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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Jim Condron: Picking up the Pieces | Reception + Artist Talk with Ann Land
Thursday, November 9th : 5-7pm
Julio Fine Arts
Loyola University Maryland :: 21210
Please join us on November 9th at 5:30pm for an engaging talk and lively reception at the exhibit “Picking Up the Pieces” at Loyola University. We are honored to have the revered veteran art critic and journalist Ann Landi join us over Skype to discuss Jim Condron’s show, the often overlooked but powerful Baltimore art scene, and the greater contemporary art world.
“Like a contemporary Dada master, Jim Condron finds wit and beauty in unexpected collisions between the mundane and the artful. His works are edgy and provocative, and delivered with more calculation than may at first meet the eye. He tests the limits of his materials, while simultaneously assuring us that it’s perfectly okay to smile.” – Ann Landi
For twenty years, Ann has written about art for ARTnews, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, and other major publications. Recently she started Visari21, a culmination of her years supporting, interviewing, and investigating the art world. Visari21 aims to connect contemporary artists with the information they need to navigate their careers. Ann interviews both contemporary art’s famous and under- recognized artists. Visari21 also tackles every major issue confronting 21st-century artists.
The exhibition Picking Up the Pieces includes over 35 works of art by one of this year’s top Pollock-Krasner award winning artists Jim Condron. Condron’s pieces express humor, memory, and beauty through the combination and interaction of everyday objects, castoff remnants, and paint. Each sculpture and painting is the artist’s concoction of imagery conveying nostalgia, jocosity, and melancholy. To create his sculptural works, Condron picks up bits of physical objects that interact with mental images preserved from his personal life and art history. Worldly fragments, such as a 1970s tennis ball can, candy wrappers, or a shovel handle, transform into artistic spectacles through the artist’s craft and engagement with his subject.
Objects such as the 1970s tennis ball can is at once banal and poignant, since the artist spent countless hours as a child by the courts as his mother played. Condron’s huddles of broken materials break from abstraction by proclaiming the reality of everyday life through the inclusion of domestic cultural references. Like his sculptures, Condron constructs his paintings by mixing discovered color and textural combinations with collections of visual fragments he sources from the art world and his life. Each sculpture or painting is titled with a textual fragment from a story that intends to add to the work’s discourse rather than naming or defining it. Condron’s visual explorations test the limits of color, form, texture, and the haptic.
Originally from Long Island, NY and Connecticut, Jim Condron lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Condron earned his MFA at the Leroy E. Hofffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and a BA in Art and English from Colby College, Waterville, ME (1992). He also studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1993-’95). Since 1993, Condron has studied with Rohini Ralby, the artist’s mentor. His work appears nationally and internationally in galleries and museums as well as in corporate, university, public and private collections. Condron has been awarded artist residencies at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Heliker Lahotan Foundation. He is a 2017 recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, an Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant and a Maryland State Arts Council grant for sculpture.
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Issues in Industry: Working Artists Panel
Thursday, November 9: 7-8:30 pm
Baltimore Museum of Industry
1415 Key Highway, Baltimore: 21230
Hear from full-time working artists—including self-trained machinist Chris Bathgate—about pursuing a passion while making a living. Panelists Chris Bathgate (sculptor), Will Holman (Open Works), Krystal Mack (BLK//SUGAR & BLK//MARKET), Kyle Van Horn (Baltimore Print Studios), Jason Bass (Treason Toting Company), and Keisha Ransome (2live2love) will discuss entrepreneurship, building an art practice as a business, and more. Panel moderated by Cara Ober of BmoreArt. FREE
Unscripted Moments: The Life and Photography of Joseph Kohl | Opening
Thursday, November 9th : 6:30-9:30pm
Maryland Historical Society
201 West Monument Street :: 21201
The Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) is proud to announce the opening of Unscripted Moments: The Life and Photography of Joseph Kohl, an exhibition celebrating one of Baltimore’s most distinctive and forward-looking photographers. The curators of Unscripted Moments include Linda Day Clark, nationally-exhibited photographer and Professor of Fine of Arts at Coppin State University; J.M. Giordano, photo editor at Baltimore City Paper and award-winning photojournalist; Josh Sisk, award-winning professional arts and culture photographer; and Joe Tropea, filmmaker and Curator of Films and Photographs at MdHS.
