only been exhibited twice. “I wanted to give Jane Frank her moment again, as a female artist with Baltimore ties. I’m 37, and in my entire lifetime, this painting hasn’t been displayed.”

While some guards purposely sought out art from the depths of the museum’s archives, others chose works that were deeply familiar. Dereck Mangus, who has had his own artwork exhibited locally in group shows and whose writing has been published in art journals, selected Thomas Ruckle’s “House of Frederick Crey,” a painting he’d come to know over the course of the six years he’s worked at the BMA, because it depicted the Mount Vernon neighborhood where he lives.

“Every museum I’ve ever worked in has had some sort of staff art show,” says Mangus, who has worked as a guard at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Harvard Art Museums, as well as the Walters Art Museum, but had never been asked to participate in the curatorial process before. “We’re putting on different hats.”

For Ricardo Castro, a guard since 2019, the familiarity was cultural. Being from a large Puerto Rican family in Delaware, he chose works by artists from Columbia, Equador, and Costa Rica, as a way to honor his heritage.

“It’s a job made of waiting, but it’s also a job of contemplation—we’re seeing everything,” says Rob Kempton, a Maryland native with a master’s in museum studies from Johns Hopkins University who has been a guard since 2016. “It’s a lot of, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ But you can create experiences, just by getting into a conversation.” He selected works by two renowned local painters, Washington, D.C.’s Alma Thomas and Baltimore’s Grace Hartigan.

This on-the-floor ability to interact—with both the museum-goers and the art itself—was another key element driving the exhibit. Security guards may often blend into the background of a museum, as quiet and stationary as the artifacts they oversee, but they can also participate in the experience—answering questions, offering guidance, becoming part of the discussion.

“There are times when people have questions and there isn’t anyone else to ask besides the security officers,” says Kellen Johnson, the Towson senior who, between his shifts at the BMA, is also a member of the Towson University Chorale and Men’s Chorus groups, and has held solo recitals at the museum.

Johnson chose paintings by the 20th-century German painter Max Beckmann and American painter-muralist Hale Woodruff to reflect his interest in music. Beckmann’s wife, Mathilde, who is featured in the 1939 “Still Life with Large Shell” painting that Johnson picked, was a violinist and singer. Woodruff’s 1928 “Normandy Landscape,” demonstrated his interest in showcasing work by Black artists.

Johnson now cites interacting with museum-goers among his favorite aspects of the job, but when he first started working at the museum in 2013, he initially kept his distance.

“It was just: stand still, don’t interact, and be this invisible presence, except to say, ‘Please don’t touch that,’” he says. “That got very boring,” so he attended lectures, signed up for docent trainings, and read up on the artists, the art, and even the collectors—all so he could bring that knowledge to work. Visitors would ask if he was a docent, says Johnson. “No,” he’d tell them, “I’m just a guard.”

Christopher Bedford, the BMA’s director, would like to give the guards the option to be more than just guards.

“I’m keenly interested in the show because it empowers and foregrounds the authorship of a group of people not traditionally given that role,” says Bedford, now in his sixth year at the museum. “There are [guards] who are interested in ascending the ranks of a museum and exploring the world of art history and curatorial work. This is a way of doing that.”

Bedford sees the informal mentorship of “Guarding the Arts” as one of its most crucial elements—a means to explore, and perhaps ultimately change, how the museum has historically worked.

“There are aspects of the way that we function that just need to be completely turned on their heads,” he says, referring to addressing larger themes of equity, representation, and shared authorship. “This is a way of doing that.” (According to the Association of Art Museum Directors, in 2018, only four percent of curator roles in U.S. art museums were held by African Americans.)

“[Mentoring] is the engine that’s propelling this forward,” Naeem says about the exhibit, “to perhaps create new futures and new careers for some of the guards.” Those guards, she says, “are a true mirror to the public.”

Baltimore native Sara Ruark, who came to the BMA in 2018 and studied film at Towson University, agrees, seeing the guards as a sort of bridge.

“WE SEE NOT JUST WHAT’S GOING
ON IN THE MUSEUM, BUT WHAT’S
GOING ON IN THE COMMUNITY.”

“We’re both outsiders and insiders,” says Ruark, who selected Dutch painter and sculptor Karel Appel’s 1962 painting “A World in Darkness,” as well as a mid-20th century miniature totem pole by an unidentified Haida artist, neither of which she had seen before. “We see not just what’s going on in the museum, but what’s going on in the community.”

This gives the exhibit a sense of accessibility, she says, one that’s particularly relevant to Baltimore’s multifaceted artistic community.

“I think people who don’t realize how rich the art world is here give Baltimore a lot of flack,” says Ruark. Beyond the big-name institutions and exhibitions, “[There are] local artists who sell stuff under a bridge that’s simply stunning, craft shows in decrepit churches—I love that about this city.”

Though this isn’t the first time a museum has put on an exhibit with participation from its own security guards—New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a show called “Beyond the Uniform” in 2020 that included a playlist from its guards—Bedford says the BMA show wasn’t patterned after anything else.

“It was modeled around the idea that shared curatorial authorship around our hierarchy would yield really unexpected results,” he says. “[Baltimore] is a place that is willing to embrace unorthodox ideas. It’s bold, a little quirky…I’m really hopeful that this will be the first of many exhibitions that will be unconventionally authored, by guards or others. I think it can become a hallmark of the museum.”

“This was a chance to have a real tangible project, with real feedback and results,” says Kempton, who is looking forward to seeing Hartigan’s 1957 abstract painting “Interior, The Creeks” and Thomas’ 1972 work “Evening Glow” on display. “Dr. Sims has said that this show privileges and deprivileges at the same time. It’s demystifying the entire museum process. To see that and to play a meaningful role in that is significant.”

On display through July 10, the exhibition will feature as many as 26 objects. As of press time, an opening reception was still in the planning stages.

Traci Archable-Frederick, a Baltimore native who served in the U.S. Army and Maryland National Guard before coming to the BMA in 2006, chose Mickalene Thomas’s 2021 “Resist #2,” as she wanted a piece that reflected the times, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and in relation to the demonstrations that swept the country in the wake of the George Floyd’s murder.

Thomas’ piece, a collage that combines protest images with acrylic paint, rhinestones, and glitter, was recently acquired by the BMA and joins the Brooklyn-based artist’s installation, “A Moment’s Pleasure,” that has transformed the museum’s East Lobby.

“This was it right here,” says Archable-Frederick. “It was speaking to everything that was happening.”

By choosing art works that speak not only to the contemporary world but to themselves, these 17 guards will be giving a very personal perspective. And yes, they’ll be watching.

In the spring of 2019, Nia June found herself in the living room of a home in Windsor Mill. She described it as “old-school.” There were many pictures on the walls and others lined the tables. There was plastic covering on the matching vintage couches. The Baltimore poet was there for work, though it didn’t feel like it.

“It felt like home,” says June, pictured second from left, who spent the day listening to stories from the three generations of Black women who resided there: Najah Johnson; her daughter, Indigo; and her grandmother, Ethel Zimmerman. “Seeing the way her grandchild and great-grandchild just folded to her—they sat at her feet, they loved her so much, and just took care of her. It was beautiful.”

Zimmerman died last January, at 86 years old, but she will now live on in the permanent collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art. June’s debut film, A Black Girl’s Country, inspired by her poem of the same name, was recently acquired by the BMA as part of its new initiative to obtain more works by artists of color and those with ties to Baltimore.

It all started with a poem that June wrote as a student at Towson University in 2018. As the only Black woman in her poetry class, she felt frustrated and out of place, with her work constantly misunderstood by her classmates, many of whom were white men. She wrote her feelings into a poem that she now describes as a “home for Black women.”

The short film based on that poem, written and directed with local cinematographer Kirby Griffin, right, and musician APoetNamedNate, left, features more than 50 Black women and men set to the backdrop of Charm City, with June’s words echoing in the background.

“In person, Nia is this very delicate, soft-spoken woman, and then you see her onstage and it’s just like pure fire,” says Griffin, who filmed all the video footage, while APoetNamedNate created the music to accompany June’s poem. Together, their goal was to celebrate Baltimore’s Black community.

“Representation was really important to us,” says June, who is now an arts educator herself. “I’ve had a lot of students who are young Black girls tell me that they watch the film every morning to start their day and make them feel good. A lot of Black women have told me they cried, or dads have said they show it to their daughters.”

The BMA first interacted with the film during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was showcased in the “Screening Room,” a virtual space where visitors could quench their thirst for local artwork while the museum’s doors remained closed, quickly becoming a fan favorite.

“This is probably one of the best things that happened to us last year,” says chief curator Asma Naeem. “This work is a portrait of so many incredibly moving and powerful and inspiring people.”

That includes Sharayna Ashanti Christmas (second from right) the founder of Necessary Tomorrows, whose creative consulting branch helped the BMA acquire the film.

“Black artists need to know that they have someone that can advocate on their behalf,” says Christmas, whose radical multimedia platform works to promote art by creatives of color, helping to raise more than $5,000 in emergency relief funding for Black artists in 2020. “They also need to learn how to advocate for themselves.”

