BmoreArt’s Picks presents the best weekly art openings, events, and performances happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas. For a more comprehensive perspective, check the BmoreArt Calendar page, which includes ongoing exhibits and performances, and is updated on a daily basis.
To submit your calendar event, email us at [email protected]!
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Generating Conversations: Against a Backdrop of Contemporary Concerns
Monday, February 27th : 7-9pm
Falvey Hall, Brown Center
1301 West Mount Royal Avenue : 21217
A panel discussion featuring Judy Norrell, collector of Southern literature, art and history; Paul Rucker, visual artist, composer and musician; and Tanya Garcia, artist, community activist. Moderated by Dr. DaMaris Hill, artist, writer, educator, social justice advocate. The program is produced in partnership with Morgan State University.
Laying-by Time highlights a broad sample of work by William Christenberry. Drawing on his explorations, recollections and interpretations of Hale County, Ala., Christenberry balanced the beauty, hopefulness and resilience of the deep south against its tensions, pathos and flaws. Moving fluidly between painting, photography, sculpture and drawing, the artist wove a story that is simultaneously celebratory and melancholy, inviting and inhospitable.
Visit mica.edu/layingbytime to see a full list of events associated with this exhibition.
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The Ground: Michael Jones McKean :: Artist Talk
Monday, February 27th : 6-8pm
Hutzler Brothers Palace Museum
210 North Howard Street : 21201
The Contemporary presents The Ground, a solo commission by New York and Richmond-based artist Michael Jones McKean, at the historic Hutzler Brothers Palace Building, located at 200 North Howard Street. The project is free and open to the public from February 18 through May 19, 2017.
Hutzler Brothers Palace, erected in 1888, and originally advertised as a “museum of merchandise” was the first department store of its kind in Baltimore. In the shell of this former emporium, McKean has fabricated a massive, multi-room, two-story structure, an architectonic labyrinth enfolding diverse aesthetic languages and multiple modes of representation. He merges the museological, the domestic, the store display, the geological, the theatrical, and the digital. In its totality, he has created an extended metaphor on “place”. Not place as a stagnant reality fixed in time, but as an emergent, fecund, and evolving set of conditions metabolizing past histories into the present.
With The Ground, McKean proposes longer overlapping and diverging timelines where human and non-human actants live in close, nonhierarchical proximity with their time scales flattened and enmeshed. Here, a handmade replica of the human brain co-mingles casually with that of a wolf, whale, cat, and elephant. An out-of-time cave diorama shares a wall with twelve heads, possibly those of costumed members of some undetermined, future leaning, pan-cultural cult. A mise-en-scene built of clay and dirt depicting people participating in a water birth of a new human conflates the contemporary and historical, creation myth and quotidian, abject realism and magic realism.
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“The Identity Collective: Exploring the Art of Self” Senior Art Student Exhibition Opening Reception + Gallery Talk
Thursday, March 2nd : 6-8pm
Rice Gallery, Peterson Hall
McDaniel College : Westminster
McDaniel College’s student honors exhibition features a variety of work from six senior art students. Titled “The Identity Collective: Exploring the Art of Self,” this annual exhibition runs Thursday, March 2–Friday, March 17, in Rice Gallery, Peterson Hall, at 2 College Hill, Westminster, Md. An opening reception takes place Thursday, March 2, 5:30–7:30 p.m., with a gallery talk at 6 p.m.
Seniors showcasing their works are Suzannah Banister of Cockeysville, Md., Anna Eckard of Westminster, Md., Sarah McRoberts of Damascus, Md., Rachel Sentz of Felton, Pa., Amber Smith of Baltimore and Hannah Sommer of Taneytown, Md.
The exhibition and reception are both free and open to the public. Rice Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, noon–4 p.m., and Saturday, noon–5 p.m. Call 410-857-2595 for more information. Visit www.mcdaniel.edu for information about McDaniel College.
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GBCA Arts & Culture Happy Hour
Thursday, March 2nd : 5-7pm
Everyman Theatre
315 West Fayette Street : 21201
Help continue the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance’s 15th Anniversary celebration with a Happy Hour at Everyman Theatre. Come enjoy drinks and light fare before the “Great Expectations” showing. All members of GBCA will receive a 50% off discount to “Great Expectations” that evening at 7:30pm. We look forward to you joining the celebration!