Unscripted Moments: The Life and Photography of Joseph Kohl showcases Baltimore in the 1980s and 1990s through the extraordinary eye of local photographer Joseph Kohl (1957-2002). Saved from the landfill and sent to MdHS by exhibit curator Linda Day Clark and her husband, the late photographer Carl Clark, the photos in Unscripted Moments provide a invaluable and evocative record of the city drawn from Kohl’s professional work and personal snapshots, including many images never before published or exhibited. Subjects range from political protests, sidewalk scenes, and animal curiosities to the nighttime world of sex workers, BDSM play, and the underground music scene. Kohl’s warmly rendered portraits of friends, models, and strangers are a highlight of the show. Like a time capsule from the end of the last century, Unscripted Moments offers a whirlwind panorama of city life during the Schaefer, Schmoke, and O’Malley years. What emerges is a vision of Baltimore that’s open-hearted and raw, cosmopolitan and compassionate — and a portrait of a photographer who exposed his love for the city and all its variety in every shot.
An opening party will be held on Thursday, November 9 from 6:30 to 9:30 P.M. at the Maryland Historical Society’s France Hall. Music will be provided by DJ Landis Expandis. Beer will be served by Waverly Brewing Company, with themed light fare and a signature cocktail for the evening prepared by Chef Shirlé Hale-Koslowski of Four Corners Cuisine and Baby’s On Fire cafe. Tickets are free!
A satellite exhibition will also appear at The Windup Space (12 North Avenue) throughout the month of November, featuring photos not on display at the MdHS main exhibit. MdHS will host a night of photography, music, and drinks to accompany the exhibition on Thursday, November 17 beginning at 7 P.M. at The Windup Space. The event will feature light refreshments and a cash bar. Admission is free.
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Ben Marcin: Structures | Opening Reception
Thursday, November 9th : 6-8pm
C. Grimaldis Gallery
523 North Charles Street :: 21201
C. Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present Structures, an exhibition of new photography by Ben Marcin. This exhibition features work from the artist’s ongoing series of abstract grids that compartmentalize urban architecture into meditations on shape and form, pattern and geometry.
In the vein of the artist’s earlier photographic essays Last House Standing, The Campsand Out West, in which static snapshots of homesteads often stand as markers for larger forces at work in American culture, Structures evokes uncharacteristic emotional depth from the benign constructions which surround us. Expounding on Marcin’s characteristic documentary style in which multiple photographs work together to provide a composite narrative, these portraits hone in on an array of details, cataloguing the foundational matter of buildings into compositions that transcend the nature of their subjects.
Marcin foregrounds particular buildings that have shaped his experience as a photographer: auditoriums, parking lots, industrial parks, barely-lit stairwells in Ocean City condominiums. Five works are titled after museums; they are composed of close-up glimpses of ceilings, HVAC vents, corners and design features in institutions built to elevate art. Marcin turns the museum in on itself, creating art out of the buildings that surround it. These works archive feeling and order via area, place and color, bearing witness to the ways in which the structures we live among design our experiences of space and meaning.
Ben Marcin is a self-taught photographer who lives and works in Baltimore. He has exhibited nationwide in galleries and venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Center For Fine Art Photography (Ft. Collins, CO) and the Houston Center for Photography. Last House Standing and The Camps have received wide press both nationally and abroad (The Paris Review, iGnant, La Repubblica, Slate, Wired Magazine). Structures is the artist’s second solo exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery.
