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: Imani Wright
Tuesday, July 10th • 7pm
Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224
19 yr. old singer, saxophonist and composer Imani Wright has already spent 12 years as an artist under the influence of Miles Davis, Queen and Marvin Gaye. Learn how these influences and many more inform Wright’s fresh originality. Have a drink and join Wright and host Brooks Long in our Marquee Lounge for a great evening of music and conversation.
Imani Wj Wright, a 19 year old artist from Baltimore, has been cultivating his musical skills and talents for the past 12 years. His growth as a musician includes his time on scholarship at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins, where he was honored with an “Outstanding Performance” award, and The Lyric Opera House of Baltimore, where he wrote an opera titled “Industrial Love.” He also spent an extensive stint at American University under the auspices of the Washington National Opera. Additionally, he was unanimously voted Male Singer of the Year at his high school. Along with those accomplishments, Imani has also had mentoring from Grammy respected artists such as Khalid and Bilal. Through his various experiences in music, Imani has developed an eclectic sound that is undeniably of his unique creation. However, as pleasing as the sound is here, the listener is also dually challenged to delve deeply into the messages, ideas, and vociferous claims of this young artist.
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Young Blood | Opening Reception
Wednesday, July 11th • 6-9pm
Maryland Art Place
218 West Saratoga Street : 21201
Maryland Art Place presents its 11th annual Young Blood exhibition, showcasing the works of recent Baltimore-area Masters of Fine Art graduates. Featuring:
To date, Young Blood has provided an important post-graduate artistic platform for 85 transitioning Masters of Fine Arts students. Since 2008 this program has continually brought recent graduates together to make new connections and present special selections from their thesis exhibitions. This exhibition will highlight exceptional works ranging from painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and virtual reality.
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Channel Heal: The Writer’s Room | Opening Reception
Thursday, July 12th • 6pm
Reginald F. Lewis Museum
830 East Pratt Street : 21202
Join us for the Opening Reception for the latest Reflections of Baltimore exhibit and the first artist build and coversation around Physicality. Be part of the conversation and the creation of Channel Heal: The Writer’s Room. The artists will be present along with special guests to address the trauma and healing process around our physical selves. Experience and create art in a NEW way with Wickerham & Lomax. This is the first in a four-part conversation and art series wrapped around the final installment of Reflections of Baltimore.
Channel Heal: The Writer’s Room is a work intended to survey various metaphysical phenomena and explore their use as correctives to conflict and trauma. The phenomena engaged in this exhibition include: physicality (the physical attributes of a person); mysticality (relating to the spiritual or symbolic), egotism (excessive focus on the self), and transcendence (going beyond ordinary limits).
Wickerham & Lomax have transformed The Reginald F. Lewis lab space into a writer’s room, a stage, where themes will be discussed and collected as reference material for a future endeavor entitled Channel Heal – a video platform chronicling various Baltimore creatives in their transgressive acts – acts that may go beyond established limits or boundaries. On display are newly fabricated pieces that are aberrations of objects typically used by those in the film and television industry. Dry erase boards, clocks, and post-it notes are sample props of the televisual writer, and in this exhibition they crystallize or define moments that would either be provisional or serve to transform the thoughts, ideas, and gestures into an artwork.
The artists work in the space of complicating binary oppositions – virtual vs. real, individual vs. group, and narrative vs. nonsensical. In this exhibition the installation and subsequent programs work in tandem to present both platform and action as a way of externalizing thoughts on conflict and trauma. Ultimately they will be transitioned into form.
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a gentle synthesis: Suldano Abdiruhman | Opening Reception
Friday, July 13th • 6-9pm
Cardinal
1758 Park Avenue : 21217
The gallery will present a gentle synthesis, a solo show of the work of Suldano Abdiruhman. The artist is a 2018 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, a member of the Black feminist collective BALTI GURLS, and co-founder of 4C Gallery. For Abdiruhman, this exhibition is “a culmination of slow and humble beginnings, material explorations, and linguistic discoveries. Through the gathering and repurposing of bed sheets, dictionaries, field recordings, crayons, and common building materials, a surprising and cartographic language emerges and evolves.”
Opening Reception: Friday, July 13, 6-9 p.m. More on the artist at suldanoa.com
For questions or more information, please contact Alexander Jarman and Ariel Cowen at [email protected].
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Art Practice as Art Therapy
Saturday, July 14: 3-6 PM
Hosted by Waller Gallery and GALLERY CA
2420 Calvert St., Baltimore, Maryland 21218
What happens when the artist uses their work to help them through their journey of mental health? Join us as we talk with artists Qieer Wang, Dominique Butler, and Amelia Eldridge as well as art therapy scholar Catherine Goucher!
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2018 Sondheim Artscape Prize Award Ceremony and Reception
Saturday, July 14th • 6-9pm
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive : 21218
Read BmoreArt’s Review of Sondheim Finalists here.
First-come, first-seated
For one of the summer’s most highly anticipated exhibitions, the BMA and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts present works by six finalists competing for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. The $25,000 fellowship is awarded by an independent panel of jurors each year to a visual artist or visual art collaborators living or working in the Greater Baltimore region.
The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at the BMA on Saturday, July 14 at 7:00 pm. The exhibition will be on view from 6-7, with a reception following the award ceremony.
The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition is held in conjunction with Artscape, America’s largest free arts festival, and is produced by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts.
Installation view, © Nakeya Brown, 2018 Sondheim Artscape Prize Finalist Exhibition. Photo by Christopher Meyers.
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Two Suns and a Bunch of Punks | An Afro House Fundraiser and Preview of Afro Punk Ballet
Saturday, July 14th • 7pm
Single Carrot Theatre
2600 North Howard Street : 21218
Afro House’s Two Suns and a Bunch of Punks is a fundraiser for and preview of Afro Punk Ballet, an afrofuturistic opera-ballet featuring the Astronaut Symphony. This incredible contemporary ensemble, which creates symphonic performance art will perform, providing a preview of what’s to come in the fall: A co-production with Annex Theater of Afro Punk Ballet at Le Mondo in October.
Be a sponsor! You will have an opportunity to the select items you would like to sponsor, from the custom-made helmets that will be worn by the cast to covering the cost of a performance. Proceeds will be used for the production of Afro Punk Ballet.
Tickets provide access the preview and the scrumptious bites the featured makers will create for the event.
Come and join Afro House in creating Disruptive. Music. Culture.
Set years into the future, Afro Punk Ballet delves into the world of two sisters unable to agree on how to handle the catastrophic consequences of a decision made by their late father, Levi, a brilliant military scientist. With a unique spiritual knowledge of space and time, Levi creates a second sun. The unprecedented devastation of his sun brings the nation’s inhabitants near extinction.
