Fall Arts Guide – Baltimore Magazine

Your Go-To Guide For the 2018 Fall Arts Season

Jess Mayhugh — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:30:00 +0000

As the dog days of summer give way to the crisp winds of fall, Baltimore’s art season kicks into full gear. Come September, theater seasons launch, galleries host their biggest shows, and an abundance of art-centric colleges and universities—including the renowned Maryland Institute College of Art and Peabody Conservatory—means a swelling of cultural and educational activities. Here, we round up our recommended events to catch from now through the end of 2018.

Kubrick 90: A Would-Be Birthday Retrospective
Through Dec. 2018. Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave.
In honor of what would be Stanley Kubrick’s 90th birthday, the Parkway will screen a retrospective of work by the celebrated filmmaker, semi-chronologically, including classics such as Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each film will play twice throughout the festival, and many will be presented on 35mm.

Baltimore Comedy Festival
Aug. 29-Sept. 3. Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.
More than 100 comedians from around the U.S. will be in town for the second Baltimore Comedy Festival, where Motor House will serve as headquarters and a performance venue for this five-day, citywide event.

The Parkway celebrates Stanley Kubrick's 90th birthday. - Courtesy of The Parkway Theatre

The Institute of Visionary History and the Archives of the Deep Now
Sept.-Dec. The Peale Center, 225 Holliday St.
With the historical Peale Center as its backdrop, Submersive Productions will present its latest theatrical experience, featuring a different production each month. It will culminate with a December shadow performance themed around a 1980s movie set in pre-World War II Germany.

The Thing is Close
Aug. 31-Sept. 29. School 33 Art Center, 1427 Light St.
Cindy Cheng and Jackie Milad will present work in a two-person exhibit that examines identity and home. Cheng creates sculptural installations that reference the interior of her parents’ house in Hong Kong, with meditations on the importance of particular objects within the space. Milad’s work on paper explores ethnic backgrounds through actual and invented symbols associated with her Egyptian and Honduran heritage

Baltimore Taxidermy Open
Sept. 6. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St.
The Walters Art Museum’s Chamber of Wonders houses treasures from around the world, among them taxidermied birds, beasts, and reptiles. But only during this annual event does the museum play host to an array of contemporary taxidermy artists (the term “taxidermy” is used loosely in this context) alongside these antique ones for a pop-up exhibit and taxidermy competition.

The art of taxidermy. - Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum

DOS-à-DOS
Sept. 7-30. Hamilton Gallery, 5502 Harford Rd.
Baltimore artists L. Nef’fahtiti Partlow-Myrick and Jenny O’Grady, who met as students in the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts master’s program at the University of Baltimore, exhibit a collection of their art books, made from a variety of materials both traditional and unorthodox. 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.

Survival Bias
Sept. 8-29. Current Space, 421 N. Howard St.
This two-person exhibition of sculptures, wall works, and video by Brittany De Nigris and Adam Milner investigates what defines the immediate present and how things are often an accumulation of past subjects, places, and times. The show’s title is based on the term “survivorship bias,” which describes how our history is shaped, in part, by the artifacts that survive.

Putin On Ice (That Isn’t The Real Title of This Show)
Sept. 12-Oct. 7. Single Carrot Theatre, 2600 N. Howard St.
A mix of fable, melodrama, and theater, the satirical Putin on Ice elevates the man to myth, from dictator to deity, in a collaboration between theater companies Single Carrot and The ACME Corporation.

Balancing Act: Paintings, Drawings, Collages. Works by Joseph Paul Cassar
Sept. 12-Oct. 20, artist talk from 4-6 p.m. Oct. 13. Y:ART Gallery, 3402 Gough St.
Art historian, author, and artist Joseph Paul Cassar will show recent drawings in ink and pastel, paper cutouts, collage, and acrylic on canvas.

Repurposed with Purpose: Meaning in the Materials of Making
Sept. 20-Nov. 10. Maryland Art Place, 218 W. Saratoga St.
This large group exhibit, curated by former Baltimore Museum of Art director Doreen Bolger, nudges viewers to look deeper into pieces and think about the materials used and why, what statement they make, and whether they are a reflection of the artist’s personal story or have a broader significance.

Lovelight Yoga and Arts Festival
Sept. 21-24. Pearlstone Conference & Retreat Center, 5425 Mount Gilead Road, Reisterstown.
Music, art installations, and lots of yoga and meditation will be held in a serene, natural setting at the annual Lovelight Festival in Reisterstown, featuring Krishna Das and Rising Appalachia, among others, plus more than 40 classes and workshops.

Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day
Sept. 23, 2018-March 3, 2019. Opening Celebration, 1-5 p.m. Sept. 23. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr.
This major exhibition by renowned contemporary artist Mark Bradford will bring together work he showed at the 2017 Venice Biennale and a new site-specific installation. The Los Angeles-based artist explores themes from his personal life, black identity, Greek mythology, and the universe through mixed-media works, abstract paintings, and video.

Mark Bradford's work from Tomorrow is Another Day - Courtesy of Mark Bradford / Photo by Joshua White

Fades and Fellowship Barbershop Stories
Sept. 28. Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.
Baltimore-based theater troupe Fades & Fellowship brings black barbershop culture to the stage. Not only does the cast of actual barbers perform the conversations and stories—true and embellished—as overheard in barbershops, but they finish the show by giving a few lucky audience members haircuts onstage.

High Zero
Sept. 28-29. Theatre Project, 45 W Preston St.
Experimental music in all its glory will be performed during this two-day festival by musicians who will expand your definition of music and instruments. Performers include Wendel Patrick, Ada Pinkston, Neil Feather (who plays invented instruments), Carrie Fucile (who plays objects and cassettes), Orlando Johnson (who plays found objects), and several others.

Baltimore Book Festival
11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sept. 28-30. Baltimore Inner Harbor.
The annual Baltimore Book Festival along the Inner Harbor is a free, three-day celebration of the written and spoken word, featuring presses from indie to university and every genre imaginable. Hundreds of authors will participate in readings, talks, book signings, panels, and workshops, and more than 100 exhibitors and booksellers will line the Inner Harbor Promenade, from the Inner Harbor Amphitheater to Rash Field. Highlights this year: authors A.J. Jacobs, April Ryan, Bill Whitaker, Jonathan Abrams, Carol Anderson, D. Watkins, Nic Stone, Tim Junkin, and Wayétu Moore, plus numerous stages and tented areas, including Tablers Tent, Charm City Comic Pavilion, CityLit Stage, Food for Thought Stage, Ivy Bookshop Stage, Literary Salon, Maryland Romance Writers’ Stage, Red Emma’s Radical Books Pavilion, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Stage, and a music stage.

Chinese Snuff Bottles
Sept. 30-Dec. 9. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St.
Chinese snuff bottles—historically used to hold a medicinal blend of tobacco, spices, and herbs and worn around the neck—were not only intriguing and practical pieces but also intricate works of art. The Walters will exhibit nearly 250 snuff bottles made from stone, glass, porcelain, ivory, lacquer, enamel, and precious metals. The show coincides with the 50th annual Convention of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society, which will be held in Baltimore in October.

Afro Punk Ballet - Photos By Kintz

Afro Punk Ballet
Oct. 4-6. The Peale Museum, 225 Holliday St.
This sci-fi, futuristic ballet opera is the second in a trilogy produced by Afro House. As the story goes, mad scientist Levi created a second sun that is drying up the lands and bringing the nation’s inhabitants to near extinction. His descendants are left with his mess to clean up.