Per June’s wishes, the film is still available for free on YouTube, where it has amassed more than 8,000 views. But as it’s one of the first films by a local Black artist to join the BMA’s collection, Christmas see it as a landmark.

“It’s being acquired in the permanent collection of a prestigious museum located in Baltimore and the work is by three artists that are from Baltimore and it’s about Black women,” she says. “I don’t think it gets any more historic than that.”

Baltimoreans can feel some measure of pride visiting The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Located downtown in a renovated industrial warehouse—a “factory,” if you will—just a few miles from where Warhol grew up, the sprawling complex houses a gritty and glittering retrospective of his life, with some familiar artwork and Baltimore personalities in the mix.

There’s a huge Last Supper canvas on view. And there’s a massive Camouflage painting and a “fright wig” Self-Portrait, too—just like at the BMA.

A BMA press release by Alice Steinbach—director of public information at the time, she later wrote for The Sun and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985—noted that “this major exhibition will offer Baltimoreans their first chance to see all the famous Warhol ‘Pop’ paintings (soup cans, Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, etc.), which have filtered down into the mainstream of everyday life. . . .”

Baltimoreans weren’t particularly impressed. The show included one of Warhol’s large Mao portraits, and dozens of BMA members cancelled their memberships in protest. “To my shock and amazement,” says Richardson, “they claimed we were Communists.”

The press wasn’t much kinder. The Sun called Warhol “boring” and “old news,” while The Columbia Flier referred to him as “a humorless, self-contained freak.” They didn’t think much of the paintings, either.

There was a similar reaction after Richardson and the BMA acquired Warhol’s later work after his death. When the museum bought The Last Supper for $682,000—the most it had ever paid for a single work of art—in 1989, “all hell broke loose,” recalls Richardson.

Comprised of two silkscreened images of Leonardo’s painting, the piece was religious in subject matter, massive in size—six-and-a-half feet high and 25-and-a-half feet long—and tinted yellow, or “puke green” as John Waters describes it.

“People howled about it,” says Waters, himself a BMA trustee in the 1990s. “Everybody flipped out.”

You may have heard that Baltimore has been disparaged recently. Here at Baltimore, we’ve spent 112 years celebrating this city—and we’re not about to back down now. Take a look back as we revisit some of the many reasons why Charm City lives up to its name. Here are some highlights from our archives:

We’ve got Otterbein’s.

The sacred sugar cookies of Bawlmer.

And the best crab houses in the country.

From Captain James, Oprah’s favorite, to the James Beard Award-winning Schultz’s Crab House.

Photography by Scott Suchman

Oprah Winfrey got her start here on WJZ.

Recently, she made a local news appearance on WBAL to defend Baltimore’s honor. “This charming city is anything but full of rats,” she said.

Illustration by Anita Kunz

We have sports legends.

The Iron Man even beat The Iron Horse’s streak!

Photography by Mike Morgan

Our chefs win James Beard Awards.

Woodberry Kitchen’s Spike Gjerde is a farm-to-fork pioneer. Even former First Lady Michelle Obama eats here.

Photography by Mike Morgan

We have some of the best museums in the country.

Among them are the first-of-its-kind National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African-American History & Culture, and the Baltimore Museum of Art—which is expected to unveil its upcoming Matisse center by 2021, making it the premier place to study the French artist and his works.

Some of the most iconic artists hail from here.

John Waters, Blaze Starr, and Joyce Scott. (Need we say more?)

-Bryan Burris

We have the largest free arts festival in the country.

Local legends (Ethel Ennis) to national names (TLC) have stepped up to the stage here.

Our symphony is home to conductor Marin Alsop, the first woman to head a major American orchestra.

In an era when symphonies around the country are closing their doors permanently, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is one of only 25 of the 800 or so U.S. orchestras to have been around for more than 100 years.

Photography by David Colwell

We invented just about everything.

Hyperbole? We think not. Read on.

Sean McCabe

In the exhibition Hitching Their Dreams to Untamed Stars: Joyce J. Scott and Elizabeth Talford Scott, it’s difficult to determine who influenced who—and even to differentiate, in some instances, which of the nine pieces was done by which artist.

It’s evident, however—in the asymmetrical, mixed-media textile pieces, the rich colors that vibrate with life, and the stories and meaning woven into each piece—that this mother and daughter, who lived and worked together in Baltimore for 60 years, influenced one another deeply.

“People ask, ‘What’d your mom say to you?’ She said to never give up . . . Just follow that dream and never stop. Persevere. Everything is out there for you,” Scott recalls at the Baltimore Museum of Art during a preview of the exhibit, which opens publicly on May 15 and runs through December 1. “That has been the code for my life.”

She’s cloaked in colorful batik and tie-dyed fabric and sitting in a wheelchair, looking regal (she assures everyone in attendance that she’ll be out of said wheelchair and dancing again as soon as her knee is in better shape). “I come from people who couldn’t be who I am right now who opened that door for me to come through, and I’m very proud to be someone who’s carrying this with me.”

Scott learned quilting from her mother (and her mother learned it from her mother), and both primarily create mixed-media fiber art, though Scott, named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, became more well-known for her sculptural beadwork and jewelry.

Aside from indirect influence, the mother-daughter duo has directly collaborated to create pieces, too. Talford Scott began “Fifty Year Quilt” (not shown in this exhibit) in San Francisco when she was young, for instance, and wherever she traveled, she’d add fabric. When Scott was born, she got to work on that same quilt, adding more stories of places traveled. They also made beadwork and dolls together, sang together, and talked at lectures together before Talford Scott passed away in 2011.

The piece “Face,” made in the 1970s and included in Hitching Their Dreams, was also created by both of them: Scott wove its colorful wool in response to her mother’s storytelling.

Scott has never been known to shy away from controversial imagery and subject matter either. Some of her work is overtly subversive, either artistically or politically or both (think “Inkisi #2,” her mixed-media sculpture of a woman whose large skirt is affixed with, among other items, bright green penises—representing procreation, she explains).

Talford Scott’s “Plantation” is an example of quilts that were made and used as escape routes for African Americans wanting to flee a plantation in the South. Creating something beautiful that represented something else entirely was a lesson taught to Talford Scott by her grandparents—how to hide in plain sight. For instance, a 20-inch row of the fabric in this topographical map might represent a line of cotton or vegetables. The stars that fill its white background represent the stars they would view in the night sky overhead that could be used for navigational purposes, making the piece both whimsical yet practical, artful yet political, comforting yet tense.

Scott says she has a “classic Negro history.” “My mom picked cotton and my father picked tobacco. They were in the Great Migration from the South . . . not only to get jobs that were better, but so that they wouldn’t be harassed by nightriders every night in their communities. And then they had me.”

Her mother and father attended one-room schoolhouses—roughly equivalent to a sixth-grade education today—but that didn’t stop Talford Scott from bringing her young daughter to the BMA, after her family relocated to Baltimore. It didn’t stop her from believing in Scott’s artwork and cheering her on, telling her she could follow her dreams, a reference Scott makes in the show’s title.

Scott lives in Upton, which she admits can be a rough neighborhood, but it’s home. “I don’t believe the change happens by running away from yourself,” she says, “I believe that when you stay in a community, you make a difference.”

People in Scott’s neighborhood call her “Mom,” just as they called Talford Scott, who would make her own wine and sit around and talk and teach people in the neighborhood to make art.

Scott recalls a talk she gave with her mother at the University of Colorado Boulder, where they were invited to speak to a ceramics class. Her mother talked about how she and her family would make pinch pots during the Depression, because you had to make your own pots for everything. And those things that you made could be beautiful. The class listened in awe, mouths agape. Even Scott was impressed, having heard similar stories as a young child but hearing them again provided new context.

Growing up in Sandtown in the ’50s, Scott was surrounded by stories like this—relatives working as sharecroppers or running and hiding from people who were after them or paying people off with bootlegged drink.

“There’s something about living in the 21st century that is very, very different in the United States, more than other parts of the world,” she says. “When my mom and other people of her generation go, that’s it. You can look them up online, you can even hear them talking online, but that thing about sitting next to them, having a shot of Hennessy or something, and hearing her talk.

“That old generation is taking with them their knowledge and secrets of the past that we in the West don’t always even celebrate,” Scott goes on. “But you go to Asia, you go to Africa, you go to Central America, and you meet that exact woman who is just like my mom, who’s still tilling the soil or spinning something with her grandkids, talking about stuff in the exact same way. I think it’s a loss for us, for our speed to be so future-[oriented]. It’s not giving the props to the past that built all of us.”

Baltimore just got gifted with its own little (and in some ways massive) slice of the Venice Biennale.

Artist Mark Bradford, who represented the U.S. in the 2017 Venice Biennale, has deconstructed and reinstalled several of his pieces that were exhibited there to create a new iteration of the exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day will be on view from September 23 through March 3, 2019.

On Saturday afternoon, as part of a four-hour Community Celebration at the BMA, Bradford will be in conversation with BMA director Christopher Bedford and senior curator Katy Siegel, who co-curated the exhibition here and in Venice. Guests can preview the show before its official opening on Sunday.