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Slow Form // Decompositions // Lost Earring | Opening Receptions
Friday, November 10th : 6-9pm
School 33 Art Center
1427 Light Street :: 21230
School 33 Art Center Presents Three New Exhibitions
On View Friday, November 10, 2017 – Saturday, January 6, 2018
Slow Form (Main Gallery)
School 33 Art Center’s 2017 Juried Exhibition #2
A group exhibition featuring Mary Baum, Mollye Bendell, Kei Ito, Elizabeth Mead, Lake Newton, Nick Primo, Margaret Rorison, Matthew Sepielli, and Doohyun Yoon.
Curated by Natalie Campbell.
(Image credit: Mary Baum – Point of Entry II)
This is an exhibition of photographs, sculpture, painting, film, and video works that embody a sense of transition between two seemingly contradictory states. As we attend to these objects, matter dissolves. Focus shifts. Everyday experience is flattened, pressed, reconfigured. Simple reflections take on a kind of substance and weight. Sound is traced in ripples of sand. While individually distinct in their approach, the works of Slow Form share an ability to communicate a sense of the physical world in a state of flux. As such, they act as portals between lived experience and other forms of sense and understanding.
Decompositions (Members Gallery)
A Solo Exhibition of works by Chris Zickefoose
(Image credit: Chris Zickefoose – Acceptance and Decline)
Decompositions explores structure, renovation, and the physical traces of time. Referencing the sensitivities of minimalism and Wabi-Sabi, Zickefoose utilizes negative space to contemplate the inherent virtues and in common construction materials both new and reclaimed. The work facilitates an exercise in objective observation, focusing on seeing versus looking.
Lost Earring (Project Space)
An Installation by Elliot Doughtie
(Image credit: Elliot Doughtie – installation detail from Lost Earring)
In his multi-media installation, Lost Earring, Elliot Doughtie ponders how our cultural touchstones shift over time while considering the evolution of his own queer sexuality and transgender body. Found materials and cast plaster sculptures of familiar plumbing implements surround a projection of an isolated clip from the 1996 movie Bound by the filmmaking duo the Wachowski siblings — pruriently discovered by Doughtie as a teenager in search of his own identity. As two disembodied hands endlessly tighten and untighten the hidden plumbing of a bathroom sink, this charged and repeated gesture explores a non-heteronormative narrative of function and aspiration. Through the use of light, objects, and moving imagery, Lost Earring reimagines the commonplace setting of a bathroom in a queer and trans context — where bodies and minds are often flooded with emotions from terror to desire.
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Freedom: BBB Performance Art Review: Labbodies
Opening Reception Friday, November 10: 8-10
Performance Series runs November 10 – 30, 2017
SpaceCamp
16 W North Ave, Baltimore, Maryland 21201
Labbodies is pleased to present this years BBB Performance Art Review at SpaceCamp from November 10 – November 30. Opening Reception, November 10, with live performances by Megan Livingston, Carrie Fucile, Park Hyun Gi, Neka Reeves, and Erick Antonio Benitez and Helina Metaferia, starting at 8:00PM.
LABBODIES Performance Art Review III is a space to reflect on different ideologies of Freedom, and what that reveals about our society. Over the last year, freedom and liberation have been called into question, leaving us to wonder who has Freedom and what does it look like in the 21st century.
Using art to call question to the price of freedom and what it looks like in the context of the past, present, and future this year Labbodies opened the Performance Art Review as a call and response to the current political climate.
Accepted proposals from artists living around the DMV area will fill the gallery with site-specific installations, live performances, video projections and new media work to address topics related to freedom. Sexual freedom, physical freedom, psychological freedom, racial freedom, and economic freedom. Questing; how do the isms of our society interact with the state of being that is free?
BBB Performance Art Review III will feature installations by Tanya Garcia, Najee Haynes-Follins Julia Kim-Smith, Sarah Stefana, Helina Metafareria, Carrie Fucile, Park Hyun Gi, Neka Reeves and Erick Antonio Benitez. With second night of performances hosted on November 17, 8:00PM featuring Lynn Hunter, Olu Butterfly, and Nicoletta de la Brown.
