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BmoreArt’s Picks: Baltimore Art Galleries, Openings, and Events October 10 – 16

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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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<><><><><><><><>The Songster Series | Susan Alcorn
Tuesday, October 10th :  7pm

Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue :: 21224

Creative Alliance presents a series of free public performances, The Songster Series, designed to reveal the hidden influences that have impacted celebrated regional musicians. This series gets to the heart of who these musicians are, their musical influences, and how their sound evolved. These intimate, salon style performances take place in the Creative Alliance’s Marquee Lounge.

The pedal steel guitar is a hard instrument to play and very difficult to master. 2017 Baker Artist Award-winner Susan Alcorn is a master. Though pedal steel is mostly associated with country and western music (and is becoming well known in the Sacred Steel style popularized by Robert Randolph) the possibilities are endless. Susan Alcorn has a deep grasp of where pedal steel has been and is a bold pioneer of where it can go.

Join host Brooks Long for an evening of music and conversation with Susan about how blues great Muddy Waters led her to pedal steel guitar, her time playing Country in the 1970s, Straight-Ahead Jazz in the 1980s and since then, bringing her pedal steel under the influence of Indonesian Gamelan, Indian Classical and avant-garde influences like late-period John Coltrane and mentor Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening philosophy.

<><><><><><><><>Shortcutz | Fades and Fellowship
Wednesday, October 11th :  7pm

Motor House
120 West North Avenue :: 21201

7 real barbers, 7 true short stories, 1 specific theme, 1 hot mic, 1 host, 1 DJ cuttin’ up live in front of an audience. The Shortcutz Storytelling Slam & Jam is a live Baltimore-based short form oral storytelling slam and party jam starring professional African American barbers and involving a live audience. Shortcutz harnesses the unique and renowned position and perspective of the Black barber embodying the history of the West African griot and the African-American oral storytelling tradition and information sharing culture–a tradition and culture that was critical to the survival of the African-American community.

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Of Excerpt Fragments: Robert Andrade
Thursday, October 12 : 6-9 pm

Cardinal
1758 Park Ave, Baltimore  21217

Join us for an exhibition opening to celebrate the culmination of California-based artist Robert Andrade’s week-long residency in Baltimore. Plus, we’ll be releasing our first publication: a zine of the works from our previous show, Natural Order. More info below.

Robert Andrade is a southern California-based artist focused on issues related to the built environment and spatial politics. For his project at Cardinal —Of Excerpt Fragments— Andrade will create both fabricated and site-specific work within the gallery space over the course of a week-long residency.

The artist’s practice oscillates between the materiality of the external, man-made structures and the polished, interior space of the gallery. The repeated use of building materials, such as asphalt, lumber, drywall, steel, etc., contributes to what might be seen as a cold or calculating aesthetic in his work. This approach is, moreover, a reflection of his larger interest in urban planning, architecture, philosophy, and history. Having absorbed some of the aesthetics of humanity’s flawed attempts at utopian urban ideals, his work prompts the audience to be “aware and critical of the built environment.” How, then, will these new works about space be viewed by the residents of a city in which power and politics have dramatically shaped geography and the interactions of residents?

Andrade’s calculated aesthetic is balanced by an intuitive, responsive method of working in a space, and with a space. Over the course of his residency, Andrade will apply his established material vocabulary to a new space here in Baltimore that is itself physically evolving. This process will take on an almost performative aspect as well, since the gallery will hold open hours during School 33’s Open Studio Tour and visitors will be able to see the installation in progress.

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Aaron LaCrate presents PANDAMIC
Friday, October 13th :  8:30pm

Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue :: 21224

Born and raised around the corner from the Creative Alliance in the heart of Highlandtown, culture producer Aaron LaCrate grew his empire from a skate shop in his parents’ basement to a New York-based music and fashion conglomerate recognized worldwide.

In celebration of Highlandtown’s native son, mid-career retrospective gallery show, Pandemic will be a hip hop party in the theater  highlighting Lacrate’s work with Jay Z, Lily Allen, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, and Eminem, and producer of rising stars from Baltimore’s own music scene like DJ Equalizer and Spank Rock. With DJ sets from Lacrate and performances by a slew of young DMV hip hop talent.

$12, $9 (+ $3 at the door)

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Second Annual Art Bazaar
Saturday, October 14 : 11-4

Dovecote Cafe
2501 Madison Avenue, Baltimore 21217

ART, FURNITURE, and CLOTHING BAZAAR!!!
This year we combine a few of our favorite things by a few of our favorite folks!

After brunch, spend the afternoon exploring the collections of local artists, curators, stylists, and designers!!

Baltimore Artists. No need to covet from afar! Come out! Bring your $$ – this is going to be INCREDIBLE!