In his work and in talking about it, Bradford doesn’t shy away from confronting the complexities he’s experienced while navigating the world as a black man, a gay man, and a tall man (at 6-foot-8, he says he’s constantly aware of his physical body and how it relates to its environment and other people). Through large abstract mixed-media pieces, sculpture, and video, he processes his experiences within the framework of society and its various communities and cultures—especially those that have been marginalized. He often works with found materials, like dyed hair endpapers, that speak to these communities.

Some highlights in the show include the huge, gnarly sculpture Medusa—made from paint, paper, rope, and caulk and reminiscent of Medusa’s snake-like locks but in this case a commentary of sorts on empowered, self-righteous women; the large and solemn pieces made from repetitive rows of the aforementioned endpapers from a hair salon, which achieve a calm, meditative quality and have a tactile, water-like depth; the emotive trilogy of “Cosmic Paintings,” as the BMA describes them, that includes the show’s striking title piece; and his Spoiled Foot installation, which starts off the show and is constructed of canvas, lumber, cut-up road maps, used roofing material, and what Bradford calls merchant posters—signage collected from in-crisis communities that advertise things like “We Pay Cash for Homes,” 24-hour child care, and bed bugs extermination.

That piece hits on Bradford’s overarching theme of expulsion and how to navigate it. People can’t physically get to the center of the gallery where Spoiled Foot is installed because the piece stretches wall to wall and covers the ceiling, obstructing the space—a tangible representation of people who are, or feel they are, cast out of a particular community. Viewers move through that space much in that same way but in a literal, physical sense—ducking and dodging, conscious of the narrow space in which they have to walk through to get to the next gallery.

As Bradford puts it, “The center is not always available to everyone. . . . I wanted people to feel how it feels.”

This of course raises questions: Who owns the “center”? Who can occupy it?

“I became really fascinated by place,” he says.

Following that line of thought, context changes when a show is installed on the other side of the world.

“Bringing it to a city that’s predominately African American—it definitely changes it,” Bradford said on Thursday. “I think it reinvigorates some of the ideas.”

Roughly 380,000 people attended the 2017 Venice Biennale (the largest crowd at the event to date), but Bradford, as well as Bedford and others on the BMA staff, says he thinks the show looks even better here, and he’s excited that it will be interpreted—or misinterpreted—differently here because of its new geographic location.

He’ll present a slideshow during his talk on Saturday, which is something he’s never done. He says he’s doing it specifically because he’s interested in engaging with the Baltimore audience.

While in Baltimore, he’s spent time with the Greenmount West Community Center, a community art space for children and their families. He’s also spearheaded its Greenmount West Power Press program, which allows kids to learn how to screen print. Tote bags and other items are available to purchase at a popup shop at the BMA to help support GWCC.

As Bedford put it, Bradford has one foot firmly planted in the studio and another in the community. He’s known for his passionate care in creating inclusive, safe spaces for youth.

In Venice, he began a partnership with the nonprofit Rio Terà dei Pensieri called called Process Collettivo, which provided inmates the opportunity to create artisanal products to sell and ultimately help with their reintegration upon being released.

In L.A., where he is based, he cofounded Art + Practice, a contemporary art gallery open to the public that doubles as an educational space for youth to develop skills and gain access to housing and employment opportunities.

In some cases, trying to bring people to a museum is backwards, he says. “I think we have to go there. How about us going there and feeling a little bit uncomfortable.”

When speaking about his time at GWCC, he says, “That’s where the hope comes in. You give the kids a safe space and allow them to be them. The world’s gonna be fine,” he adds, not sarcastically. “We just have to do more and more and more of this.”

He goes on to tell the story about his debilitating childhood fear of the dark. He’d look out his window at night at the moon and tell himself a story: that God poked a hole through the sky, and that’s the little window of light shining through, reminding us that the light is still there—that tomorrow is another day.

Visual Art

Maren Hassinger: The Spirit of Things
Maren Hassinger’s four-decade career in art is rooted in sculpture and dance. A selection of her sculptures, made with wire rope, plastic bags, and newspapers, are on exhibit in the Contemporary Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art in the solo show The Spirit of Things. Some have been reconfigured for this exhibition, which also contains video installations of her performance art and dance. She’s also known for her role at the Maryland Institute College of Art as director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture, which she has served since 1997. July 18-Nov. 25, performance and conversation with the artist at 3 p.m. Sept. 8. BMA, 10 Art Museum Drive.

ISLA: Regarding Paradise
Ironically, the etymology of the word “paradise” goes back to its Greek and Old Iranian roots meaning “walled enclosure.” In this group exhibit at Towson University, curated by Baltimore artist Jackie Milad, contemporary artists working in an array of mediums examine the figurative and literal walls that enclose the pristine beach images of the Caribbean islands, a place that has worked toward political autonomy and environmental justice. Sept.7-Oct. 20. Reception on Sept. 6. Center for the Arts Gallery at Towson University, 8000 York Rd., Towson.

DOS-à-DOS
Baltimore artists L. Nef’fahtiti Partlow-Myrick and Jenny O’Grady met as students in the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts master’s program at the University of Baltimore and will now exhibit the fruits of their labor: a collection of art books, made from a variety of materials both traditional and unorthodox (paper—but also metal and beans, for example). The show’s title references a bookbinding technique that ties together two text blocks with a shared spine-that spine being the MFA program, in this context. Sept. 7-30. Hamilton Gallery, 5502 Harford Road.

Baker Artist Awards 2017 & 2018
Recent Baker Awards awardees—Abraham Burickson (interdisciplinary, 2018), Sara Dittrich (interdisciplinary, 2017), David Marion (visual art, 2017), and Amy Sherald (visual art, 2018)—will show work in an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Included in the show will be Burickson’s “The Odyssey Works Box,” an archival box filled with books, photographs, and other ephemera, accompanied by a video tour of the history of the arts collective Odyssey Works; Dittrich’s wall sculptures, arranged with hundreds of clay ears; Marion’s multimedia sculptures “Extinction Event” and “Fracking,” which explore violence perpetrated on the natural environment; and two portraits by Sherald. Sept. 12-Oct. 14, with a free opening event with performances on Sept. 13. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

Balancing Act
Joseph Paul Cassar has been working in Baltimore for 13 years as a visual artist and art historian, and is a professor at the University of Maryland University College. He’s shown his work around the world, and this month will exhibit in our city, when Y:ART Gallery in Highlandtown shows his recent work in Balancing Act—drawings in ink and pastel, paper cut-outs, collage, and acrylic on canvas. Sept. 12-Oct. 20, opening reception from 6-9 p.m. Sept. 15, artist talk from 4-6 p.m. Oct. 13. Y:Art Gallery, 3402 Gough St.

Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day
Renowned contemporary artist Mark Bradford represented the U.S. at the 2017 Venice Biennale and will bring that work to Baltimore for the exhibit Tomorrow is Another Day, accompanied by a new site-specific installation, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Bradford explores themes from his personal life, black identity, Greek mythology, and the universe through mixed-media pieces, paintings, and video. Sept. 23, 2018-March 3, 2019; opening celebration, 1-5 p.m. Sept. 23. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

What Makes Us (Us)
Gina Pierleoni exhibits some 200 paintings and mixed-media portraits of people encountered over a 25-year period in Baltimore and beyond. She’ll lead a coinciding workshop which will include live music to help to dig deeper into questions of place and perception. Aug. 25-Sept. 29; workshop, 6-7:30 p.m. Sept. 15. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

AfriCOBRA: The Evolution of a Movement
This group exhibit at Galerie Myrtis celebrates artists in AfriCOBRA, aka African Commune for Bad Relevant Artists, a coalition that was born from the black arts movement that began in the 1960s and is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. The aesthetic of these artists emerged from activism and aims to speak to black people specifically. The show will display paintings, photographs, prints, and 3-D pieces by the group’s earliest and most recent members, including Akili Ron Anderson, Kevin Cole, Adger Cowans, Michael D. Harris, Napoleon Jones-Henderson (founding member), James Phillips, Frank Smith, Nelson Stevens (founding member), and Renee Stout. Coinciding programming will include Tea with Myrtis (as in, founding director of Galerie Myrtis, Myrtis Bedolla) and an art salon with AfriCOBRA members who will talk about their artwork and its impact on the black arts movement. Sept. 15-Oct. 17, with an opening reception from 5-7 p.m. Sept. 15. Galerie Myrtis Fine Art, 2224 N. Charles St.

Music

Taste of Tuva
Celebrated artist Joyce Scott will host this special evening featuring the music, art, and food of Asia. Alash Ensemble, a trio of throat singers from the Central Asian state of Tuva, will bring both their music and culinary specialties, while collaborating with Baltimore musicians Shodekeh and J Pope. The event supports the Asian Arts & Culture Center at Towson University. 6-9 p.m. Sept. 15. TU South Campus Pavilion at Towson University, 8000 York Rd.

Abdu Ali’s Last Show of 2018
Baltimore music artist Abdu Ali will perform their last live show of the year this month at Metro Gallery, joined by Kotic Couture (hip-hop with pop, Baltimore club, and underground art influences), Pamela_ and her sons (the solo music project of Alessandra Hoshor), and W00dy (Philadelphia-based experimental pop artist). 8 p.m. Sept. 5. Metro Gallery, 1700 N. Charles St.