About Performance Art Review:
BBB Performance Art Review III is curated by Labbodies Dr. Hoesy Corona and Dr. Ada Pinkston as part of Borders, Boundaries, and Barricades, a two-week long performance art review highlighting the performance art community in Baltimore. This project is partially supported by the Grit Fund, a Regional Regranting Program administered by The Contemporary and funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
All performances are free and open to the public. For more information check out www.labbodies.com
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The Necessity of Tomorrow(s): Mark Bradford—Making a Path
Saturday, November 11th : 12-3pm
Union Baptist Church
1219 Druid Hill Avenue :: 21217
Free, Reservations Required
How do you make a path to power where none exists? How do you assess a community’s needs and create access for a community to self-determine? The first event of the BMA’s new series, The Necessity of Tomorrow(s), brings together one of the most accomplished artists of his generation, Mark Bradford, and BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director Christopher Bedford for a conversation exploring how the artist grapples with these and other key questions in his artistic practice and community-based work. Afterward, take part in a community conversation around issues of access, then stay for an afterparty featuring live musical performances, DJ, and light refreshments.
Doors open at 11:30 a.m. Please note this event will be held at Union Baptist Church, located at 1219 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217.
The BMA’s new event series, The Necessity of Tomorrow(s), invites nationally and internationally acclaimed artists and thinkers to Baltimore for conversations on art, race, and justice. The series borrows its title from an essay by science fiction author Samuel Delaney who argues for the role of creative speculation in making a more just future. The BMA is encouraging communities throughout Baltimore to come together for these creative conversations.
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Layers //// Its Not Complicated (But It Is) | Opening Reception
Saturday, November 11th : 7-10pm
Current Space
421 North Howard Street :: 21201
Current Space is proud to present Layers, an exhibition featuring latest works by Elena Johnston and Monique Crabb; and Its Not Complicated (But It Is), a solo exhibition by Sara Havekotte.
Opening Reception : November 11, 7 – 10pm
Exhibition Duration : November 11 – December 3
Gallery Hours : Sat & Sun, 12 – 4pm
LAYERS
LAYERS is an interwoven collection of paintings and quilts by Baltimore-based artists Elena Johnston and Monique Crabb. In the past several years, Johnston and Crabb have shifted their personal art practices to incorporate new mediums and materials while relying heavily on experimentation as a driving force. The result is a new collection of work that celebrates color and shape in all of their forms.
Elena Johnston is an artist who lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She makes paintings and teaches art to elementary and middle school students in Baltimore city.
Color is my favorite aspect of painting. Recently I have poured large canvases of pastel color combinations to make paintings not unlike color field paintings, for the purpose of color studies and explorations. I became drawn to the color combinations of Double Wedding Ring Quilts made in the 1930s-40s published by the Museum of American Folk Art. For this project I chose to recreate a select few favorites as an experiment to balance the structure and control innate in the quilts mixed with my more naturally experimental approach of pouring latex paint in order to incorporate the element of chance.
Monique Crabb is an artist whose background was mainly in photography before exploring the world of quilting and natural dyeing. This new approach has opened up a playful and experimental world of colors from plants, wood, food scraps and minerals. The designs are either intuitively pieced or inspired by traditional quilt patterns that span many years and cultures, re-imagined with a contemporary eye.
My drive is process, and my goal is to repurpose discarded fabric and give it new life. The development of a quilt requires the interweaving of many steps and the process encourages me to be patient and compartmentalize my time, thoughts, and actions. I rummage thrift stores looking for well-made natural textiles of varying weaves and textures and I forage for natural dyes in and around my home. I prepare the fibers and natural dyes and introduce them to one another. With my fresh naturally-toned fabric I begin designing a layout, and much like a painter preparing her paints, I, too, carefully select my colored fabric, cut pieces, and slowly start building shapes until one day the flow of lines and color are complete and onto the next steps of machine piecing, hand quilting and hand binding for a complete piece that can live on both a wall like a painting or provide warmth as a bed covering.
