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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Sons: Seeing the Modern African American Male
Ongoing through July 30th
Reginald F. Lewis Museum
830 East Pratt Street : 21202
With the recent murder of a promising Bowie State University African American male student over the weekend potentially being classified as a hate crime; the climate of harsh race relations and harmful stereotypes of African American males is being placed front and center right here in Maryland.
In the face of so much negative news about African American males, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum seeks to continue it’s mission of shining light on the full story of the African American experience here in Maryland. The Lewis exhibit, Sons, focuses on the often false negative perceptions of African American males and their true stories of success. Each participant is offered up as what you may perceive them to be and then the next image reveals what they really are: thugs are revealed to be college students and dangerous individuals are shown to be doctors and most importantly dads to a new generation of African American males staring down these same stereotypes and blowing them up with success, hard work, integrity and spirituality.
With so much of the narrative on African American males focusing on the negative The Reginald F. Lewis seeks through its, Sons, exhibit and through its many programs and events like its upcoming Story Time and Arts Hour: Celebrating Black Dads and the book release of Baltimore’s own Devin Allen A Beautiful Ghetto to change the story.
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Chrysalis: Mattye Hamilton
Final Day Thursday, May 25th
Hamilton Gallery
5502 Harford Road : 21214
Through her paintings Mattye Hamilton illustrates the way in which she is am connected to her environment. She is drawn to the patterns, colors and figures of daily life which she uses to populate a world of her own. Her works radiate light and tease emotion.
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Crust Theory
Tuesday, May 23rd : 6-8pm
St. Charles Projects
2701 North Charles Street : 21218
St. Charles Projects hosts a night of poetry, animation, and works on paper.
Our pasts are mineral, visceral, and mythological. Three artists dig up the guts of what is vanished and array them in the light for your listening and viewing interest. Toby Altman presents a reading from his new book, Arcadia, Indiana, a “mutant tragedy” built on a poetics of trash. Alicia Puglionesi leads participants on a tour of an underground cavern with mysterious healing powers. Gwyneth Anderson transmutes the meter of her great-grandmother’s poems into visual pattern and motion. The processes of sedimentation and forgetting are herein disturbed by intrusions from the present. Buried matter is prodded by our desire to see it alive, honest, vengeful – we want to understand what happened and why; or, to re-stage, re-map, and reclaim the sense of other possibilities.
ARTISTS:
Toby Altman is the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and five chapbooks, including recently Security Theater (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016). His poems can or will be found in Crazyhorse, Jubliat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies. Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) is a mutant tragedy, a five act-sonnet sequence, staged in the trash-choked landscape of pastoral fantasy. It plays with narrative, labor, sexuality, and form, starting with a murder in an Indiana steel factory and ending with the Sphinx refusing all of Oedipus’ solutions to her riddles. This play is a Renaissance tragedy in contemporary drag, destabilizing literary boundaries to develop a poetics of trash, in which the repressed and discarded parts of (literary) history return to strangle their point of origin.
Gwyneth Anderson is an animator and sculptor exploring invisibility, perception, and the phenomena of movement. She has screened and exhibited work in galleries, festivals, and unaffiliated outdoor areas throughout the US and internationally, including with Roots & Culture, the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, the Sullivan Galleries, Roman Susan, Woman Made Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, 6018 NORTH, and Links Hall in Chicago; the Freies Museum in Berlin; the XL Art Space in Helsinki; and @ptt in Geneva. As an artist in residence, she has gestated at the Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), FRISE (Germany), Harold Arts (Ohio), Arteles Creative Center (Finland), and Utopiana (Switzerland). She is currently based in Baltimore, teaching experimental animation with Baltimore Youth Film Arts at Johns Hopkins. For this event, she has transcribed the meter of her great- grandmother’s poetry into light, animating familial patterns of pain.
Alicia Puglionesi is a writer and historian who experiments with communication. Her work engages with the layering of synaptic and archaeological memory in landscapes overwritten by American empire. Her publications include Krall Krall (Cars Are Real, 2013) and Views from the National Forests (Furniture Press, 2014), as well as many scholarly and general-interest essays. She will share excerpts of words and images from her current project about caves.