BeatClub at the Lewis
Over the years, Bmore BeatClub has met regularly inside clubs, bars, and initially a record shop to celebrate hip-hop and beats. Novice artists rap alongside experts at these gatherings, and this month’s event will be extra special, as Bmore BeatClub will bring hip-hop, spoken word, and poetry to the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. 7 p.m. Sept. 28. Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St.

Theater

Fades and Fellowship Barbershop Stories
Barbershops are places of conversation and camaraderie—and from this idea came the production Barbershop Stories by Baltimore-based theater troupe Fades & Fellowship. A cast of real barbers will perform the stories overheard in the shop—and then give actual haircuts to selected audience members. Sept. 28. The Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Literary Arts

CityLit Swing: A Special Celebration Honoring Kwame Alexander
CityLit will honor poet, educator and New York Times bestselling children’s author Kwame Alexander with its Chic Dambach Award for Service to the Literary Arts during a celebratory evening at The Motor House. Sliding-Scale tickets are available for this CityLit fundraiser, which will include lite fare, libations, jazz, and a reading by Alexander. 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Sept. 13. The Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Small Press Expo
The annual Small Press Expo celebrates indie cartooning and comic arts, bringing more than 4,000 creatives to Bethesda for readings, workshops, and to meet with one another. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sept. 15 and noon-6 p.m. Sept. 16. Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, 5701 Marinelli Road, North Bethesda

Miscellanea

Mortified: Share the Shame
Everyday adults share their most mortifying moments via teenage diary entries, poems, love letters, lyrics, and locker notes in this popular show. 6 and 8 p.m. Sept. 22. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Mono Practice
Founding director Ruri Yi is opening a new contemporary art gallery, Mono Practice, in Station North this month, with a focus on abstract and reductive art. The inaugural exhibit, Pointing To The Sun | An Exercise In Abstraction, is curated by Rod Malin and will feature work by Baltimore-based artists David Brown, Zoë Charlton, Ariel Cavalcante Foster, Terence Hannum, Stephen Hendee, Bill Schmidt, and Yi. Sept. 6-Oct. 13, with an opening reception from 6-9 p.m. Sept. 6. Mono Practice, 212 McAllister St.

Visual Art

First Fridays Free Curatorial Tour: Meleko Mokgosi: Acts of Resistance
As part of a free series at the Baltimore Museum of Art, curators give tours of exhibitions they curated and explain the shows in further detail, providing rich insight into the artists and their work. This month, senior curator of contemporary art and department head Kristen Hileman will lead a group through the much-talked-about show Meleko Mokgosi: Acts of Resistance. Mokgosi explores race and gender through intimate yet larger-than-life portraits and paintings of domestic environments. Curatorial tour from 2-3 p.m. Aug. 3; the show remains up through Nov. 11. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

We Are Everywhere: Travels of the African Diaspora
Photographer Schaun Champion will show images from Baltimore and around the world that represent the African diaspora in her exhibit We Are Everywhere: Travels of the African Diaspora at Ida B’s Table, a beloved Southern soul food restaurant in downtown. The show is part of the monthly series Necessary Tomorrows, created by resident curator Sharayna Christmas to feature work that complements the visit and mission of the restaurant. Opening reception and artist talk, 5-8 p.m. Aug. 7. Ida B’s Table, 235 Holliday St.

Counterweight
Sera Boeno, Cevahir Özdoğan, and Noa Heyne examine concrete as a material and as a gender—its cultural and sociological implications and history—in the show Counterweight. Artist talks, a printmaking/archiving workshop with Lebanese archivist and artist Celia Shaheenon (Sept. 9), and an exhibition catalogue release on Sept. 21 will accompany the show. Aug. 10-Sept. 21, opening reception from 7-10 p.m. Aug. 10. The Menial Collection, 243 W. Read St.

Music

Summer in the Squares: Symphony Number One
Pull up a chair (or blanket) for the finale of this season’s Summer in the Squares. Symphony Number One will perform at Mount Vernon Place for the free series of shows that bring the work of emerging composers to the stage alongside beloved pieces by classical greats. During this show, the Baltimore-based chamber orchestra will feature the Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” alongside new works and pop favorites. 7-8:30 p.m. Aug. 29, Mount Vernon Place, 699 Washington Place

Baltimore International Surf Music Showcase
Four instrumental surf acts from around the world will take the Ottobar stage this month for a totally tubular night. Headlining the show will be Surfer Joe, based in Italy and often called the “international surf ambassador.” The legendary California surf band The Volcanics, and Les Agamemnoz (France) will also perform alongside local surf rockers the Flying Faders. 8 p.m. Aug. 15. Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St.

Art/Sound/Now: Suldano Abdiruhman and The Compositions
In collaboration with the High Zero Foundation, The Walters Art Museum will present its annual ART/SOUND/NOW, featuring artists creating soundscapes throughout the museum’s various gallery spaces. This year’s event highlights work by interdisciplinary artist Suldano Abdiruhman, a member of the artist collective BALTI GURLS and cofounder of 4c Gallery. 7-8:30 p.m. Aug. 23. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St.

Film

High Fidelity / Empire Records Double Feature
When a beloved music shop in Baltimore turns 25, a nostalgic screening of two cults classics is in order. The Sound Garden was born in 1993, and shortly thereafter, the films Empire Records and High Fidelity were released—in 1995 and 2000, respectively—both set amid the backdrop of record stores. And if watching these back-to-back on the big screen weren’t nostalgic enough, please note they’ll be screened on 35mm. 7-11 p.m. Aug. 30. The SNF Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave.

Theater

Variations on Sacrifice
Rapid Lemon Productions will present its annual Variations Project this summer with Variations on Sacrifice. Eleven 10-minute plays by local authors will premiere during two weeks, followed by a third week (new this year) of staged readings of eight additional plays. Audiences of 2017’s Variations on Magic voted to select this year’s theme, Sacrifice. Plays, Aug. 3-12; staged readings, Aug. 16-19. Baltimore Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St.

Literary Arts

‘Sentiments’ by Press Press: Baltimore Book Launch
What could be better than a summertime potluck? A summertime potluck hosted by Press Press, with readings to satiate your palate. The launch of “Sentiments: Expressions of Cultural Passage,” the latest publication by Press Press, will feature readings about creating sanctuary, by Bilphena Yahwon, Rami Karim, and others, beginning at 5 p.m., plus a reading of “Manifesto for Sanctuary-Building & Sanctuary-Keeping.” Bring along a snack or something to grill at this community potluck of Baltimore creatives. 3-7 p.m. Aug. 11. Press Press, 427 N. Eutaw St.

Miscellanea

Comedy, Music and Poetry Showcase with Heda Rose and Guests
A lineup of Baltimore talent will take the Motor House stage for an evening of poetry, standup comedy, and music, headlined by vocalist, songwriter, actress, model, activist, and film producer Heda Rose. The remaining lineup includes comedian Larry Lancaster, comedian Ebony “Miz Jaxxxn” Jackson, comedian Ray Diva, and poet Gradalove. Heda will perform a comedy set and music set with a live band. 8-11 p.m. Aug. 31. The Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Fluid Movement’s ‘The Water Ballet’
The Baltimore-based performance art group Fluid Movement channels the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock for its latest production, “The Water Ballet” at Patterson Park. Take a deep dive into all that horrifies you. Day and night shows, Aug. 3-5. Patterson Park.

Each year, an artist in the Baltimore area is recognized for his or her outstanding work by way of the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize, which awards a $25,000 fellowship.

Those curious to learn more about the artists and see their work can catch a group exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has been on view since June, showcasing a sampling of work by each finalist.

Mediums and styles cross the spectrum—photography, painting, fiber art, video installation, and sculpture—but one thing is certain: Work by this year’s group of Sondheim finalists addressed hard-hitting issues faced by America, such as racial and gender inequality, immigration, and slavery.

Past winners of the prestigious award have included artistic duo Wickerham and Lomax (2015) and musical instrument creator and innovator Neil Feather (2014).

A crowd gathered for the awards ceremony last night at the BMA coinciding with Artscape next weekend. Among the finalists this year were Erick Antonio Benitez, Nakeya Brown, Sutton Demlong, Nate Larson, Eunice Park, and Stephen Towns.

Erick Antonio Benitez, a Salvadorean-American artist, whose work focuses on the refugee and migrant experience, won the 2018 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize.

“This work is very timely and important to me,” Benitez said at the ceremony. “I wanted to create something that would highlight true realities.”

The 30-year-old MICA grad said that he plans to spend the $25,000 prize to help fund more trips to the U.S.-Mexico border to collect more objects for future installations. The remaining artists received $2,500 each.

The Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition of work by all seven finalists will remain on view at the BMA through August 5.

Visual Art

Young Blood
Art has the power to reflect the culture in which it was made, often expressing ideas that cannot be articulated as effectively through words alone. In the case of the exhibit Young Blood at Maryland Art Place, we see—through painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and animation—what inspires and stimulates the minds of our local creative youth culture. Each year, MAP celebrates recent Baltimore-area masters of fine art grads with an exhibit of their work.