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ellen cherry : Portraits in Song
Thursday, March 2nd – Sunday, March 5th
The Strand Theatre
5426 Harford Road : 21214
The Strand Theater Company introduces a new addition to its 9th Season, the Second Series titled SHE SPEAKS – a collection of short engagements aimed to showcase a wide variety of women’s diverse voices and perspectives. The Series opens with Portraits in Song, by song and story alchemist, ellen cherry, and features a live performance of eleven original songs inspired by the stories of powerful women in history. The musical performance is accompanied by large scale projections of commissioned portraits by the artist Liz Downing.
Portraits in Song opens on Thursday March 2nd, 2017 and runs through March 5th, Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sundayat 2pm. Tickets are $25 for Patrons, $20 General Admission, $10 for students, seniors and artists. All performances take place at 5426 Harford Rd. 21201. Tickets are available at strand-theater.org.
ellen cherry is a musician, composer, and performer. She created a performance piece that springs from her love of storytelling and her passion for history. The purpose of the project is to shift attention away from imposed detrimental beauty standards and instead see women as powerful thinkers and doers.
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Abstract/Subtract
Friday, March 3rd – Sunday, March 5th
R House
301 West 29th Street : 21211
Abstract/Subtract is a 2-day pop-up exhibition featuring art & films by local artists at R. House.
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Nate Larson :: Opening Reception
Friday, March 3rd : 6:30-9:30pm
‘sindikit
405 East Oliver Street, 2nd Floor : 21202
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New Works on Paper :: Gallery Talk
Saturday, March 4th : 5pm
The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224
A recent arrival to Baltimore through the Creative Alliance’s Resident Artist program, Jerry Allen Gilmore exhibits his expressive, mixed media works with the intuitive mask drawings of Highlandtown resident and Outsider artist, Miss Ellen Cameron in the two-person exhibition New Works on Paper.
Gilmore’s intimate miniatures and sweeping, large scale drawings, prints, and collages are deceptively personal as he adopts a cast of animated characters and symbols to relate his own story. This work playfully embodies the often awkward issues that life’s every movement possesses – a humorous bend in the river, where one may be given aid by animals, magicians and shamans, or be menaced by devils, clowns and bumble bees. Characteristically all of these works are autobiographical, repurposed and retraced narratives that explore the artist’s own thoughts on identity, sexuality, spirituality, beauty and mortality. Each work draws on different chapters in the story of his life, but as with many recollections, out of their natural chronological order. For Gilmore all of these works drive home his creative mantra: where you go depends upon where you have been, and where you can go depends upon what you can imagine.
A recent arrival to Baltimore through the Creative Alliance’s Resident Artist program, Jerry Allen Gilmore exhibits his expressive, mixed media works with the intuitive mask drawings of Highlandtown resident and Outsider artist, Miss Ellen Cameron in the two-person exhibition New Works on Paper.
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Tim Doud: Prologue 1996 – 2016 :: Opening Reception
Saturday, March 4th : 5-7pm
gallery neptune & brown
1530 14th Street, NW : Washington DC
Prologue is Tim Doud’s first solo gallery exhibition in Washington, DC, to feature his oil and charcoal portraits spanning twenty years. When creating each work, Doud develops an up close and intimate relationship with the sitter while remaining traditional in his practice of drawing and painting directly from life. He allows each subject to reveal a less obvious or hidden extension of his or her personality by giving them the freedom to determine their costume and makeup. Tim spends many sessions painting each sitter over the course of several months, creating an intense collaborative portrait. With visual influences of Lucian Freud and Alice Neel, Doud shifts the typical focus of the portrait genre, exploring the psychology of the sitter with questions of identity and self representation.
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SEEK 2017 International Film Festival
Saturday, March 4th – Sunday, March 5th
Falvey Hall, Brown Center
1301 West Mount Royal Avenue : 21217
The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) presents SEEK 2017, an international film festival that features screenings of The Royal Tailor (Korea), The Grandmaster (China) and Timbuktu (Mali), as well as a program of international and local short films.
The festival will take place March 4 – 5, at Falvey Hall, Brown Center, 1301 W. Mt. Royal Ave. All events are free and open to the public.
Prior to the screening of The Royal Tailor on Saturday, March 4, musicians from the Peabody Institute will perform the film’s musical theme, as well as themes from The Avengers: Age of Ultron and New World.