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Mondawmin Crossings | Pedestrian Safety Walking Tour
Saturday, October 14th :  3-4:30pm

Entrance to Druid Hill Park
Auchentoroly Terrace + Liberty Heights Avenues : 21217

Greater Mondawmin is a collection of strong neighborhoods in West Baltimore sharing an array of educational, recreational, and shopping opportunities. Unfortunately, many residents are unable to safely walk or bike to our local amenities due to the dangerous highway-like streets that ring Druid Hill Park and Mondawmin Mall. Mondawmin Crossings will be an interactive walking tour celebrating our neighborhood history and exploring opportunities for improving pedestrian safety and connectivity between Druid Hill Park and Mondawmin Mall.

Meet at the entrance to Druid Hill Park at Auchentoroly Ter & Liberty Heights Ave,
Across from the synagogue
 at 2001 Liberty Heights Ave, Baltimore, MD 21217

Led by local public artist Graham Coreil-Allen in collaboration with community leaders and stakeholders, Mondawmin Crossings will explore the history of development, existing streetscape conditions, and planned improvements along Liberty Heights Avenue and Reisterstown Road. Residents and stakeholders are invited to talk about their work in the community impacting pedestrian safety. The tour will be an opportunity for all participants to talk about the places and issues they consider meaningful. Comments from the tour will be shared with the companies, organizations, and city agencies that are helping to shape the bright future of Greater Mondawmin.

<><><><><><><><>Retreat / William Lamson / Lu Zhang | Opening Reception
Saturday, October 14th :  6-9pm

Area 405
405 East Oliver Street : 21201

Retreat features the work of Lu Zhang and William Lamson, two artists whose practices specifically focus on immersing oneself in creating a studio practice that is the process. Where site specificity becomes studio and the work transforms throughout the exhibition itself. Zhang transforms the front gallery space into an expanded series of experiments that will remain in flux throughout the course of the exhibition. Lamson features projected videos in the back gallery. Curated by Stewart Watson, AREA 405 is pleased to be a part of the process of these two exemplary artists’ work this fall.

William Lamson was born Arlington, Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is an interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice involves working with elemental forces to create durational performative actions. Set in landscapes as varied as New York’s East River and Chile’s Atacama Desert, his projects reveal the invisible systems and forces at play within these sites. In some work he is the subject, directly performing in front of the camera, in all of his projects, Lamson’s work represents a performative gesture, a collaboration with forces outside of his control to explore systems of knowledge and belief.

Lamson earned his MFA from Bard College, and teaches in the Parsons MFA photography program. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including the Brooklyn Museum, The Moscow Biennial, P.S.1. MOMA, Kunsthalle Erfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition, he has produced site specific installations for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Storm King Art Center. His work is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and numerous private collections. William has shown with Robischon Gallery in Denver since 2006, most recently exhibiting in The Roaring Garden, Rotation this summer. His work has appeared in ArtForum, Frieze, the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Harpers, and The Village Voice. He has been awarded grants from the Shifting Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, he is 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.

About the Work: Untitled (Infinity Camera) 2017: Commissioned in 2017 as part of a show called Wanderlust at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery, Untitled (Infinity Camera) employs a floating optical device to create a hypnotic journey through the tidal waterways around New York City. The device itself consists of an open sided chamber of one way mirrors that can be configured in various ways in relation to the video camera. As this optical rig is carried along by the current, the camera records a kaleidoscopic vision of bridges, towers, pollution and the watery ecosystem around which everything is built. Like a partially submerged architectural model, the reflective space simultaneously frames the landscape and obstructs it, allowing the camera to see in opposite directions at the same time while the center of the frame recedes into the darkness of an infinite regress

Lu Zhang (b. 1983, Chongqing, China) is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in installation, sculpture, drawing, and text. Zhang’s conceptual approach takes specific sites or contexts as a point of departure. Recognizing the processes and people already present, she adapts her practice to respond to and temporarily inhabit a place. Zhang views her itinerant practice as emerging from an immigrant experience. She selects sites intuitively; sometimes responding to its historical context; other times tracing its physical manifestations, from scale to proportion or architecture; still other times Zhang mines a site’s function and collaborates with its workers.