This year’s Young Blood showcases pieces by graduates of Maryland Institute College of Art; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Towson University, including Caroline Hatfield, Mollye Bendell, Mitchell Noah, Madeline Stratton, Ryan Lytle, and Sara Kaltwasser. Through Aug. 25, with an opening reception from 6-9 p.m. July 11 and an artist talk at 1 p.m. Aug. 18 at MAP, 218 W. Saratoga St.

Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition
From sculpture to photography to painting, fiber art, and video installation, work by this year’s Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize finalists is visually spellbinding, and the artists don’t shy away from exploring such issues as spirituality, race, gender, and immigration. Baltimore-area visual artist finalists Erick Antonio Benitez, Nakeya Brown, Sutton Demlong, Nate Larson, Eunice Park, and Stephen Towns are each exhibiting selected works at the Baltimore Museum of Art through August 5. The winner will be announced during a ceremony at 7 p.m. July 14 and awarded a $25,000 fellowship. Exhibit runs through Aug. 5, awards ceremony at 7 p.m. July 14 at the BMA, 10 Art Museum Drive.

Summer ’18
The current show at C. Grimaldis Gallery in Mount Vernon revisits the exhibitions shown over the past year while giving a little preview of what’s to come. This survey exhibition features pieces by British sculptor Anthony Caro, abstract expressionist Grace Hartigan, and Korean light artist Chul Hyun Ahn. It also debuts work by 2018 Guggenheim Fellow Rania Matar, Colin Van Winkle, and 2017 Rome Prize recipient Beverly McIver. Through Aug. 18 at C. Grimaldis Gallery, 523 N. Charles St.

Intimate Women
Intimate Women, currently on view at Full Circle Gallery, explores the relationship between women’s minds and bodies through photography-based collage and sculpture by women artists. Their inner worlds are revealed through stories of culture, gender roles, and sexuality. As curator JiaJia Chen puts it in a statement about the show, “Every work in the exhibition is an adjective, presenting personal but universal subject matter from different perspectives.” Artists include Asha Holmes, Jianan Liu, Layla Choi, Michelle Cuevas, and Rachel Hartman. Through Aug. 4 at Full Circle Gallery, 33 E. 21st St.

Music

Jack Novotny Sextet
The Jack Novotny Sextet will bring their original music, composed in the spirit of the great jazz masters, to An die Musik. They’ve studied the nuances, style, and flavor of works by icons such as John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman, and expand upon and integrate those ideas into their own pieces, rather than duplicate the originals or even replicate improvs.

“Performing new material that has never been heard is exhilarating for our group,” says Jack Novotny, saxist in the group. The sextet also includes bassist Juini Booth, pianist Benito Gonzalez, trumpeter Marlon Jordan, tenor saxophonist Edwin Bayard, and Baltimore drummer Nasar Abadey as a guest, filling in for regular drummer Mark Lomax II. Novotny will play tenor/soprano saxophone and flute. 8:30 and 10 p.m. July 12 at An die Musik, 409 N. Charles St,.

Literary Arts

John Lingan
Rockville-based John Lingan, who has written for the Oxford American, New York Times Magazine, and others, brings us his debut book, Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk. Lignan spent four years researching the early-American town of Winchester, VA, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He first went there to seek out Jim McCoy, a honky-tonk owner and the DJ who first gave Patsy Cline airtime. What he uncovered though was a story about a town facing an identity crisis. He’ll launch his book tour this month with a reading and signing at Bird in Hand. 7 p.m. July 17 at Bird in Hand, 11 E. 33rd St.

Miscellanea

Cirque du Soleil Crystal
Cirque du Soleil’s show Crystal explores the artistic limits of ice through jaw-dropping acrobatics on the ice and in the air—synchronized skating and adrenaline-pounding extreme skating will be performed alongside traditional circus arts like trapeze. This dreamlike world is brought to life with visual projections and an original score. July 5-8 at Royal Farms Arena, 201 W. Baltimore St.

Artscape
Our beloved Artscape returns this month, taking over 16 blocks of Baltimore and boasting three outdoor stages, 11 indoor venues, over 200 concerts, an artist market with more than 150 vendors and craftspeople, plus large-scale projects showcasing visual and performing arts, visual art exhibitions, film, street theater, and youth-focused entertainment. Performances include theater, dance, comedy, and more. And all of the above is free. It’s a great way to celebrate the city and all the arts in one fell swoop. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. July 20 and 21, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. July 22 at Mount Royal Avenue & Cathedral Street, Charles Street, Bolton Hill, and Station North Arts & Entertainment District neighborhoods.

Ratscape
After a two-year hiatus, the wonderfully bizarre Ratscape will return this year in conjunction with Artscape. A lineup of more than 40 local bands spanning rock, rap, punk, experimental, hardcore, and more will perform free shows at the Ynot Lot, an outdoors venue in Station North, throughout the weekend: JPEGMAFIA, Jeff Carey, and Bound by the Grave on Friday; Butch Dawson, Joe Bidan, and Homosuperior on Saturday; Wume, Sneaks, and HexGirlfriends Sunday. The grassroots festival is produced by Baltimore Music Preservation, aka Joshua Christy Schuelpner, Mike Franklin, and Caroline Devereaux. 2 to 10 p.m. July 20-22 at the Ynot Lot,1904 N. Charles St.

It might come as no surprise to learn that Amy Sherald has won yet another major arts award tonight—this time, the $40,000 Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize as part of the annual Baker Artist Awards, presented by The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund.

A jury selects winners from a large database of some 900 artists in the region who have created an online Baker Artist Portfolio.

Winners—one per each artistic discipline—were announced during a pre-recorded awards ceremony that aired on MPT this evening in the program The 2018 Baker Artist Awards: An Artworks Special. Additional artists, winning $10,000 Mary Sawyers Baker awards, were Lisi Stoessel for Performance, Lafayette Gilchrist for Music, Margaret Rorison for Film/Video, Dora Malech for Literary Arts, Abraham Burickson for Interdisciplinary Arts.

Beloved in Baltimore, Sherald rose to national fame when her official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery. Also in 2018, she was chosen for the prestigious Driskell Prize and named as a new trustee on the Baltimore Baltimore Museum of Art of Art board.

“Amy’s work has struck a profound cord with the American public this year, and I am thrilled to see her win the 2018 Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize for her remarkable artistry,” Connie Imboden, president of the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund, stated in a release.

Visual and Interdisciplinary Arts winners will present work at the BMA September 12 through October 14 with 2017 awardees in the same categories. This year’s winners in the remaining categories will present their work during an opening reception Sept. 12 at the BMA.

“The Baker Artist Awards reflect the vitality of this region’s creative community. It sounds almost cliche but it’s a fact,” says Susanne Stahley, Senior Producer, Arts & Culture, for Maryland Public Television. “The celebration of these artists hopefully inspires viewers to get out and visit galleries, concerts, theaters—and the web. The Baker Artist Portfolios showcases hundreds of the area’s artists across genres.”

The Baker Artist Awards ceremony will air again at 8 p.m. May 19 on MPT2/Create and 6:30 a.m. May 20 on MPT-HD.

Visual Art

MICA ArtWalk
Maryland Institute College of Art undergrad class of 2018 will showcase their work in the three-hour ArtWalk extravaganza on May 11. Expect to see art in all genres and mediums: painting, sculpture, illustration, ceramics, graphic design, film, animation screenings, and more. New this year, the event is free to the public, complete with food trucks to give the event a festival feel. “The entire campus becomes one huge art gallery,” says Erin Baynham, social media manager at MICA. This is a great way to see what these talented kids are up to, with the added bonus of meeting them face to face and buying work to take home. 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. May 11 throughout the MICA campus. Work will remain on view through May 14. 

Music

The Björk Songbook
The Evolution Contemporary Series will conclude its season on May 8 with a concert of songs by Björk, taken from her newly released 34 Scores for Piano/Organ/Harpsichord & Celeste. Baltimore artists including Outcalls, Joy Postell, and The Witches will play renditions of songs by the legendary Icelandic pop star. Judah Adashi, founder of the series, is known for breathing new life into symphonic music, and this concert is sure to be no exception. 8 p.m May 8 at An die Musik, 409 N. Charles St.

Through the Eyes of a Child
The Through the Eyes of a Child performance is inspired by the work of Clara Han, associate professor of anthropology and co-director of the Program on Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University, who is exploring in a new book how violence is passed down through generations of families. The concert will be presented as part of Music of Reality, a series that brings musicians and scientists/researchers together and intersperses lectures with music. Music will include pieces by Leonard Bernstein as well as contemporary composers. 7 p.m. May 4 at 1025 S. Potomac St.