Parenting: An Art Without a Manual
Oct. 6, 2018-Sept. 1, 2019. American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy.
AVAM’s next annual mega-exhibit is a meditation on the art of parenting—from cultural wisdom to scientific breakthroughs in cognitive and behavioral research. Work by three dozen artists will incorporate a wide spectrum of media and styles, such as Allen Christian’s life-sized torso sculptures of Mother, Father, and Child made from antique piano parts; Leon Borensztein’s black-and-white photos documenting his daughter, who was born legally blind; and a group of women who sewed their fathers’ old ties into hexagonal assemblages and provided six-word stories to accompany them.

John Waters: Indecent Exposure
Oct. 7, 2018-Jan. 6, 2019. Opening Celebration, 1-5 p.m. Oct. 7; Artist Conversation with John Waters and Senior Curator Kristen Hileman, 6 p.m. Nov. 1. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr.
Enter the wonderfully absurd world of John Waters in this retrospective exhibition of photos, video clips, early films, photocopied drawings, and sculpture from the legendary Baltimore filmmaker. The artist’s penchant for black humor is evidenced in the more than 160 pieces he has made since the early 1990s that criticize, dramatize, and exploit popular culture and celebrate the LGBTQ and other marginalized communities.

Open Studio Tour
10 a.m.-6 p.m. Oct. 13-14. Assorted venues citywide.
More than 100 artists open their studio doors across the city for this two-day, self-guided tour, where visitors can watch the artists in their element and talk with them about their work.

Photo from the Charmed Life exhibit. - Jim Burger

A Charmed Life
Oct. 13-Nov. 24. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.
This retrospective of more than 130 photographs will span Jim Burger’s 30-plus years as a photojournalist with The Baltimore Sun and City Paper. Burger will present an illustrated talk of his life’s work from 7:30-8:30 p.m. on Nov. 8 to coincide with the exhibit.

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass
7:30 p.m. Oct. 26. New Psalmist Baptist Church, 6020 Marian Dr.
This massive theatrical spectacle, conducted by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra director Marin Alsop, will feature hundreds of Baltimore performers—Peabody Conservatory instrumentalists, singers, and dancers; Preparatory students including members of the Peabody Children’s Chorus; and others from the community including the Morgan State University Choir and students from the Baltimore School for the Arts. The show is loosely based on a Catholic Mass and uses song and dance to raise questions about faith.

Charm City Fringe Festival
Nov. 1-11. Various venues in the Bromo Arts District.
Experimental theater and performance art will be highlighted in this 11-day festival that brings performers from across the continent to Baltimore for more than 90 performances in theater, comedy, dance, crankies, film, and more.

Romare Bearden: Vision and Activism
Nov. 10, 2018-March 3, 2019. Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St.
Romare Bearden is considered one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century. As an artist, educator, scholar, writer, songwriter, and social activist, he examined race through his work: paintings, editorial cartoons in the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, collages, and other artwork. More than 50 of his pieces will be displayed at this major exhibition.

A Wonder in My Soul
Nov. 29-Dec. 26. Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.
Set in a Baltimore beauty shop, this story of friendship and community confronts the issues of gentrification and crime as its co-owners decide whether or not to move the shop.

An Alice Gadzinski sculpture. - Courtesy of the Creative Alliance

Violinist Joshua Bell
8 p.m. Nov. 30, 3 p.m. Dec. 2. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St.
Joshua Bell, one of the most celebrated violinists of his era, with appearances on The Tonight Show and Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle, will perform Dvorák’s romantic Violin Concerto under the baton of Romanian conductor Cristian Măcelaru.

Alice Gadzinski
Dec. 7, 2018-Jan. 12, 2019. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.
Baltimore sculptor Alice Gadzinski was a resident artist at the Creative Alliance when she passed away earlier this year from cancer. In honor of her creative spirit, the art center is hosting an exhibit of work she made at the Creative Alliance, as well as never-before-seen pieces.

Black Nativity
Dec. 7-30. Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.
Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity, a musical originally performed Off-Broadway in 1961, is a retelling of the Nativity story with an entirely black cast. The show, presented in Baltimore by ArtsCentric, includes Hughes’ poetry as well as traditional Christmas carols sung gospel-style.

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This Is What Activism Looks Like

Aaron Hope — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 08:00:00 +0000

By Gabriella Souza
Photography by David Colwell

Arts & Culture

This Is What Activism Looks Like

We take a look at some of the key figures who are shaping both arts and activism in the city.

By Gabriella Souza. Photography by David Colwell.

he marches and protests that brought in the new year were the first indicators that 2017 would be full of political discourse and civil unrest. And, as the arts have always mirrored the world’s events, artistic expression is at a vigorous high. That’s especially true for artists in Baltimore, who have borne witness to the death of Freddie Gray and the city’s accelerating murder rate. To usher in the arts season, we take a look at some of the key figures who are shaping both arts and activism in the city.

Shan Wallace chose a block on the edge of two worlds to display her work. To the north of the 400 block of Park Avenue you have what some would deem progress—luxury apartments on the rise and the bustling Mount Vernon Marketplace food hall. To the south, boarded up buildings and smashed windows stand out like busted teeth. “I’m tired of looking at this shit,” the photographer and activist says, eyeing spray paint-tagged boards screwed over a bay window, underneath a sunblasted sign that still reads “Jimmy’s Chinese Food.” “Why does this have to look like this? So I decided I’d put some art up.”

Wallace installing her work throughout the city.

Wallace, an East Baltimore native, has made a name for herself internationally by taking photographs that challenge the narrative of what it means to be black. There are depictions of a young father feeding a bottle to his tiny baby and protestors in powerful, open-mouthed stances at a march. It’s large prints of these photos, and others, that Wallace coats with wallpaper glue and affixes to vacant buildings on this spring day, the thud of a staple gun sealing her act of resistance. “I’m not even really supposed to be doing this, but who cares?” she says. “I just want people to embrace the community. And if you feel like you don’t love yourself, or like you hate your skin color, I want you to see my work and know people are standing with you.”

Wallace didn’t think twice about her action. It was innate—in her blood, so to speak. And that makes sense, because as an artist in Baltimore, she is following a lineage of artists who have similarly taken stands against social injustice, poverty, and civil inequalities in a city where these struggles are a part of daily life.

“We’re a highly challenged city,” says Baltimore artist and native Joyce Scott, one of last year’s recipients of a $625,000 MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. “Our situation is just thrown in our face, and it feels like the whole world sees us as downtrodden and violent. And a very human response to this is an artistic one.”

Decades before the deaths of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, and Baltimore’s own Freddie Gray, Scott was referencing lynchings and rapes in her bold, luminous beadwork. You can trace the arc of Baltimore’s socially aware art from artists like Scott to the paintings of Amy Sherald, for example, who depicts her African-American subjects with power and depth, and Stephen Towns, whose work re-constructs the narrative surrounding historical figures such as slave rebellion leader Nat Turner.

“When you look at other cities, you can say ‘Oh, that’s the one artist or the one organization that has activism in their work,’” says George Ciscle, founder of the curatorial practice master’s program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), as well as The Contemporary, Baltimore’s roving modern art museum. “But in Baltimore, so many of us are fighting this way—and it’s not just individual artists, it’s organizations as well. We really stand out in that regard.”