ITS NOT COMPLICATED (BUT IT IS)
It’s Not Complicated (But It Is) showcases a world where the trials of growing up in the Internet age are merged with art history. Sara’s work encompasses two larger topics, modern day social culture and the history of women’s representation in art. The subjects in Sara’s paintings take cue’s from her daily routines, her body, and her daily interactions. In her works, Sara asks the questions “how do we create a community in today’s world while maintaining personal freedom, and can we achieve both painlessly. “ In works such as Don’t, Go, Don’t Go, I Don’t Know, we see the back and forth between deciding what to do with an unpredictable lover and realizing you carry the same unpredictability in yourself.
Sara employs a vocabulary that pulls from collage, fiber and abstract painting. Fiber Arts as well as collage have historically been under-valued as women’s work, or simply craft for the purpose of utility, in examples like dress making, or scrapbooking. Here we see these often dismissed art forms brought along side one of the most prominent and male dominated genres of painting in the US, the Abstract Expressionist Movement.
Sara Havekotte is an artist working and living in Baltimore Maryland. She is a graduate from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in Painting and a minor in Art History. Sara was raised in Pittsburgh PA and moved to Baltimore in 2009. She maintains her studio practice at Current Space in downtown Baltimore.
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Ru-jac Records & The Legacy of Baltimore Soul
Saturday, November 11th : 8pm
Arch Social Club
2426 Pennsylvania Avenue :: 21217
Dress attire is required at Arch Social Club.
Ru-Jac Records & The Legacy of Baltimore Soul is an event celebrating the history of the 1960s West Baltimore R&B record label. Featuring performances by Ru-Jac stars Winfield Parker and Joe Quarterman as well as Joy Postell, all backed by young Baltimore musicians. Beginning the night is a panel discussion that takes a deep look into the Ru-Jac Records’ place in the era’s bustling music scene. Discussion moderated by Brooks Long. The event will take place at Arch Social Club, a century-old African-American organization that has been centered in Penn North neighborhood, close to Ru-Jac’s headquarters, for over 40 years.
Purpose
To connect the generations of Baltimore to their rich, largely forgotten musical heritage, using the music of Ru-Jac Records and the story of Rufus Mitchell as a vehicle to reveal the city’s vibrant musical past and uncover important stories of black entrepreneurship.
History
Ru-Jac Records, located at 427 Laurens Street, was owned and operated by Rufus E. Mitchell. An associate of the notorious yet empowering business man Little Willie Adams, Mr. Mitchell was for decades one of the central figures of the Baltimore’s black entertainment scene. Among other places, Mitchell booked at the Baltimore Civic Center (now the Royal Farms Arena), the historic Royal Theatre and the legendary Carr’s Beach, a segregation-era beach for African-Americans that Mitchell and Little Willie turned into a top east coast destination. As general manager of Carr’s Beach, Mitchell booked the most famous black acts of its time to perform, including Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and James Brown. Mitchell’s life is a prime example of black business people turning injustice on its head and finding paths for success.
Through his Ace Bookings business, Rufus maintained a roster of some the area’s very best black pop talent whom he often booked as openers for famous acts. In the early 1960s Rufus began Ru-Jac Records, recording sides for most of his Ace Bookings roster including early Ru-Jac star Winfield Parker, duo Gene & Eddie, Rita Doryse and a young Arthur Conley. Thanks to Mitchell’s relationship with Otis Redding, Redding later produced and co-wrote Conley’s giant hit, “Sweet Soul Music” a #2 Billboard Top 100 hit and enduring soul anthem. Ru-Jac was a launching pad not only for Conley; Winfield Parker and Sir Joe Quarterman found success after the head start provided by Ru-Jac. Ru-Jac Records helps tell the story of a dynamic Baltimore music scene and an ambitious black entrepreneur at the center.
The talent, energy and dynamic ingenuity of 1960s Baltmore is ripe for rediscovery and reclamation of local artistic inheritance. It all starts with this event, Ru-Jac Records & The Legacy of Baltimore Soul.
8pm $10, $8 members (+$3 at the door)
The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation
Ru-Jac Records & The Legacy of Baltimore Soul is made possible through a fellowship grant from The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, which “exists to promote innovation in science and technology, arts, education and social justice.”