Theater

Life or Theatre?
With Baltimore Annex Theater’s production of Life or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon may very well become a household name alongside Anne Frank. The play is written and directed by Carly J. Bales (founding producing artistic director of EMP Collective) and based on the life and art of Salomon, a German-Jewish woman in Nazi-era Berlin who completed nearly 1,300 autobiographical paintings (the largest singular body of work by a Jew during the Holocaust), gave them to a friend, and was murdered shortly thereafter in Auschwitz. The play combines her intimate prose and expressionist painting with music to bring to life her story, 100 years after her birth. This is Bales’ first full-length play. Thursdays through Sundays May 24 to June 17 at Annex Theater, 219 Park Ave.

Follow No Strangers To The Fun Places
The Acme Corporation will dissect the process of art making (specifically theater) in their new play Follow No Strangers To The Fun Places, by Lola B. Pierson (creator of Baltimore’s Ten Minute Play Festival). It’s loosely based on Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, though we’ve been told not to get too excited about that point, as the play bears little resemblance to the book. May 3 to 19 at The Great Hall at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, 1900 St. Paul St.

SOUL The Stax Musical
Go back to the birth of soul music at Baltimore Center Stage’s production of SOUL The Stax Musical, which revives the songs of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, and other classic R&B stars during its world premiere. The musical tells the story of the Memphis-based Stax Records and music’s power to unite us, then and now. May 3 through June 10 at Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.

Dance

Moving Walls: A Performance of Body & Sculpture
Baltimore Independent Dance Artists examines human experience in relation to architecture in its new, experimental show at The Peale Center. Dance combines with a large sculptural installation and animation for the experience, though the set alone, created by Noa Heyne, is worth a visit to the museum. 8 p.m. May 3 and 5 at The Peale Center, 225 Holliday St.

Film

Maryland Film Fest
There is much to be excited about when it comes to this year’s Maryland Film Fest in Station North. There’s Matt Porterfield’s latest, Sollers Point, starring McCaul Lombardi; 10 blocks of shorts; a screening of the film I, Olga Hepnarova, selected and introduced by John Waters; an after party in the Ynot Lot and Windup Space; and much in between. Get ready to laugh, cry, and contemplate life every which way with more than 40 feature films across all genres and cultures. Learn more about it here and here and here. May 2-6 at the Parkway Theatre and MICA.

Miscellanea

Baltimore Portrait: Artists in Conversation
As part of the VOICES speaker series at The Church of the Redeemer, Baltimore artists Amy Sherald and Stephen Towns will be in conversation with Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford this month. Both have become Baltimore celebrities recently after receiving national attention for their work—Sherald with the unveiling of her official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Towns with his first museum exhibition (currently on view at the BMA). 7 to 8:30 p.m. May 30 at The Church of the Redeemer, 5603 N. Charles St.

Last August, visual artist Stephen Towns traveled to his home state of South Carolina and joined millions of Americans when he stood in the path of totality and witnessed a total solar eclipse.

“It is something that is indescribable,” he tells a crowd gathered to see his exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art. “You know there is something bigger than you.”

The same celestial forces played prominently in the story of Nat Turner, who led a rebellion of slaves and free black people in 1831, a story that the Baltimore-based Towns had been studying and using as the impetus for his latest body of work, a series of quilts that explore how slavery has impacted modern life. After seeing a solar eclipse in his time, Turner, a minister and deeply spiritual man, believed it was a sign from God to move forward with his revolt against slave owners, which he did, though it would ultimately bring him to his death when he was convicted.

“And about this time I had a vision—and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened,” he writes in the book The Confessions of Nat Turner. 

The glowing moon and beaming sun against shimmering, starry skies play prominently throughout Towns’ pieces, which are are on exhibit in the solo show Rumination and a Reckoning at the BMA from March 7 through Sept. 2. The work is in the textile gallery space of the American wing of the museum and marks Towns’ first museum show.

Towns and internationally renowned artist Mark Bradford will be in conversation with BMA director Christopher Bedford on March 7 to discuss their work and chosen mediums. The event is free to the public and begins at 7 p.m.

Towns is trained as a painter but moved to fiber arts in 2014 when he made the large-scale quilt “Birth of Nation,” a Madonna and Child of sorts, depicting a black woman wet-nursing a white baby, set against the historical 13-star American flag.

“I tried through painting, I tried through drawing, but it wasn’t working,” he says about starting the. When he turned to fiber arts to convey Turner’s story, “something about the materiality of the fabric” lent itself to the work. The self-taught seamstress says he learned a lot watching YouTube tutorials—which is fascinating, given the meticulous detail of the pieces that combine metallic thread, glass beads, buttons, tulle, and, in some cases, acrylic paint.

The quilts aren’t particularly large, averaging about 30 to 35 inches. Towns says that’s partly because he’s a creature of habit—and this size is similar to the canvases he once painted. He also says, “They’re like windows into that past time period.”

He brought to quilting his knowledge of, and interest in, sacred art, portraiture, and 19th-century photography.

In addition to his “Birth of a Nation” piece, seven smaller story quilts tell Turner’s story—from a child learning to read, through his work as a minister, and finally to his hanging as a martyr for enslaved people. Turner as prophet is depicted with a yellow, beaming sun around his head in some pieces, reminiscent of Towns’ older series of paintings, inspired by medieval altarpieces, that showed modern-day men and women with metallic golden halos. Two quilted portraits of Nat and Cherry Turner, believed to be his wife, complete the show.

Aside from those two portraits, the figures in Towns’ series are intentionally faceless, appearing as black cutouts, silhouettes. He wants them to be representative of all of us, he says.

He also chose to not show blatantly violent images, in part because he’s heard from friends that they’re tired of seeing films about slavery that contain graphic depictions of the old South. Instead, Towns focused on the positive frames of the story, and much is told abstractly through symbolism. A red scarf-like ribbon, for example, runs through several pieces, representing the blood and sacrifice of slaves. The heavens, too, serve as a metaphor, “a place beyond that is always there,” as Towns put it, “that you don’t always have the wherewithal to get to.”

Visual Art

Devin Allen’s A Beautiful Ghetto exhibit
Baltimore street photographer Devin Allen became known across the nation for his work after one of his images of the 2015 Baltimore protests was featured as the cover of Time magazine. Three years later, and in honor of that anniversary, the Institute for Integrative Health will exhibit a series of his black-and-white photos documenting the riots in A Beautiful Ghetto. Maybe more importantly, the show will serve as a launchpad for community-wide discussions. This kicks off with an artist talk during the opening reception, where his 2017 book by the same title will be available, and it continues with various events with a focus on healing, such as the April 13 dialogue with artists, writers, and leaders about creating healing spaces for their communities. The Institute for Integrative Health, 1407 Fleet St. Opening reception: 6 to 8:30 p.m. March 15.

Adam Davies: Reroutings
Creative Alliance resident artist Adam Davies will transform the space there to bring us Reroutings, an exhibit of his large-format film photographs of outdoor structures that have served as unofficial public forums (think graffiti-strewn bridges and unexpected street art found during a stroll). The gallery space will be completely darkened and the walls painted black and replaced with his huge (56- by 70-inch) photographic images, which will be lit from behind. Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches will perform his lo-fi electronica soundscapes—which were an influence on the photography series—during an opening reception on March 10, and more events will follow. Opens March 10 at the Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning
Story quilts are an African-American tradition dating back at least some 200 years. Some historians believe that secret codes were sewn into quilts, providing maps for navigating the Underground Railroad. Baltimore artist Stephen Towns continues in this tradition, exploring themes of slavery and perspectives of women and people of color through his large-scale fabric and bead-work pieces, often featuring faceless black figures that appear as silhouettes. The Baltimore Museum of Art will exhibit 10 of his quilts in Rumination and a Reckoning beginning this month, seven of which depict the story of Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion. As if that weren’t enough, the museum will host Towns in conversation with internationally renowned artist Mark Bradford. March 7 through Sept. 2 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

Music

Baltimore Plays The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill 20th Anniversary
Hard as it may be to believe, it’s been 20 years since the release of the seminal album The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. In a homage to the work, several artists—Jasmine Pope (J Pope and the HearNow), Christen B, Joy Postell, Karin Sings Evans, Marc Avon Evans, Jamaal Black Root Collier—will gather at the Creative Alliance to perform its tracks in their own style. March 18 at the Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Theater

Humbug: The Great P.T. Barnum Séance
Magician David London will attempt to summon the spirit of The Great P.T. Barnum via—what else?—séance in his new show Humbug at The Peale Center. While we can’t guarantee audiences will make contact with the legendary showman, we do guarantee the exhibition of genuine Barnum artifacts (honestly, that might be a hoax, too—in the spirit of P.T. Barnum, of course). March 8 to 25 at The Peale Center, 225 N. Holliday St.

Film

Everything is Terrible!’s The Great Satan
Imagine being able to get a taste of more than more than 2,000 horror, satanic, and religious films in under two hours. You don’t have to imagine anymore. Everything is Terrible! has done the work for you, creating a narrative from scraps of material to make the kitschy, trippy new film The Great Satan. In their own words: “Since the dawn of time, man has searched for answers . . . and failed. But the fog of existence has finally cleared thanks to the eternal fruits of your favorite found footage collective.” The makers will be at the theater to present their film as part of their cross-country tour. Guests are encouraged to bring offerings of VHS tapes of Jerry Maguire. March 7 at SNF Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave.