Installation process from The Artists For Truth inaugural benefit exhibition opening.

Nationally, and perhaps internationally, the 2016 presidential election brought artistic resistance to a new level. Artists Ai Weiwei and Kara Walker have consistently commented on political and social issues. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison wrote in response to George W. Bush’s 2004 election, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

If you scroll through the venerable online arts journal Hyperallergic, at least one story a day mentions art as a form of protest or exhibits with social justice-related themes. There are more public examples as well, like the “Fearless Girl” statue that now stares down New York’s Wall Street bull. (Interestingly, Baltimore’s New Arts Foundry had a hand in constructing her.) And when the Trump administration announced the possibility of drastic funding cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts, directors of major museums—the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for example—spoke out in editorials.

The mural I Think That She Knows by Megan Lewis from The Artists For Truth inaugural benefit.

“Months into Donald Trump’s presidency, artists started organizing themselves and using their work as a filter or lens to address issues like immigration, equity, and privilege,” Ciscle says. “It’s not something that’s on the sidelines—it’s coming to the forefront in the national art scene.” He cites the Blue Black exhibit at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, which ruminates on race in a city still grappling with the death of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown. “That might not have come together before 2016,” he says.

Though the national political scene has affected Baltimore, the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 had a larger resonance. Days after violence tore through the city, a mural depicting Gray went up at the West Baltimore spot where he was taken into custody. Artists organized vigils, exhibits, and concerts to give back to the community, but, just like everyone else, they’re still wrestling with its impact. Shows at Galerie Myrtis, MICA, and others tackled the black experience in America, but the response wasn’t limited to visual art. Writers D. Watkins and Kondwani Fidel, among others, have risen to national prominence by telling their own experiences of growing up in Baltimore’s poor, black neighborhoods. And in the classical music world, The Peabody Institute started offering a workshop called Art and Activism (led by Judah Adashi, who is featured on page 120) that allows music students to ponder their roles in a socially aware society.

“Freddie Gray has really made Baltimore look at issues of privilege, prejudice, equity, and talk about them,” Ciscle says. “I saw this with my grad students [at MICA], in regards to what they were talking about prior to Freddie Gray and since then, I’m not going to say it has put the black and white community together, but it has pointed out what the inequities are and said this is our priority as an arts community.” It was not a stretch, then, to imagine that Baltimore artists would respond to white nationalists marching on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. Soon after, a Confederate monument in Bolton Hill was doused with red paint and activists placed Pablo Machioli’s sculpture of an African mother with her fist raised at the Wyman Park site of another such monument.

Though the national political scene has affected Baltimore, the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 had a larger resonance.

Machioli’s work remained as the Confederate monuments, as well as a statue of controversial Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Mt. Vernon Place, were removed within a few days to much fanfare. The Walters Art Museum said in a statement that it was proud to be in a city where “monuments that glorified values we cannot condone have—literally—been taken down from their pedestals.” The Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford—who called the removal “an opportunity to envision the art that best represents the aspirations and values of Baltimore”—is part of a panel that will decide what to do with the statues, and the spots that they leave vacant.

They could take a page from Wallace, whose work gets immediate interest on Park Avenue. A car beeps a series of friendly honks, a woman lingers by a photograph of a boy on a motorbike. “How ya’ll doing?” a passing man asks.

“What’s going on, man?” Wallace answers, signing her photos with a marker.

Then a man in a rumpled red coat with bloodshot eyes walks up the block. “Are these your photos?” he asks Wallace. When she says yes, he smiles and says, “These are very nice.”

After he leaves, Wallace is quiet. “I would rather do this than have an art show,” she says a moment later. “You don’t always have to give back by protesting. People have to be effective any way they can. This is my way.”

Visual Artist, composer, musician

Activist Work: A 2017 Guggenheim fellow and a winner of Baltimore’s Baker Artist Awards, Rucker examines human rights and communities, including the prison-industrial complex and how it relates to slavery. His exhibit Rewind, which addresses cultural and social issues relating to race, class, and power, is currently touring the country.

As told to Gabriella Souza: It was serendipitous because when my exhibit Rewind opened at the Creative Alliance in 2015, it was the same month that [the D. W. Griffith movie] The Birth of a Nation opened 100 years before, and that had set off a wave of white protectionism and fear in America. One of the reasons why my work is around this aspect of history is that history is repeating itself over and over again. My point was that hate groups still exist and they’re relevant and they’ve changed form. Several of the Ku Klux Klan robes I made for my show are camouflage, and I wanted to show that racism can have a stealth form, it have can have a protectionist or nationalist bent. But the thing is, you can’t always prove that it is what it is, you can’t always prove that you’re being treated differently, although you saw the person in front of you get called ‘sir’ and you aren’t getting called ‘sir’. It’s maddening, but the thing that I’ve realized is that people don’t realize what they’re doing. Even well-intended progressives, who think they’re being fair, are not acknowledging their surroundings. I love that there are a lot of white people who are putting out Black Lives Matter signs, but black neighbors matter—look at your neighborhood. Black jobs matter—look at your workplace. Who’s around you, who’s not around you? You’re in a city, Baltimore, that’s 64 percent black.

Paul Rucker’s Proliferation.

“My point was that hate groups still exist and they’re relevant and they’ve changed form.”

After the [2016 presidential] election, I realized that I didn’t need to take my show to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago—this show needed to be seen in smaller places. It’s going to Ferguson, then to York, Pennsylvania, then the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Ferguson couldn’t pay for it, so I sold a piece of mine to the University of Maryland, College Park, to fund my airfare and the airfare of the photographer documenting the show, as well as the cost of shipping, building, and presenting the show. I don’t sell a work to sell a work. Anything that I sell dealing with people’s deaths, I put the money back into a show or give it to another institution.

Being in Baltimore, it’s really important that we know more about slavery since this was a major slave port. We need to emphasize that slaves were not just big black men. They were pregnant women working in the fields, they were children, as soon as they could walk, who were made to shoo birds away from the field or participate in manual labor. This is important to me, but it should be important to America and American history as far as how we got here today, and who benefitted from these atrocities, and who’s benefitting now. We have to think about why we have what we have in place and how we got here—and if we don’t, it’s not going to be pretty. We’re wrestling with the soul of our city, and this city and this country are suffering.

Photographer, multimedia artist, and educator

Activist Work: Garcia’s 2015 exhibit Después de la Frontera (After the Border) at the Creative Alliance told the stories of undocumented youth and families who had fled their homes in Central America to come to Baltimore. Her work “Counterpunch” documents the fighting spirit of three Latina women who work at the facilities management department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the editor and co-founder of Hyrsteria, a zine that highlights the social disparities that challenge our day-to-day lives.

As told to Gabriella Souza: The work I make is reflective of the communities I’m surrounded by or what they’re concerned about. Especially because I am Latina, immigration is something I’ve worked on for a couple of years, and is something that I care about. It’s even more intense since the presidential election, with deportations and raids, plus just the culture shock of being an immigrant—trying to find work, deal with the language barrier. I work a lot with narrative. Stories are something really innate to people. They’re from our ancestors, something we’re familiar with from our ancestors, and I think that stories are really powerful ways of teaching people. When someone tells you a story from beginning to end, your brain is imagining yourself in that story. That can create empathy to a certain degree. I make the work that I do using stories because it’s a powerful medium of teaching people. The work that I do, regardless of what it is, is about stories and sharing.