Zhang has received a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council for works on paper and been awarded The Trawick Prize Young Artist Award. In 2014, she became an inaugural recipient of a Rubys Artist Project Grant in Literary and Visual Arts. She has produced projects in Baltimore, Chicago, China, Finland, and the Netherlands. She has collaborated with ICA Baltimore and SPARE to produce publications and exhibitions; the George Peabody Library to launch a studio residency program, and The Contemporary to build resource initiatives for artists. Zhang received her MFA in Painting at the Frank Mohr Institute in the Netherlands and her BFA in General Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

About the Work: In Headspace, Lu Zhang engages the front room exhibition space of Area 405 in an expanded studio experiment. The installation presents fluctuating arrangements of drawings, prints, and sculptural objects. Through repeated movements and serial actions, Zhang treats drawing as akin to taking a long meditative walk. She employs shifts of scale, repetition, found materials, and cut-outs to frame the surfaces, textures, topography, and architecture of Area 405. Adapting the dependable modernist grid to be flexible, fallible, and vibrating, she presents moments of intense focus and gestures of play within the container of a studio. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Headspace will remain in flux, activated through shifts, additions, reconfigurations, and visitor interactions.

As the building houses 40 artist studios and hosts programs and exhibitions, Zhang interprets 405 East Oliver Street to be a site of making and a site of gathering. In this landscape, Zhang interrogates the role of the studio as a physical and mental space: as a site of learning, a site of confrontation, a site of routine, a site of doubt, a site of endurance, and a site of rest. Within this flexible context, she attempts to devise a way of working as a place to retreat to, a place for durational ceasing, a place to reconsider, establish language, and begin again.

In Zhang’s conceptual practice, she takes specific sites or contexts as a point of departure. Recognizing the processes and people already present, she adapts her methods to respond to and temporarily inhabit a place. Zhang views her itinerant practice as emerging from an immigrant experience. She selects sites intuitively; sometimes responding to its historical context; other times tracing its physical manifestations, from scale to proportion or architecture; still, other times Zhang mines a site’s function and collaborates with its workers. Using a procedure of gathering, sorting, arranging, and rearranging, Zhang’s methodology is rooted in research and sustained engagement. She applies this logic to her chosen sites with the resulting works taking a variety of forms from installations, to books, to drawings, to gestural interventions. By gathering imagery from a wide range of sources; from found materials to historical texts, to her personal archive, Zhang investigates the nature of work, the essence of language, and the poetics of place.

<><><><><><><><>Mind on Fire * Ada Pinkston * Wume
Saturday, October 14th :  8pm

EMP Collective
307 West Baltimore Street : 21201

Mind on Fire
a modular chamber orchestra focused on the works of living composers. We’re making a show at EMP Collective performing Missy Mazzoli’s “Vespers for a New Dark Age,” a frenetic meditation on the night, ghosts, and phantasma that haunt our modern world. https://missymazzoli.bandcamp.com/album/vespers-for-a-new-dark-age
www.mindonfire.org

Wume
Drums and Synth duo, April Camlin and Al Shatz, playing polyrhythmic structures through the lens of kosmische and is in a constant state of evolution and self-reflection.
https://wume.bandcamp.com/
http://wumemusic.com/

Ada Pinkston
Founder of Labbodies, explores the intersection of imagined histories and sociopolitical realities on our bodies.
http://adapinkston.com/

$10-30*

Doors at 8pm
Show at 8:30pm SHARP

Tickets are available through eventbrite
*If our entry fees are cost prohibitive, or if there is anything else we can help you with, please contact [email protected]

<><><><><><><><>Lovers Dine
Saturday, October 14: 7-9:30 pm

New America
429 N Eutaw St, Suite 1N, Baltimore: 21201

We invite guest to dine at New America on October 14th – the upcoming event presents two lovers exploring their relationship aloud amongst the dining hall. The dinner of the couple will be mic’d and they will go over a round of questions. This is an initiative to explore some of the difficulties involved with being two creative people and having to also maintain an intimate relationship. It questions the stereotype of the isolated artist by garnering real world examples and answers.

Relationships tend to be in constant flux – processes, procedures, and practices– that sometimes need to be reorganized through the narrative of others for a better understanding of what sometimes is healthy and sometimes does/doesn’t work. We’re hoping that these dinner conversations present a kind of public intimacy and works through the theme of date night as a semi consumerist form but also a convention of monogamy – to find something slightly more complex. We see how 6 couples over the course of several months divulge parts of their relationship in public.

The first couple is Nick Scholl and Daniel Wickerham who’ve been together 6 years and married 4 years in December.

About Daniel Wickerham:
Aside from his smoking habits, Daniel Wickerham is an artist in Baltimore by way of Columbus OH. He has spent the better part of a decade collaborating with Malcolm Lomax where the chance of going mad remains high. Living past of the point of logic is not only a privilege but a life’s work. You can follow him chronicle his husband’s doppelgängers at https://www.instagram.com/vickici4g/

About Nick Scholl:
Nick Scholl is a web developer and producer and was a Co-Founding Editor of DIS Magazine. He has also been a classical baritone for over 20 years, having sung with the Seattle Opera, Baltimore Lyric Opera, Baltimore Concert Opera, and the Baltimore Basilica. He currently lives, works, and drinks in Mount Vernon.

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