Kékszakállú

Baltimore’s Matt Porterfield, best known for his films Hamilton and Putty Hill, will host and do a Q&A at two screenings of the gorgeous Argentine film Kékszakállú, co-written and co-produced by him and directed by Gastón Solnicki. The coming-of-age film’s title and inspiration comes from the opera Bluebeard’s Castle and follows a group of upper-class girls as they enter the world outside of their privileged lives. March 2 to 8 at SNF Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave.

Literary Arts

An Evening with Laura Lippman at Federal Hill Prep School
Baltimore’s literary darling and New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman will be at Federal Hill Prep School as part of a book tour for her latest release, Sunburn. The novel tells the story of Polly, a runaway wife who’s ready to start a new life but wasn’t quite ready to fall in love in the process. March 24 at Federal Hill Preparatory School, 1040 William St.

The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Fox Court, a rather solemn room with its towering, stately columns and echoing acoustics, just got a little warmer under the soft, golden glow of Spencer Finch’s much-anticipated Moon Dust (Apollo 17). The installation—417 light bulbs suspended in air between floor and ceiling—went on view on Feb. 21 and will remain a fixture in the space until the fall of 2024.

Anne Mannix-Brown, senior director of communications and marketing at the BMA, says she noticed a lot of foot traffic throughout opening day, and notes that you can see the installation from the street through a large window.

The piece spans 45 feet and represents the molecular structure of the moon dust that was collected during NASA’s Apollo 17 space mission. Bulbs in four sizes are meticulously arranged into their molecular structure, much like the three-dimensional models of colored atoms we studied in school science classes as children but on a much grander scale.

In 2012, Finch, based in Brooklyn, New York, put on view a more-permanent large-scale piece in Baltimore: a curtain wall made of glass that stretches across Johns Hopkins Hospital building, with blue and green hues reminiscent of Claude Monet’s work.

Joanne Gold, who with her husband Andy Stern loaned Moon Dust to the BMA, says she fell in love with the piece and jokes that she’d install it in her home if she had the space. “It’s a masterpiece . . . it’s so exquisite,” she tells a crowd of museum donors during an opening-night reception. After seeing it exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2009, she purchased it in memory of her mother.

That year also marked the 400th anniversary of the beginning of Galileo’s detailed observations of the moon through a strong telescope he’d made—not a coincidence, as this anniversary got Finch thinking about the moon as subject.

Finch says he has a “conceptual interest in representing the world,” which is evidenced in his pieces that examine the Great Salt Lake, bee flight patterns, the Milky Way, pollen, and clouds.

He admits that it’s, as he puts it, “terrifying to put up a piece that’s so permanent”—especially when you don’t know exactly what it will look like until it’s completely installed and lit. But he likes its new home. “It’s very exciting to see it today . . . I feel like it works in this space,” he tells the audience that has gathered under its light. “You can feel like you’re sort of in this galaxy.”

As the artist points out, the piece is at once a microcosmic and macrocosmic abstract depiction of the cosmos, as it suggests the molecular structure of moon dust as viewed under a microscope but also fills the space overhead much like a vast, starry sky. He hopes it engages a sense of wonder, regardless of how it’s perceived.

When asked why his work is often specific to time and place, Finch says, “I find in that deep observation an opportunity for poetry,” and acknowledges 19th-century scientists alongside Emily Dickinson as inspirations. “Emily Dickinson looks at the natural world with an incredible intensity,” he says, “opening it up to something poetic and beautiful.”

Visual Art

Reflections: Intimate Portraits of Iconic African Americans
Photographer Terrence A. Reese’s career has led him to take portraits of such stars as Lauryn Hill and George Clinton. The artist, who goes by TAR, will exhibit a selection of his work at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum this month in the show Reflections: Intimate Portraits of Iconic African Americans. Black-and-white images will depict such luminaries as the Nicholas Brothers and Gordon Parks in their natural environments and living spaces so as to better reflect who they are, through their personal objects, style, and the context of their lives. Wednesdays through Sundays, Feb. 1 through Aug. 12, at Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St.

Artist talk with Shirin Neshat
Iranian artist Shirin Neshat explores gender, identity, and politics in her work, as well as the differences in culture between the West and Muslim countries. Because she tackles such complex themes, there is no shortage of questions and discussion surrounding her work. It also makes her a perfect candidate for MICA’s Mixed Media lecture series, which brings to Baltimore artists from across the globe. For this installment, Neshat will be in conversation with Baltimore Museum of Art Director Christopher Bedford. 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at Falvey Hall, Brown Center, 1301 W. Mount  Mount Royal Ave.

Music

Charm City Django Jazz Fest
Nothing like some live gypsy jazz to add a little heat to a cold winter’s day. Creative Alliance has got us covered with not one but three days of its annual Charm City Django Jazz Fest, which will bring in acts from across the region and world, including headliner Samson Schmiit, a legendary Manouche gypsy guitarist from France. Swing on by to see Sara L’abriola, Ultrafaux, ‘Nuff Said, and others, to experience a range of styles within the genre. Feb. 23 to 25 at the Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Out of Darkness: Two Remain
A new opera looks at what you might consider atypical Holocaust survivors: one, a political prisoner, and the other a homosexual Protestant, both of whom used words to overcome the traumas of captivity during the war. World-renowned composer Jake Heggie developed the two-act opera based on the true stories of these characters who “survive through their poetry,” says Garnett Bruce, stage director of the Peabody Chamber Opera’s production of the piece. Feb. 8 through 11 at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. The composer and librettist will attend opening night, with a talk following the show.

Theater

Constellations & Crossroads
Constellations & Crossroads is a theatrical double-header steeped in American history and exploding with life. Baltimore Rock Opera Society partnered with Arena Players, Baltimore’s historic African-American community theater, to present two short musicals in their entirety, backed by a live band. The Determination of Azimuth tells the story of Katherine Johnson, a black mathematician who worked for NASA and was responsible for comp[uting paths for rocket ships sent into space. Battle of Blue Apple Crossing leans more on fiction to tell the tale of blues legend Robert Johnson, said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical ability. The score follows America’s musical heritage from field spirituals to rock ’n’ roll to garage rock. 8 p.m. Feb. 9 through 18 at Arena Players’ venue at 801 McCulloh St.

All She Must Possess
The Rep Stage premiere of All She Must Possess tells the story of Baltimore’s famed Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, extravagant world travelers and collectors of art and curios. During the early 20th century, they stored thousands of paintings—including work by Matisse and Picasso, among other greats—in their homes, amassing what would become one of the world’s largest collections of modern art (a large portion would eventually be housed at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it is today). In the theatrical version of their lives, written by University of Maryland Baltimore County professor Susan McCully and directed by Rep Stage artistic director Joseph W. Ritsch, paintings come to life and Gertrude Stein—Etta’s lover—makes an appearance. Coinciding with the play is an exhibition of historical women’s clothing from the Cone sisters’ time, on display at Howard Community College’s Rouse Company Foundation Gallery through March 11. The play runs Feb. 8 to 25 at Rep Stage at Howard Community College.

Dance

The Community Project
Each year, The Collective pulls together dancers from the community and pairs them with a professional choreographer to develop the Community Project performance. This year, 22 dancers—ranging in age from teens to baby boomers and across all skill levels—met on several cold January weekends to rehearse under dancer Caitlin McAfee for this year’s show, which is but one component to the Baltimore Dance Invitational. Set to Indian Wells’ song “Cascades,” the group will show through movement how the mind races, gets distracted, and follows its own trails of thought. Gordon Center for Performing Arts on Thursday, February 15, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts, 3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills. 

Beyonce vs Rihanna Dance Party: Round 2
The Ottobar event flier states it best: “Are you ‘Drunk In Love’ or ‘Drunk On Love’?!” At the Beyonce vs Rihanna Dance Party, that is precisely the question. And also, are you ready to duke it out—through dance, of course, to support your diva de jour. The dance party battle will light up with Beyonce tracks from DJ Mills and Rihanna tracks from Ottobar owner Craig Boarman. 9 p.m. Feb. 16 at the Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St.

Miscellanea

African-American Arts Festival
The University of Baltimore helps us to celebrate Black History Month specifically through art at its annual African-American Arts Festival. Its offerings span an array of artistic mediums: film, visual art, music, theater. Some highlights: a panel with Black Ladies Brunch Crew of D.C., an African drumming circle, readings of Langston Hughes poetry spliced with live, improvised jazz piano, and a screening of Jonathan Demme’s film of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Feb. 15 to 18 at the University of Baltimore, 1420 N. Charles St.

Exhibit of Original Costumes

We may be 2,500 miles from Hollywood, but John Klisavage brings us a touch of its wonder by way of costume. At his bookstore in Havre De Grace, he’s displaying several outfits worn in major motion pictures, including Hunger Games and The Notebook. February and March at Washington Street Books & Music, 131 N. Washington St., Havre De Grace.