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Showtime Goma & Nancy FeastxAnna CrooksxTony KillxScroll Downers
Wednesday, May 24 : 8 PM – 11 PM
EMP Collective
307 W Baltimore St, Baltimore, Maryland 21201
SHOWTIME GOMA AND NANCY FEAST is a special, live only, collaboration that features music from two solo projects; Nancy Feast (Teeny Lieberson of the band TEEN) and Showtime Goma (Jen Goma of the band A Sunny Day in Glasgow). Two performers in conversation and collaboration, melding music and performance, figuring it all out before your very eyes. Funny at times, moving at times, but always highly entertaining, that’s Showtime and Nancy.
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Tony Kill Despite being (born?)(conceived?) in Baltimore this is Tony Kill’s first Baltimore show! Showtime and Nancy have never played a Mid-Atlantic show without him – and I don’t know why anyone would 😉
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Anna K. Crooks might not have a chapbook out (yet) or be published in major literary journals (time will tell), but none of that really matters and who needs it anyway? Because we live in a world where everything is instantly sharable, you can find many of her poems on the poetry blog manymistypes.tumblr.com. You might also find one or two in a copy of a Proliferate zine (which she co-edited with Ellen Paul) floating around town. Then there’s a chance you’ll catch her at a few of the small poetry readings in some DIY spaces, where she reads her poems about whether or not dolphins and lobsters gossip and how they’re not really like humans except in certain ways, and delivers such lines as “why don’t you drive up to my house/ shirtless astride a motorcycle/ ill jump to your arms/ and never look back.”
Crooks reads with a voice that is at once incredibly sweet and conveys “don’t fuck with me”; she tosses aside pages from her ordered stack of poems once she’s done with them, and makes the room knowingly nod, laugh, or snap as she advises listeners, like Cosmo gone rogue, to “kill your man, and/ please yourself.” – Baltimore City Paper
Scroll Downers
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B’More B Goode
Friday, May 26th : 8pm
The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21211
A Celebration of the words and music of Chuck Berry
On March 18th, rock and roll pioneer, master tunesmith, and true American orignal, Chuck Berry, passed away.
Join one of the great living boogie woogie piano masters and longtime Chuck Berry pianist, Daryl Davis, along with the Ursula Ricks Band, Quinton Randall, Caleb Stine, Brooks Long, LaFayette Gilchrist and Gina DeLuca for a memorable night of Chuck Berry tunes.
8pm | $22, $19 mbrs | + $3 at the door
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Nancy Hiller Book Signing
Friday, May 26th : 7-10pm
A Workshop of Our Own
1718 Union Avenue : 21211
We at WOO are excited to be hosting an artist talk and book signing by Nancy Hiller, author of the new book Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life. Hiller is a cabinet maker with over 30 years of experience working in cabinet shops in the US and the UK. She is a contributor to Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking, Old House Journal, and other publications.
“Often hilarious, always thoughtful, her sheer determination to be a cabinetmaker is fantastically strong, withstanding the slings and arrows of, amongst other things, misogyny, deeply flaky clients, the undervaluing of her work, knowledge, and time, the self-doubt of the self-employed perfectionist, and the chill and filth of bone-numbing damp English winters.” –Laura Mays, reviewing Hiller’s recently published book, “Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life”:
Books will be available for purchase, and light refreshments will be served. Doors open 6:30pm, talk starts around 7!
Learn more about Nancy Hiller at https://nrhillerdesign.com/
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Open Space Presents: Site Horizon: One
Work by Mikael Flores-Amper
Saturday, May 27 : 7 PM – 10 PM
Open Space
512 W Franklin St, Baltimore, Maryland 21201
Surface Shift is an architectural intervention which physically alters the topography of the gallery space. Visitors are invited to walk on, in, and around this immersive piece.
Please join us for the opening reception Saturday, May 27, from 7-10PM
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1st Annual Baltimore Drag Awards
Saturday, May 27th : 8pm
The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21221
The 1st Annual Baltimore Drag Awards are finally here! Hosted by two of the city’s powerhouse MCs; Brooklyn Heights and Betty O’Hellno, the event is basically the equivalent of The Academy Awards of Baltimore Drag. The red carpet will be rolled out for guests and awardees to arrive in their glamorous best. In addition to the awards, we will have a cocktail mixer, red carpet arrivals from 8-9pm and performances throughout the night!
Black Tie Formal dress is encouraged.
Two ticketing options:
Single tickets are $18, $15 Creative Alliance members | + $3 at the door
Limited VIP table for four + a complementary bottle of champagne: $110
8pm Red Carpet
9pm Awards show