Tanya Garcia photography from #ShutItDown.

“oftentimes, we’re silenced for whatever differences we have, whether we’re a woman, a woman of color, an LGBTQ woman of color.”

I did a video in my exhibit Después de la Frontera of a woman from El Salvador telling her story of coming to the U.S. where I only showed her eyes. There are a few reasons why I did that. One is to keep some anonymity about who she is because she is undocumented. But her eyes really told a story, too—everyone’s do. The expressions you make, and your gestures, show in your eyes. I wanted the viewer to be confronted with her story and not look away. It’s simple in that there’s nothing else going on visually, it’s just her eyes, her oral history essentially, so you’re really focused on her and her story.

Storytelling like this is needed because, oftentimes, we’re silenced for whatever differences we have, whether we’re a woman, a woman of color, an LGBTQ woman of color. It’s combating this narrative that we aren’t important and we’re not human. The more you strip people away from their identity, their stories, their histories, their citizenship, their rights, the easier you can demonize them, call them a menace, say you should be scared of them. You’re feeding off people’s fear, and fear is really strong. Our government has done a really good job of connecting fear and safety to race, and it’s really important to contradict that narrative through personal stories of people who are responding to what they’re living through every day. Once that’s lost, it’s easy to just cast them off, ship them off as if they don’t exist, they don’t have relatives and families, they don’t have lives.

Performers during the Rise Bmore concert.

Composer, professor at the Peabody Institute

Activist Work: Adashi is the founder and director of Rise Bmore, a multifaceted concert held each year on the anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death, and the founder and artistic director of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series. His choral work “Rise” traces America’s civil rights struggles from Selma to Ferguson and beyond.

As told to Gabriella Souza: I think a lot about my own upbringing and how it relates to the things that I do now. My mom is from Romania and my dad is from Israel. I was a sheltered only child, who was taught to do well, taught to not rock the boat. I’ve definitely become more attuned to the fact that I’m first-generation American. I used to not care about it at all, because when you’re a kid, all you want is to be like everyone else, and your immigrant parents are just a hindrance to that. Then you learn how meaningful it is to be other. One of the things I’ve noticed is that what a white person goes through is relatively easy. But people want to decry calling out racism more than they want to decry racism. Apparently the word “racism” is nastier to people than the thing itself. Just like there are people for whom the Baltimore Uprising in 2015 will forever be violent when I always hold fast to the idea that the single most violent act of the Uprising was the murder of Freddie Gray.

“Music is a good figurative space in which to engage with these things. ”

That, to me, is what most of my music is about. Music is a good figurative space in which to engage with these things. There are many schools of thought about what it means to write activist music. A composer friend of mine [David T. Little] makes a distinction between revolutionary music and critical music. Revolutionary music is essentially propaganda; critical music is a sense of bearing witness to things so that they’re not forgotten, so that they don’t become casualties of cultural amnesia—you are not offering the truth or the conclusion. I think Freddie Gray is a pretty distant memory for some people, and that’s unbelievable. I do think that’s not as common with cultural traumas that affect white people equally, like 9/11. He had no intention of being the symbol that he has become, and he deserves to be alive. But he did touch something in a lot of people here, and that’s powerful. That’s what I see in Baltimore. So much art seems to come from that place—that deep love of this city, and a pretty clear-eyed awareness that we are one of the ground zeros for what it looks like when a city was conceived as hyper-segregated and people here still live that truth in many ways. Art can connect artists across different genres, races, ages, genders, and identities of all kinds, and it also invites people into what that creates. I think it has potential to heal, to transform, to make people sit with discomfort. That’s what I’m trying to do with Rise Bmore, to form community around this remembrance.

Poet, organizer

Activist Work: Agostini is a founding member of the Rooted Collective, which is a gathering of black LGBTQ people in Baltimore that creates events featuring music, art, and conversation centered around healing. She is a part of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, a group of poets that just published its first book, Not Without Our Laughter. She serves as the chief operating officer of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, which works to support survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault and transform cultural attitudes to prevent rape and abuse.

As told to Gabriella Souza: At a very young age, I survived sexual abuse. I didn’t have the words for it, I didn’t know how to name it. I grew up in a family where you trusted adults, you trusted the people around you, and when I started telling people, it was hard for them to comprehend what to say to me or what to do. I just thought, ‘okay, this is my fault, this is something that is my burden, I failed the people around me.’ I took that with me, I carried that as my shame for a very long time. When I was about six, my grandmother taught me how to write, and that was the first place where I could go to where no one was telling me what I could and could not say. I couldn’t talk about being sexually abused, I couldn’t talk about the violence I was seeing in my home, I couldn’t talk about the pain I was feeling in my body, but I could write these poems. I don’t think I could articulate it at that time, but that became a point of resistance.

Saida Agostini shares her piece, Bresha Meadows Speaks On Divinity.

“it’s not just about what it is that we’re fighting against, but it’s actually about what we’re fighting for.”

I really carried that with me, and I was really fortunate that I had this beautiful collective of black writers who saw my work and said this is what you need to be doing. I think what we often forget about resistance work is that it’s not just about what it is that we’re fighting against, but it’s actually about what we’re fighting for. The most radical art helps us think about different ways to think, different ways to feel, and the world that we want. For me, I want a world that is safe, and a world where I don’t have to say black lives matter, where I don’t have to say that my life as a black queer woman or the lives of black trans women matter, because it’s just as accepted and as natural as breathing.

Everybody has their own path around artistry and resistance, and for me, storytelling and talking about my own experience and what has happened within my body has become so important for me. We’re taught that there’s this ethic of responsibility politics and if you’re black you have to present this perfect image. I did all of the right things, went to the right universities, got the right grades, and I wasn’t happy. I even tried not to be a poet for a really long time because I felt like I didn’t fit into the box of what my parents and my family would want. And I kind of kept going back to the thing where what makes me most joyful, and when I’ve seen my family and my people be most joyful, is when we’re sharing these stories. So that means that truth-telling is the best thing that I can do, when I’m standing in witness of what I know.

Members: Melissa Webb (MW), Amy Eva Raehse (AER), Maggie Villegas [MV], Ryan Hoover [RH], Rob Ferrell, Lillian Hoover, Bart O’Reilly, Emily Jane Soontornsaratool

Activist Work: This collective of artists, professors, and curators organized its first benefit exhibition in June, showing more than 250 artworks by 150 local and national artists. Through the sale of those artworks, it raised $16,000 for The Center for Media Justice, the Baltimore Action Legal Team, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and The News Literacy Project.

As told to Gabriella Souza: MW: Soon after the 2016 presidential election, Lillian [Hoover] posted an inquiry on social media asking if anyone wanted to put on a benefit exhibition. There was just this feeling of helplessness, that things had spiraled out of our control. All who responded were looking for a way to contribute—to utilize our skills as artists and organizers to unify the community around collective concerns, and to find a way to raise money to aid organizations that have long been focused on issues we care deeply about. After much discussion surrounding civil rights, police brutality, and climate change, among others, we moved toward the issue of truth, and the consistent lack thereof. The deliberate misinformation and manipulation of facts in media and political discourse encapsulated so many of the concerns we had. It turned out to be timely, right before “fake news” became the news.