Following the screening, director Won Suk Lee will join Christian Oh, executive director of the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival and co-chair of the DC Short Film Festival, for a live conversation via Skype.
RSVP is required for this screening. Click here for more information.
MICA faculty Fletcher Mackey will also moderate a panel discussion on discovering cultural diversity in film, with Christian Oh, Agnes Moon, Morgan State University professor, and Niki Murphy ’15, Film and Video.
On Sunday, March 5, a selection of short films by MICA and K-Arts alumni will be shown alongside a selection of films chosen by Agnes Moon, director Paul Kim, Niki Murphy and director Jennifer Suhr.
Click here for more information, including a full schedule of feature and short film screenings.
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Pat Dennis & Robert F.X. Giroux: The Nature of Reality :: Opening Reception
Sunday, March 5th : 2-5pm
MAXgallery
126 North Madiera Street : 21231
The nature of reality is this: it is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden. (Rumi)
Pat Dennis paints the heart/heart-break, pleasure/pain, personal/political in this life we live. Life on the planet is difficult, as is painting the “truth”, whatever that may be in the moment.
In 1975, Dennis began painting in Nyack, New York, the birthplace and boyhood home of American Realist painter, Edward Hopper. She was influenced by her stint as an assistant to Sari Dienes, on “The Land”, an artist’s community in Stony Point, New York. Neighbors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns would often drop in on Dienes and Dennis for lunch.
Dennis subsequently moved to Taos, New Mexico, where she lived in a tent with her two children. She studied for one year at the Taos School of Fine Arts, until the school closed, due to the death of its founder.
Dennis continued to paint and study and was strongly drawn to the powerful work and persona of Georgia O’Keeffe. She also developed a strong working relationship with renowned Native American artist Randy Lee White.
In 1979, Dennis and her children returned to New York, where she became an active member of the New York Feminist Art Institute, an international collective of women artists exploring the relationship between art and mainstream culture. (continued)
During her time in New York, Dennis and three colleagues founded the TAI Gallery on 19th Street in New York City. During this period, the artist also exhibited and sold works in Nyack, and in Manhattan at the Nelson Rockefeller Gallery and Leger de Main Gallery at the Lincoln Center. Locally, her work has been exhibited at The Columbia Art Center, The Creative Alliance, and MAXgallery. She lives in the Sowebo neighborhood of Baltimore with her husband, Robert F. X. Giroux.
Robert F.X. Giroux distinctly remembers when he first began to draw. It happened in 1963, when he stumbled upon his mother’s “art box” in the attic. The wooden box was full of treasures: pencils, charcoal, pastels, tubes of oils. It was then that he traded in his crayons for the tools in this amazing trove. Since that time, he has created art whenever he has been moved to do so.
Giroux’s work represents his reaction to modern American life, which forms our collective physical, cultural, and emotional reality. This reality is steeped in enormous material wealth and ways of communication, production, and war-making that are unprecedented within the 200,000 years of human existence.
Giroux is a self- taught artist. He gained his knowledge of materials and production through studio visits with artists, including his wife, Pat Dennis. These studio visits, coupled with his mother’s prompting to “go ahead and paint” yielded what is today Giroux’s body of work.
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Free Community Day
Sunday, March 5th : 12-5pm
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Avenue, NW: Washington DC
The first Sunday of the month is Community Day at NMWA!
Enjoy free admission to the museum’s current exhibitions as well as the museum’s newly reinstalled collection.
• Celebrate Women’s History Month! Answer “Can you name #5WomenArtists?” Share your NMWA visit on social media with #5WomenArtists and by tagging @WomenInTheArts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Learn more: https://nmwa.org/
• “Border Crossing: Jami Porter Lara” explores recent work by Albuquerque-based artist #JamiPorterLara, who hand-builds and pit-fires clay sculptures resembling an icon of modernity—the plastic bottle. Learn more: https://nmwa.org/
• “New Ground: The Southwest of Maria Martinez and Laura Gilpin” illuminates the midcentury Southwest as a nuanced and dynamic environment in which these two women created art that embodied a distinctively modern aesthetic. Learn more about #NewGroundDC: https://nmwa.org/
• “Chromatic Scale: Prints by Polly Apfelbaum” explores #PollyApfelbaum’s distinctive approach to brightly colored, abstract prints and how it relates to her work in painting, sculpture, and installation. Learn more: https://nmwa.org/
