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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Joyce J. Scott + Kyle Hackett | Reception
Wednesday, March 21st : 6-8pm
Goya Contemporary Gallery
3000 Chestnut Avenue, Mill Centre #214 : 21211
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Baltimore Portrait: Artists in Conversation
Wednesday, March 21st : 7pm
Church of the Redeemer
5603 North Charles Street : 21210
What do you want to say to Baltimore through art? Join BMA director Chris Bedford in conversation with Baltimore portrait artists Amy Sherald, Michelle Obama’s portrait artist and Stephen Towns, mixed media and muralist artist.
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Framework Panel #27: Challenging Colonialism in Contemporary Art
Hosted by Mexican Cultural Institute DC and Transformer
Wednesday, March 21, 2018: 6:30 – 8:00 pm
The Mexican Cultural Institute
2829 16th St NW
Washington, DC 20009
Attendance is FREE
Transformer continues our ongoing FRAMEWORK Panel Series with FRAMEWORK Panel #27: Challenging Colonialism in Contemporary Art. This panel will highlight emerging artists challenging commonly held notions of how their identities have been defined through colonialism, history, and popular culture.
This panel is presented in conjunction with Transformer’s spring exhibition, Queer Tropics, a group exhibition that considers the abstract idea of the tropics and how that vision has been variously created, reinforced, and confronted. Originally presented at Pelican Bomb Gallery X in New Orleans, November 2017, Queer Tropics features artworks that examine the visual and cultural systems through which one imagines the landscape of the tropics as a site of leisure, sensuality, and play.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
Ash Arder is a trans-disciplinary artist who creates idea and object-based systems for interpreting and re-imagining interspecies relations (i.e. relations between humans and plants). Her highly flexible, research-based approach examines these relationships primarily through pop culture and historic (both personal and shared) lenses. She is a 2018 MFA candidate in the fiber department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Victori+Mo and BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn, NY, A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and Art Matrix Gallery in Chicago, IL and an upcoming solo show at Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY. Recent group exhibitions include shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Pelican Bomb in New Orleans, Transformer Gallery in Washington DC, and Freight + Volume in New York among others. She was selected by ArtNet as one of “14 Emerging Female Artists to watch in 2017” and has been featured in online and print publications like Brooklyn Magazine, Blouin ArtInfo, Whitewall Magazine, Ingenue Magazine, Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.
Dulcina Abreu was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Abreu’s artwork is primarily focused on dance as medium, creating spaces to talk about resistance and identity through performance art, installation, poetry and sculpture. With pieces as “Lady Walk” or “Cartografia” Abreu plays in between representation and translation of the aesthetics of Dominican labor in NY, each one piece inspired by transcultural phenomenon around construction craftsmanship or basic assembling line performance. Zie projects have been presented with art institutions as New Museum, Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery, Sheila C Johnson Design Center and Studio 301.
Hoesy Corona is a multidisciplinary artist and the founding co-director of Labbodies, a visual arts organization that creates opportunities for artists working in the arena of performance art. Corona’s unapologetically colorful, sculptural and performance-based works have appeared at The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, The Queens Museum, Visarts, Transformer DC, Glass House Project, Kern Gallery, Haggerty Museum, The Peale Museum, Panoply Performance Laboratory and The Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, among others. Corona is the recipient of a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant administered by The Contemporary.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR:
Edgar Endress is a Chilean artist who works within the limits of social-practice and sculpture, interactive media, collaboration and public engagement. Most of Endress’ work involves working with communities with an emphasis on popular culture. His works of video art and documentaries reveal a very personal style of camera and editing, with a constant interest in the relationship between the natural landscape and the built one, as well as in the human presence and the personal stories that are held in these spaces. He is also the founder of the Floating Collective Laboratory, a mobile museum that aims to bring art closer to the daily life of the public and stimulate participation in contemporary and social art. He also directs an experimental laboratory of arts and technologies at George Mason University.
The Mexican Cultural Institute of Washington, D.C. is committed to enriching the relationship between Mexico and the United States by sharing Mexico’s vibrant cultural past and present with the local community. Since its establishment in 1990, the Institute has succeeded in presenting diverse, ongoing cultural programs and has become a thriving artistic center in the heart of Washington. Over the past two decades, the Institute has developed cultural programming in partnership with many institutions in the nation’s capital including the Smithsonian Institution, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, among others. www.instituteofmexicodc.or
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Center Stage Mobile Unit’s Twelfth Night
Thursday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 25th
Center Stage Third Space
700 North Calvert Street : 21202
Mobile Unit, an exciting new initiative of Baltimore Center Stage, that breaks down the walls of conventional theater spaces by taking high-quality theater to economically, culturally and geographically diverse communities across the Baltimore area, including homeless, elderly, incarcerated. The project launched in spring 2017 following a successful pilot project in 2016.