AER: The chaos leading up to—and the repercussion of—the election was sobering, just as the proliferation of fabricated information was overwhelming. The safety of our citizens felt tenuous. We were still trying to rise up, as a unified city, from the impact and implication of Freddie Gray’s death, and we suddenly had an unstable man—who openly expressed hateful, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-culture views—leading our country. Baltimore needed a counterpoint to the anger—something restorative while remaining an act of resistance. We wanted to do something to send a message, and we wanted to help artists find their voices because artistic voice has been a potent looking glass and change maker throughout history.

The Artists For Truth inaugural benefit exhibition opening.

MV: There’s a sense of social responsibility here in amplifying the work of other activists, in educating, that I just hadn’t seen before moving to Baltimore. It’s central to how artists think here. People here don’t wait for the city or institutions to solve problems for them. They are focused on figuring out what they can do themselves. I think they recognize that it’s the best way to get shit done. And that might be frustrating, but it’s also empowering.

RH: Some artists in Baltimore address political issues as the subject of their work, some engage in political action through their work, and other artists are politically active outside of their art practice. I think this ethos comes from the city in general. We have problems, but they often bring people together to work on solutions and make a real difference. There is a lot of work to do in this regard, but there is a tremendous amount of value in bringing people together to share knowledge, perspectives, and resources. I value not just the activist spirit of the arts community, but the way the activist community welcomes and incorporates the arts into their practices. I hope these lines continue to blur even further as more relationships are built.

“We wanted to do something to send a message.”

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Our Picks for the Best Fall Arts Events

Lauren Cohen — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 08:00:00 +0000

The fall marks the beginning of the artistic year. As a result, the creative calendar is literally bursting with concerts, exhibits, and theatrical events. These are a few of our favorites.

Iron Crow Theatre presents The Cradle Will Rock
TO OCT. 8: Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 play is so unabashedly anti-capitalist that it was the first musical ever shut down by the U.S. government. The Cradle Will Rock attacks wealth and the political power it unjustly wields, and pays homage to those fighting to survive. Best of Baltimore-winning Iron Crow gives this historic work a highly stylized, modern restaging that sounds like a perfect fit for these turbulent political times. Baltimore Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. 410-539-3091

The Christians
TO OCT. 8: This play ponders the age-old question: What happens when we lose faith in our leaders? It turns the lens specifically on the American megachurch, examining what results when people of the same religion hold different beliefs and begin questioning the infallibility of pastors. As an added bonus, this production features multiple choirs from area churches to get you into that old-time religion spirit. Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St. 410-332-0033

Altered Realities
TO NOV. 4: Sometimes all you need is a little shift in perspective. This exhibition aims to provide just that, using works from a variety of mediums—from painting to virtual reality—to focus on uncanny interpretations of everyday experiences. This show includes many exceptional Baltimore-area talents, such as photographer and videographer Johnathan Baker, Best of Baltimore winner Phaan Howng, and Scott Cawood, who uses scrap steel to examine transformation. Maryland Art Place, 218 W. Saratoga St. 410-962-8565.

Arts of Asia
OCT. 1: The Walters’ Asian Art collection has been under lock and key for years, awaiting a splendid restoration. Now, the collection, which highlights the artistic traditions of countries that span the world’s largest continent, from India to Japan, and is considered one of the most exceptional in North America, has been brought back to life. Marvel at these antiquities in their beautiful new home, especially the John and Berthe Ford Gallery, which features the art of India, Nepal, and Tibet. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. 410-547-9000

Helen Glazer: Antarctica Project
Oct. 18-Dec. 8: Art and environmental activism are a perfect pairing. Once you’ve viewed stunning works depicting the beauty of our world, how can you deny that it should be saved? Artist Helen Glazer is inspired by the complex physical forces that shape the natural world, and uses rarely visited places—in this case, Antarctica—as her subject matter. This exhibit centers on photographs she made in 2015, when she was a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program—the only person from Baltimore ever to have won this competition. There, she was given access to protected areas where she photographed ice formations and geological structures at remote locations and scientific field camps. Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd., Towson. 410-337-6477.

Baltimore Voices at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Nov.1-3: Yes, this fusion of music and spoken word is technically geared toward high school students, and yes, it’s in the morning during the middle of the week—but it’s too good of a concept for us not to recommend. Baltimore Voices focuses on the people who live in Baltimore, including city school students, who were interviewed by the co-founders of WYPR’s documentary series Out of the Blocks. Add in beatboxer Shodekeh as emcee, remix samples from the beat wizards at the Baltimore Boom Bap Society, and the BSO playing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, and you’ll have quite an interesting morning. Nov.1-3. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. 410-783-8000.

Necessity of Tomorrow(s)—Mark Bradford: Making a Path
NOV. 11: This fall, The Baltimore Museum of Art will hold three events that invite nationally and internationally recognized artists and thinkers to consider key ideas at the intersection of aesthetics, race, and social justice. (The series borrows its title from an essay by science-fiction author Samuel Delaney that argues for the role of creative speculation in making a more just future.) The first of these gatherings features Mark Bradford, whose work is showcased at the BMA-organized U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He will join BMA director Christopher Bedford to discuss his artistic practice and community-based work, followed by a conversation around issues of access, plus a live musical performance. Union Baptist Church, 1201 Druid Hill Ave. 410-523-6880.

André Watts plays Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor
NOV. 17, 19: Peabody Institute alum André Watts (who shot to fame when Leonard Bernstein chose him to make his debut with the New York Philharmonic) returns to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to play the explosive, grandiose piano work that is known as the most popular of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos. Also on the program, Christopher Theofanidis, one of the most performed living composers, honors fellow composer Stephen Paulus in a new work. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. 410-783-8000

The Revolutionists
DEC. 6–JAN. 7, 2018: Playwright Lauren Gunderson took a page from A Tale of Two Cities and set her new play during the French Revolution. But, unlike Dickens, she has focused solely on the women——and has given her work a comedic touch. In this play, which is making its East Coast debut, former queen Marie Antoinette, assassin Charlotte Corday, playwright Olympe de Gouges, and Caribbean spy Marianne Angelle find themselves alone together in a room. France’s fight for equality and freedom finds modern parallels in this play, which explores feminism, legacy and standing up for one’s beliefs. Everyman Theatre, 315 Fayette St. 410-752-2208

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Falls Arts Events Listings

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 08:30:00 +0000

The best arts and culture events going on this fall. To read more about the local arts scene—and the 100th anniversary of The Baltimore Museum of Art—pick up a copy of the October issue, on newsstands now.

Through October 12
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This is the first production in the company’s newly unveiled downtown venue! Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, 410-244-8570, chesapeakeshakespeare.com.

Through November 15
Emergence 2014: International Artists to Watch
Featuring artwork and short films, this show includes work by dozens of artists around the world. Galerie Myrtis, 410-235-3711, galeriemyrtis.net.

October 1
Found Footage Festival
The 10th anniversary edition of the popular fest showcases strange and hilarious videos found online and on dusty VHS tapes. Creative Alliance at The Patterson, 410-276-1651, creativealliance.org.

October 1-31
Free Fall Baltimore
Check out hundreds of free arts events around Baltimore during the month of October. 410-752-8632, freefallbaltimore.org.