A culinary documentary on Basque cuisine
Parkway Theater has teamed up with a local restaurant to bring a food and film pairing, naturally. After a screening of The Txoko Experience: The Secret Culinary Space of The Basques, scriptwriter Marcela Garces and director Yuri Morejon will answer any questions the audience has, and then . . . everyone can partake in the food portion of the evening: passed pintxos from the Basque-inspired La Cuchara restaurant. Renowned Basque chefs serve as narrators of the culinary documentary, which explores Txokos, groups of people who gather to explore innovative and experimental ways of cooking. As Morejon puts it, “Txokos represent a distinctive, albeit enigmatic element of Basque gastronomy. As the private temples of traditional Basque cuisine, they captivate people with their warmth, ambiance, and great respect for fresh products.” 7 p.m. Feb. 22 Parkway Theater, 5 W. North Ave.

Visual Art

Scott Pennington’s Two-Minute Joys
Scott Pennington’s art is nothing if not fun. He draws from his experience as a furniture maker to craft large-scale, interactive artwork. Through several light-based installations and wall pieces, his latest show, Two-Minute Joys, explores a tradition Pennington grew up with: the carnivals that make their rounds from town to town, bringing people together among their bright lights, rich colors, and the sweet scent of carnival food. It’s what the artist refers to as the “carnival aesthetic,” prevalent throughout his work. Indulge in a carnival trip of the mind at Maryland Art Place, courtesy of Pennington. Jan. 18 through March 10, MAP, 218 W. Saratoga St. Reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Jan. 18.

Curatorial tour of Beyond Flight: Birds in African Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit Beyond Flight: Birds in African Art shows the many uses of birds in sub-Saharan art. See the dramatic masks worn during rituals, herbalists’ staffs, and household objects embellished with bird imagery while meditating on how these winged creatures have piqued our curiosity over the centuries. As BMA associate curator of African art Kevin Tervala pointed out, birds make up less than one percent of living things and yet are used extensively throughout all artistic genres. Through June 10, BMA, 10 Art Museum Drive; curatorial tour from 2 to 3 p.m. Jan. 5.

Art talk with longtime MICA instructor James Hennessey
As a decades-long painting instructor at Maryland Institute College of Art, James Hennessey influenced the work of thousands of Baltimore artists. His retrospective exhibit at the Creative Alliance, Enduring Concerns, celebrates him with a survey of his paintings done over the years that he’s worked in the city. Through Jan. 13, with an artist talk at 7 p.m. Jan. 6, Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Dance

King of What: Bboy/Bgirl Jam
Motor House will play host to breakers from across the U.S. and Canada during its five-hour King of What, which kicks off with a cypher that will allow hundreds of dancers to showcase their skills before a selected few move into one-on-one competition—i.e., before things get real. One lucky break-boy or -girl will be named the best and take home $1,000 (and someone else will win a $100 prize for having the flyest getup). And if five hours isn’t enough, there’s an after party. 5 to 10 p.m. Jan. 20 at Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Music

Hirsute live
The only thing better than an album listening party is an album performed live in its entirety. Amy Reid will provide us with this gift at the performance of her 2017 release Hirsute at the Motor House. She’ll be joined by a band to combine electronica, vocals, and live instrumentation. Plus, guest artists  Infinity Knives & Randi will perform, and Hanna Olivegren (of Zomes) and Noelle Tolbert will explore movement and sound. 9 p.m. Jan. 6 at the Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Off The Cuff: Impressionist Masterworks
For a tasty music and art pairing, try the January installment of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Off the Cuff series, where the music of Debussy and Ravel will be performed alongside projected images of Impressionist art by Monet, Degas, Cézanne, and others, and you’ll learn how Impressionism influenced composers of the day. In collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Impressionist Masterworks short-format concert includes commentary from BSO music director Marin Alsop and BMA senior curator of European painting and sculpture Katy Rothkopf, who will provide context to enrich the experience. An after party, Ravel on the Rocks, will extend the night with live gypsy jazz by Orchester Prazevica and food from Dooby’s. 7 p.m. Jan. 13, Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St.

Literary Arts

Red Emma’s Mother Earth Poetry Vibe
The gift of poetry is its ability to inspire us. With that idea in mind, Red Emma’s Mother Earth Poetry Vibe is an open mic that focuses on work that engages conscious thought, spirituality, justice, equality, and, in short, raises the vibration of our collective consciousness. All are welcome to share, while Philadelphia-based lyricist, author, educator, and voiceover artist Lyrispect will be the featured guest of the evening. 6:30 to 9 p.m. Feb. 3 at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, 30 W. North Ave.

Miscellanea

Edgar Allan Poe: Evermore
Raise your glass for a toast to the macabre poet Baltimore claims as its own, Edgar Allan Poe, who would have been 209 on Jan. 19, had he not died of . . . well, either alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, tuberculosis, or suicide (don’t worry, folks, you’ll just be drinking nonalcoholic apple cider, courtesy of Poe Baltimore). 6 to 6:30 p.m. Jan. 19 at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, 519 W. Fayette St.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Parade
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said to a crowd in Memphis, Tennessee, less than 24 hours before he was assassinated. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.” Baltimore will celebrate the legendary Civil Rights activist on his birthday with a parade down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Noon to 2 p.m. Jan. 15.

Moonifestations of Ancestor Earth closing
What do you get when you combine meditation with January’s waxing moon? One guess is Moonifestations. Xander Dumas and Elliot Moonstone, better known as The Dandy Vagabonds, will close out their fiber-art installation Moonifestations of Ancestor Earth: a voyage of expansion at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower with a guided meditation. Through the use of astrology and gemstones, they’ll help the group to “moonifest” individual and collective intentions. Come dressed in the likeness of your favorite element, stone, or planet, and bring a journal. Noon to 2 p.m. Jan. 27, Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower Galleries, 21 S. Eutaw St.

News

Resort, a new contemporary art gallery
Resort, a new gallery in Baltimore exhibiting contemporary art, will hold its inaugural show this month. A Big Toe Touches a Green Tomato will showcase the work of former artistic director of The Contemporary Ginevra Shay and Philadelphia-based artist and self-described “plant person” Roxana Azar. Jan. 20 through March 3; opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Jan. 20, Resort, 235 Park Ave.

Humans have been fascinated by birds for millennia—their songs, their movement through air, water, and land; migration patterns; flying in formation; their extraordinary range of color and form; and their symbolism for freedom and connecting with the divine.

They frequently appear in artistic work, when they make up less than one percent of living things, says the Baltimore Museum of Art associate curator of African art, Kevin Tervala. “They’re found materially or representationally all over the world,” he says. “Why, time and time again, do we look to birds for what it means to be human?”

Together with the BMA’s former associate curator of African art, Shannen Hill, Tervala put together the earthy, exotic new exhibit Beyond Flight: Birds in African Art, which opened at the BMA on Dec. 20 and will remain on view through June 17, with a tour led by Tervala on Jan. 5.

A museum renovation in 2015 tripled the amount of space dedicated to African art, and part of that expansion included the creation of a gallery used for rotating exhibits, including this one. 

“The expansion also allowed us to increase the different ways we can talk about African art in the permanent installation galleries,” Tervala says. “In those galleries, we have nooks, or sections, that talk about African art from various different perspectives, for example, temporal, thematic, or ethnic group.”

Beyond Flight combines the dramatic, whimsical, and spiritual elements of birds and humans’ relationship to them. Pieces, from 19th- and 20th-century sub-Saharan Africa, are made almost entirely from organic materials—hair, clay, feathers, bone, wood, plants, fur—with original mud intentionally left intact. There are representations of birds from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and Uganda. Rooster, hawk, ostrich, crow. An owl with human features.

The show is organized into sections that act as food for thought about the ways in which birds have been appreciated, understood, and utilized throughout African history, in art as well as daily life. One case shows the use of birds decoratively on everyday objects. (“Put a bird on it” takes on a whole new meaning here.)

Two large cases hold ceremonial masks depicting birds, many of which were used to help infuse the creature’s essence into that of the wearer, who would then act as if transformed into the bird itself. In another case are herbalists’ iron staffs, with birds used to symbolize ideologies and beliefs. Another section shows how birds were used to indicate social status, how feathers were sometimes symbols of power and authority in Africa.

A nice touch on the part of the BMA are imagined written narratives alongside each case, short snapshots created to coincide with each display case to help bring the work to life. For example: “Crouched in the tall grass of the Nigerian savanna, a Hausa hunter begins to bob his head. He twitches, pecks, and cocks it to the side. Above the vegetation, all that is visible is the movement of the man’s headdress (burtu), a bird decoy made from the skull of a Ground Hornbill. Here in the wild, in the moments before a kill, the hunter’s success is measured by his ability to leave his body and become, for several minutes or hours, like a bird.”

The awe-inspiring Pende masquerade headdress is the show’s centerpiece, flaunting hundreds of feathers that catch the light to reveal their colors. The mask arrived at the BMA in a somewhat ruffled state. BMA object conservator Christine Downie worked on the incredibly delicate piece for three months to restore its feathers to their original state, or get them as close to it as possible: dusting, cleaning, and repairing feathers with splints, combing and sewing the ends of feathers back together.

While Beyond Flight features African art, Tervala believes the fascination with birds is universal; the show could have just as easily centered around early American art, he asserts, with its rooster weathervanes and birds sewn into quilts.