With a minimalist design and a compact cast of five playing all the parts, the Mobile Unit is a streamlined and nimble production that travels throughout the Baltimore area. Armed with a good story, costumes and minimal props, professional actors of the Mobile Unit bring both classic and contemporary works to life for a variety of communities, wherever they are. The audiences’ unlimited imagination is at the center of the action in the intimate comfort of community cafeterias, recreation rooms, gyms, or lobbies.
It’s theater up close and personal for all people regardless of education or class, furthering Baltimore Center Stage’s mission of Access for All.
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MICA GRAD SHOW ll: Opening Reception
Friday, March 23: 5-7 pm
1300 W Mount Royal Ave, Baltimore, MD 21217
MICA’s Office of Graduate Studies is delighted to announce GRAD SHOW II, featuring students from the MFA, Graphic Design, Illustration Practice, Post Baccalaureate Fine Art and Post Baccalaureate Graphic Design. MICA GRAD SHOW II will be on view March 23rd – April 8th in Riggs and Leidy Gallery, Lazarus Center. Opening Reception, Friday, March 23rd, 5PM – 7PM.
Visit micagradshow.com for a complete schedule of exhibitions, film screenings, public programs, and student-curated installations throughout Baltimore city.
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Phil Wiggins & The Chesapeake Sheiks
Friday, March 23rd : 8pm
The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224
Phil Wiggins is a versatile traditional harmonica player, continuing the Piedmont blues tradition, a gentle and melodic blues style of the mid-Atlantic region. He plays the diatonic ten-hole harmonica in the country blues style, cupping both hands around the instrument and playing acoustically. His sound is not shaped by the gear, the microphone or amplifier when performing on stage; instead, he relies on complex syncopated patterns, breath-control and rhythm, stylistic virtuosity and fiery solo runs. He is one of the true masters of this instrument and his virtuosity has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and received a National Heritage Fellowship this past year, the highest honor the U.S. bestows on traditional musicians. Tonight, he leads his newest group, the Chesapeake Sheiks, a rocking band that delves deep into the blues swing catalog withThe Chesapeake Sheiks consist of Phil on harmonica and vocals. Ian Walters is on with piano. Marcus Moore on violin, Matt Kelley on guitar and Steve Wolf upright bass. Plus, Baakari Wilder does tap dancing and dance percussion.
FRI MAR 23 | 8PM | $23, $20 Members (+$3 at the door)
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A Suspended State in Last, a solo project by Sessa Englund | Opening
Saturday, March 24th : 7-10pm
Guest Spot @ The Reinstitute
1715 North Charles Street : 21202
A Suspended State in Last examines the adjournment of art as historical matter. Englund explores ideas surrounding art rituals as a potential parallel oeuvre, subsequently complicating how art relates to the shared material experience. Englund’s critique falls on materialism as artistic production; they investigate the relationships between matter and bodies, from the hierarchies of gender to the abject and phobic. The work explores the vitality of substances and addresses how the concepts of inter-materiality and trans-materiality emerge in the hybrid zones of socio-political experimentation.
Much of material history has been reserved for the sake of capital value, such that we have forgotten the importance of art as a shared cultural value. The increasing importance of humanitarian issues, fueled by wealth disparity and the current climate crisis, has challenged our cultural Institutions into doing more than simply represent the change that art embodies.
It should be the role of our cultural institutions to be willing actors and agents for expanded notions of time, space, process, and participation; not to rely on the antiquities of the past to reinforce the vitality of institutional connoisseurship. The allure of material history as memory causes an inability to anticipate socio-political ills, thus impeding the trajectory towards fulfillment of a greater purpose.
Sessa Englund is an artist and curator working across sculptural and time-based mediums, based in NYC and Gothenburg, Sweden. They received their BFA at the School of Art+Design, S.U.N.Y. Purchase, and is a member and founder of Disclaimer Gallery and Cura (Projects).
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Classical Revolution Baltimore Presents: Lost & Found Series
Saturday, March 24th : 7:30pm
Motor House
120 West North Avenue : 21201
The Lost and Found series features new and rarely performed older music, focusing on musical contributions by women and people of color, while exploring historical and social contexts that caused their work to be overlooked and undervalued.
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Get your ticket for BmoreArt’s lecture next week…
BmoreArt: Ethics and the Art Gallery: Heather Darcy Bhandari & Amy Eva Raehse
Thursday, March 29: 6-9 pm
The Motor House
120 West North Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland 21201
Free with RSVP – Tickets by Eventbrite
The Re-Model is a BmoreArt Speaker Series featuring Strategic Career Thinking from Art World Insiders
Join us for a discussion on art galleries and ethics with Goya Contemporary Executive Director Amy Eva Raehse (Baltimore, MD) and Heather Darcy Bhandari (NY, NY), an Independent Curator and co-founder of The Remix, author of ART/WORK, and former director at Mixed Greens, a commercial gallery in NY.
Thursay, March 29 / Doors open at 6:30 / Lecture at 7- Join us before or after in The Showroom, Motor House’s cafe and bar
Motor House Theater
Free to the public with an RSVP! Seating is limited.