October 1-November 22
Markus Baldegger: Recent Paintings
The Swiss-born artist shows his latest work at the gallery that also reps the likes of Ben Marcin and John Waters. C. Grimaldis Gallery, 410-539-1080, cgrimaldisgallery.com.

October 4
Chessie Jam
A music fest for kids, this afternoon show features Biz Markie of Yo Gabba Gabba, Justin Roberts, Recess Monkey, and Baltimore’s own Milkshake. Pier Six Pavilion, 410-783-4189, chessiejam.com.

October 4-August 30, 2015
The Visionary Experience: Saint Francis to Finster
AVAM’s new mega-show takes a spirited look at a wide range of visionary thinkers and artists. American Visionary Art Museum,
410-244-1900, avam.org.

October 8
Mikita Brottman Launch Party
The MICA professor celebrates the publication of The Great Grisby, a lively examination of our relationship with dogs. The Ivy Bookshop, 410-377-2966, theivybookshop.com.

October 8
Chuck D
The hip-hop icon discusses race, rage, and inequality as part of Towson University’s Diversity Speaker Series. West Village Commons, 410-704-2051, events.towson.edu.

October 8-November 16
Next to Normal
The Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a family struggling with mental illness is a groundbreaking piece of musical theater. Center Stage, 410-332-0033, centerstage.org.

October 11-12
Open Studio Tour
Artists city-wide, including Seth Adelsberger (our 2014 pick for “Best Painter”), open their studios for visits and discussions about their work. Various locations, 443-263-4350, school33.org.

October 17
An Evening with Howard Alden & Jeanne Gies w/ Bucky Pizzarelli
Pizzarelli, a legendary player, joins the duo for an evening of virtuosic guitar and classic jazz vocals. Cabaret at Germano’s, 410-752-4545, germanospiattini.com.

October 25
The Classical Masters
Tom Hall and Baltimore Choral Arts Society perform a program of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart classics. Goucher College Kraushaar Auditorium, 410-523-7070, baltimorechoralarts.org.

October 26-April 17, 2016
From Rye to Raphael: The Walters Story
The museum unveils a reinstallation of its permanent collection and explores the legacy of its founders. The Walters Art Museum, 410-547-9000, thewalters.org.

November 13
Aretha Franklin
The Queen of Soul makes a very rare Baltimore appearance. Don’t miss it. Patricia & Arthur Modell Performing Arts Center at The Lyric, 410-900-1150, modellpac.com.

December 2-7
Newsies
The 2012 Tony-winning musical (“Best Score” and “Best Choreography”) makes its Baltimore debut. Hippodrome Theatre at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, 800-982-2787, baltimore.broadway.com.

December 4
The Black Keys with St. Vincent
An excellent double bill of the Keys’ straight-ahead, blues-drenched rock and Annie Clark’s thorny, complex tunes. Royal Farms Arena, 800-745-3000, baltimorearena.com.

December 10-January 11, 2015
Deathtrap
This witty thriller stars Bruce Nelson and is directed by Everyman founder Vincent Lancisi. Everyman Theatre, 410-752-2208, everymantheatre.org.

January 23-25, 2015
Jason Alexander
Alexander—you know him as Seinfeld’s George Costanza, but he’s also a Tony-winning performer—appears with the BSO SuperPops. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 410-783-8000, bsomusic.org.

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Art All Around

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0000

When we asked a group of art aficionados to identify must-see works
of art, we expected to hear about pieces in The BMA, The Walters, and
other museums and galleries around town. We got that, and a lot more.
Our respondents cited deserving masterpieces from Baltimore’s bastions
of high art, and they also made less obvious choices. You might expect
the Cone Collection would get mentioned—which it did—but a stretch of
Loch Raven Boulevard, or a SoWeBo barbershop? They made the cut, too,
and such inclusions suggest that the definition of art is increasingly
elastic. And why shouldn’t it be? A great city exhibits creative touches
and flourishes in unlikely and out-of-the-way spots, beyond its
established venues. Its creativity gets integrated into everyday life
all around us. You should see it.

Must-see art according to: Leslie King-Hammond

Director, Center for Race and Culture, Maryland Institute College of Art

Loring Cornish
Praise Houses
2700 Parkwood Avenue
This is
a must see for believers and non-believers. Loring Cornish is the
Master of Awe in his use of all things humble, ordinary, and mundane.
His artistry, technical facility, and awesome imagination help Baltimore
to understand the power of the extraordinary.

New Beginnings Barber Shop
Hollins and S. Arlington Streets

This is a most wonderful family experience in SoWeBo. The traditional
salon/barber shop concept has been transformed into an upscale
experience for having your body, mind, and spirit renewed. Troy Staton,
master barber and art collector, fills his space with exceptional works
of art, workshops for children, lectures, and exhibitions for local and
international artists.

Painted Screens of East Baltimore
Various locations in Canton, Fells Point, Little Italy, and Highlandtown
This is an opportunity to wander through East Baltimore and discover
the magicalpainted screens on Baltimore’s row houses. This is a
phenomenon unlike any other city in the United States and not to be
missed.

Must-see art according to: Maurice Berger

Research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Qing Dynasty Monochrome Ceramics
Hackerman House, The Walters Art Museum
Dozens of Qing Dynasty monochrome ceramics are situated on rows of
towering shelves in the ornate and painstakingly restored rooms of the
Hackerman House. Potted in China from the 17th through 19th centuries,
these vases, bowls, dishes, and scholar’s objects pay homage to the
austere, unadorned ceramics of the Song Dynasty, created more than 300
years earlier. In their simple, abstract form and brightly colored
glazes, they challenge you to rethink the origins and geography of
modernism.

Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture
830 E. Pratt Street
One of the city’s most compelling cultural experiences is contained not
within a work of art, per se, but an institution: the Reginald F. Lewis
Museum of African American History & Culture. What makes the museum
so engaging is its broad mandate, one that rigorously expands the
meaning of important visual culture to include artifacts as diverse as
paintings, sculptures, photos, posters, toys, magazines, books, and
films. The richness of the museum’s holdings and broad array of
temporary exhibitions—recent shows have explored the work of
contemporary black women artists, the life of baseball player Roberto
Clemente, and the significance of Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park for
generations of African Americans—make it a wonderful place for families
and young people.

Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park
UMBC campus
This is one of
Baltimore’s most contemplative and tranquil art experiences. Organized
by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in 2000 and inspired by
Beuys, a renowned German conceptual artist who died in 1986, the public
park features a bucolic arrangement of 30 trees and boulders. The
installation, one of this city’s rare examples of large-scale “land
art,” is at once beautiful and thought provoking, a celebration of the
power of nature—and art—to inspire and heal, no less in the midst of a
bustling urban campus.

Must-see art according to: Jay Fisher

Deputy director for curatorial affairs and senior curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, The Baltimore Museum of Art

Hugo van der Goes
“Portrait of a Man at Prayer with Saint John the Baptist”
The Walters Art Museum
Hugo van der Goes is one of the first 15th-century Netherlandish
artists I ever learned about. When I saw his work, I was amazed by the
eloquent realism applied to his sensitive reading of the faces of people
in his religious scenes. It is rare to see his work in the United
States, and when I came to Baltimore to work at The BMA, I couldn’t
believe we had a wonderful example of his painting right here in the
city. There are so many little treasures in The Walters, but this is my
favorite.

Charles Willson Peale
“The Exhumation of the Mastodon”
Maryland Historical Society
“The Exhumation of the Mastodon” is such an important part of Baltimore
history. Peale was a great artist and the Peales established some of
the first art and archaeology museums in the U.S.—here in Baltimore and
in Philadelphia. I believe Peale exhibited the exhumed Mastodon skeleton
in his first museum in Philadelphia, but the Baltimore museum got
something that proved more lasting than the skeleton—Peale’s artistic
vision of the discovery and exhumation of this amazing creature. It
continues to enthrall museum visitors today. [This piece was also cited
by Doreen Bolger.]

Sir Anthony van Dyck
“Rinaldo and Armida”
The Baltimore Museum of Art
“Rinaldo and Armida” probably has more international renown than any
other painting at The BMA, maybe in Baltimore. It is one of the greatest
artworks ever made by this splendid painter. It is just a joy to look
at, full of movement, ravishing color . . . it looks like it belongs in a
palace, and, in fact, it used to belong to England’s King Charles—until
an enterprising Baltimore merchant felt strongly that the city would
benefit from having it here. It is the history and continuance of this
kind of cultural generosity that makes Baltimore a remarkable place to
live. [This piece was also cited by Joseph Sheppard.]

Must-see art according to: Gary Vikan

Director, The Walters Art Museum

Paul Gauguin
Woman of the Mango
The Baltimore Museum of Art
I hear music when I look at Paul Gauguin’s Woman of the Mango, painted
in 1892 while Gauguin was in Tahiti. (That’s his wife.) Paul Cézanne’s
Mont Sante-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (also at The BMA and
also part of the famous Cone Collection) is magnificent as well, but
Gauguin’s work has a rare combination of startlingly powerful color and
profound mystery that adds up to very rare aesthetic poetry.

MICA’s Brown Center
1301 W. Mt. Royal Avenue
Named for
Baltimore philanthropists C. Sylvia and Eddie C. Brown, this
spectacularly translucent polyhedron was designed by Charles Brickbauer
with Ziger/Snead Architects. View it, if you can, from an elevated point
to the west, because this perspective offers a wonderful contrast
between the Brown Center and the elegant Renaissance revival Main
Building of MICA, from 1908, just across the street. Together, these two
buildings prove that great architecture is part of Baltimore’s present,
as well as its past.

“Rubens Vase”
The Walters Art Museum
There is not another work
to match it in any museum in the world. An astounding technical
achievement in carved agate, the “Rubens Vase,” from 4th-century
Constantinople, has a fantastic history of “close calls.” It was stolen
from the Imperial Palace of Constantinople by marauding Crusaders in
1204, then passed from one French royal collection to another, until
1592 when it was stolen again, from the royal château at Fontainebleau
by rioting Huguenots. This extraordinary (and very fragile) vase next
turned up in 1619 at a flea market in Paris, where the great Flemish
artist Peter Paul Rubens bought it for 20,000 gold florins. Rubens tried
to sell his vase to the Grand Mogul of India a few years later, but it
was lost in transit in a shipwreck off the coast of Australia. To hear
the end of this incredible story, stop by The Walters and check out our
audio tour.

Must-see art according to: Rebecca Hoffberger

Founder/director, American Visionary Art Museum

Tom Miller
“Children and Elders” mural
North Avenue and Harford Road
That piece just pops out at that intersection and really captures the
spirit and vitality of city life. I love the fact that you see the full
figures of the children, but you only see the adults from the knees
down.

Bob Hieronimus
“E Pluribus Unum” mural
Lexington Market

It’s his masterwork and includes all the symbolism that’s inspired him
for so long—from the founding fathers to Baltimore iconography.

Macht Building
11-13 E. Fayette Street
It’s one zaftig,
voluptuous building. That façade is one of the most amazing pieces of
architecture in Baltimore, and the female figures, done in marble, are
fantastic. The building is glorioso to women in the highest.

Must-see art according to: Joyce Scott

Artist

Druid Park Lake Drive
Starting at Madison Avenue and traveling toward 83
The park, the reservoir, the grand apartment buildings, and the distant urban forest are just like a mid-19th-century painting.

The Scene Outside My Front Door
Penn North neighborhood
I
lived in a challenged neighborhood, between Bolton and Reservoir Hills.
The braggadocio, this outside defense against life’s boredom and
oppression, is a passion play; the inhabitants are mobile dancers from
Lautrec; the drug dealers refer to Greco-Roman sculpture; and the
brightly colored babies and bling are über Pop art. This is super
surreality.

Elizabeth Caldwell Talford Scott
”Joyce’s Quilt”
Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture
My
mother died this year, and her image and quilt at the Reginald F. Lewis
Museum reminds me how the truth of art is from the soul.

Must-see art according to: Gary Kachadourian

Artist, winner of 2011 Baker Artist Award, former visual arts coordinator for Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts

Loch Raven Boulevard Linear Park
Loch Raven Boulevard between The Alameda and Hillen Road
Loch Raven Boulevard is part of what I understand to be an early
20th-century Olmsted Brothers plan for linear greenways connecting
Baltimore’s major parks. These also include Mt. Royal Avenue, 33rd
Street, Broadway, and a number of other streets. What makes this site
most compelling is how this idyllic construct interfaces with
contemporary life. The street has become purely a commuter road and the
greenway ends up seeming like any generic roadway divider (median strip)
while its rolling hills obstruct drivers’ views of buses making the
right-hand lane almost useless for cars. I especially love that it’s
always dotted with groupings of filled plastic lawn bags (community
efforts to groom the space?). This boulevard, along with the others from
this series of greenways, is part of one of the most conceptually
beautiful and ambitious hidden-in-plain-sight ideas enacted in
Baltimore.

“JOCE” graffiti mural
Seen from westbound I-95 as it passes over Monroe Street
I’ve always been a fan of the particular genre of graffiti that is
produced using house paint and rollers, and this is my favorite work
that is currently visible. It’s solitarily placed on the lower lefthand
corner of a large wall of an industrial building and is done in pink
block letters with brown outlines on a cream-colored wall, a formally
beautiful work with a Neapolitan ice-cream subtext.

“Wack-A-Moles” on former Current Gallery
30 S. Calvert Street
Current Gallery had to vacate its first space in 2009 when it was going
to be torn down for redevelopment of the block. For the final
exhibition at the space, Andrew Liang, one of the gallery’s
co-directors, painted the front and side of the building with
Wack-A-Moles, targets for the operator of the imminent wrecking ball.
Two years later the Wack-A-Moles are still waiting, an indicator that
time in the world of real-estate redevelopment follows a very different
metronomic path than the time most of us are used to. It should be noted
that the city gave this building—and now has given another building on
Howard Street—to Current rent-free, so this is a case of where urban
redevelopment’s slow movement has done great things for the arts.

Must-see art according to: Gerald Ross

Director of exhibitions, Maryland Institute College of Art

Wayne Kusy
“Lusitania”
American Visionary Art Museum
One
of America’s national treasures is the American Visionary Art Museum. In
it, is a “must-see” for anyone: the 16-foot-long replica of the
steamliner Lusitania built entirely out of toothpicks by artist Wayne
Kusy. Completed in 1994 and displayed in two halves (to get it out of
his apartment), Kusy took about two-and-a-half years to finish it,
working between two and three hours a night. The ship is complete with
portholes, smokestacks, stairs, and an elaborate inner structure—built
“anatomically” correct. It is an incredible monument to artistic as well
as historic perseverance, memory, and achievement.

Chamber of Wonders
The Walters Art Museum
The Walters Art
Museum (known to some, locally, as the “Mini Met”), is a great treasure
unto itself but within it, The Chamber of Wonders—a recreation of what a
southern Netherland nobleman might have assembled in the 17th
century—is another “essential” experience. Passing through a hall of
ancient armor, one enters an amazing space filled floor to ceiling with
extraordinary works of art, decorative objects, and furniture and
natural curiosities: collected butterflies, skulls, sea creatures, and
taxidermied animals (including an alligator!). This is truly a wonderful
and playful area to contemplate our world and the opportunities we have
to creatively interact with it.

Jonathan Borofsky
”Male/Female”
Penn Station
Jonathan
Borofsky is one of my favorite artists of the last 40-odd years. His
deliberate path is to create works and objects that attempt to examine
and portray the human condition and point to inner enlightenment and
positive change. His piece, “Male/Female,” installed in front of Penn
Station in 2004 has been called about every nasty thing in the book,
including “just plain ugly.” Sentimentality for its message aside, I
happen to see it as a true piece of “outsider art.” For me, it works on
many artistic levels but, ultimately, the piece’s distinctly alien
presence amid the history and depth surrounding it adds another layer to
the Baltimore that I love the best: the Baltimore that doesn’t quite
“fit in.”

Must-see art according to: Joseph Sheppard

Artist

Sir Anthony van Dyck
“Rinaldo and Armida”
The Baltimore Museum of Art
It made front-page headlines in The New York Times when it was
purchased. It is one of the world’s great paintings, certainly Van
Dyck’s most important work. It was painted to show off his skills in
landscape, still life, portrait, and figure painting to secure the
position of court painter in England. Few people are aware of it being
in the collection at The Baltimore Museum of Art.

Antoine-Louis Barye Collection
The Walters Art Museum
The
collection of Antoine Barye, the teacher of Rodin, is probably the most
extensive and best collection in the world of the foremost sculpture of
animalier in the 19th century.

Cone Collection
The Baltimore Museum of Art
The Claribel and
Etta Cone collection of early 20th-century avant-garde artists is the
most famous collection in Baltimore and includes Matisse, Picasso, Van
Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne.

Must-see art according to: Doreen Bolger

Director, The Baltimore Museum of Art

Gaia, “Raven”
Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum
Gaia’s “Raven”
can be seen at the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum—or at other
locations around town where this fabled street artist has wheat-pasted
it to crumbling brick walls or fading billboards. This jaunty image was
inspired by Poe’s tragic poem about love lost. The story of its creation
is about the power of art to transform the urban environment: The
artist has donated 100 of his prints to be sold for the benefit of the
Poe House, which has lost its city funding. Get one while they last (I
did)!

Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin
“The Game of Knucklebones”
The Baltimore Museum of Art
Chardin’s “The Game of Knucklebones,” on view in The BMA’s Jacobs Wing,
is an artwork I visit when I need to smile. A beautiful young woman is
playing knucklebones, sort of like jacks but with sheep bones, and she’s
just tossed a ball that’s suspended in the air. Dressed informally, she
looks as if she could be a scullery maid, but she’s probably an
upper-class woman. It’s obvious that she should be sewing (her needle is
stuck in her apron) and instead she’s fooling around. We all need an
artwork that reminds us to put aside work for a moment of fun or
pleasure!

Charles Willson Peale
”The Exhumation of the Mastodon”
Maryland Historical Society
The
Exhumation of the Mastodon was my favorite Baltimore work of art long
before I moved here. I first met this fascinating painting in a Peale
show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was featured in a 1983
exhibition that I worked on as a young curator. Peale, like his
contemporary Benjamin Franklin, epitomized the Age of Enlightenment. He
was a learned scientist, an inventor, a brilliant artist, and a showman.
Here, we see him holding a careful, accurate drawing of a bone from a
prehistoric creature later exhibited in his museum. Looking back from
2011, the breadth of Peale’s achievements set the tone for this city as a
center for art, science, and innovation.

Must-see art according to: Noah Charney

Bestselling author and art historian

Albrecht Dürer
“Melencolia I”
The Baltimore Museum of Art
Albrecht Dürer’s mysterious print, one of the greatest prints ever
made, is an unsolved mystery. No one knows its meaning, or what it
represents beyond an allegory of melancholy, featuring a brooding angel
surrounded by occult implements. Over the angel’s shoulder we can see a
“magic square,” a mathematical curiosity wherein the sum of any group of
four adjacent numbers is the same, in this case 34. Dürer chose this
version of the four-by-four magic square because at the bottom center
are the numbers 15 and 14: 1514 is the year he created the print.

Anonymous
16th-century copy of “Mona Lisa”
The Walters Art Museum
Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” needs no introduction, but few know that there
are many excellent contemporary copies of Leonardo’s painting, some of
which may actually have been painted by Leonardo. It was not unusual for
Renaissance artists to make multiple copies of particularly renowned
works. The Walters has a fine copy of the “Mona Lisa.” A similar copy,
which hangs at the Louvre Museum outside the director’s office, was
boxed up during the Second World War, labeled as the original, and
shipped all over France, leading the Nazis on a wild goose chase. The
Nazis thought they had stolen the original “Mona Lisa” when, in fact,
they had been chasing after this copy, while the original never left
Paris.

Jusepe de Ribera
“Saint Paul the Hermit”
The Walters Art Museum
Ribera is a candidate for the greatest artist whom no one has heard of.
Aside from art historians specializing in 17th-century Baroque
painting, the great Spanish painter Ribera has slipped beneath the
radar. He was the best among the Caravaggisti, artists emulating the
revolutionary drama, chiaroscuro, and realism of Caravaggio. But while
others imitated Caravaggio, Ribera took his style and made of it
something new and wonderful. Noboby, not even Caravaggio, paints the
aged male form better than Ribera.

Must-see art according to: Raoul Middleman

Artist

Rembrandt
“Portrait of Titus”
The Baltimore Museum of Art
In this painting, Titus has two thumbs on the hand propping up his
chin, denoting his restless shifts during the pose. The painting is all
about father-son relationships.

Paolo Veronese
“Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene and her Daughter Porzia”
The Walters Art Museum
In the Walters, there is a spectacular painting of a mother-daughter
combo by Veronese that complements the Rembrandt with a Venitian versus a
Dutch perspective.

El Greco
”Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata”
The Walters Art Museum
Also
in the Walters is a singular El Greco; a Saint rendered with almost
total monochromatic grays, but it has the sensation of full color.

Must-see art according to: John Waters

Artist, Writer, Filmmaker

Andy Warhol
”The Last Supper”
The Baltimore Museum of Art
Whenever
I am feeling really good about living in Baltimore I go by The BMA and
hope to see that amazing puke-green “Last Supper” by Warhol. Then,
feeling even better, I head toward the Visionary Art Museum and pay a
visit to Andrew Logan’s giant Divine statue and hope one day this will
be done in bronze and placed right next to Frank Zappa’s in
Highlandtown. Or better yet, out front of the train station—even though
“Male/Female” by Jonathan Borofsky is perfectly fine there.

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