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Chul Hyun Ahn: Light/Continuum |Opening Reception
Thursday, January 23 • 6-8pm
@ C. Grimaldis Gallery

Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present Light/Continuum, a solo exhibition of works by Korean artist Chul Hyun Ahn.  As an investigation of infinite space, Ahn uses light, color, and illusion to immerse his viewers in deep landscapes that bridge the gap between the conscious and subconscious.

Chul Hyun Ahn constructs illusionistic environments, providing a space for contemplation. His sculptures urge the viewer to consider man’s boundless ability for physical and spiritual travel while exploiting notions of infinity and the poetics of emptiness.

Ahn has translated geometric painting and the Zen practice of meditation into an art of light, space, and technology, enticing the viewer to look deeply into his frame of environments. His works create an optical and bodily illusion of infinity through apparent limitless space. The notion of the void distinguishes his work amid the vast panoply of ways that artists have used light as a medium since the experiments of the 1920s and particularly since the 1960s.

Chul Hyun Ahn is an artist of international acclaim, with works in numerous public and private collections including the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Hearst Foundation, Movado Group, the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation, Delaware Art Museum, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum. Ahn participated in Art Basel Hong Kong 2019 in collaboration with La Prairie, Switzerland. He lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland and has been represented by C. Grimaldis Gallery since 2002.

Chul Hyun Ahn: Light /Continuum will be on view from January 23 through February 29, 2020. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, January 23, 6 – 8 pm. Hours for C. Grimaldis Gallery, which is free and open to the public, are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am – 5:30 pm.

Barbers and Porters: Pillars of Community – Schroeder Cherry | Opening Reception
Thursday, January 23 • 6-8pm
@ The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall

One of Baltimore’s best kept secrets is artist Schroeder Cherry. With his 2019 Artscape Sondheim Finalist status, Cherry quickly became a fan favorite.  Now, after years of producing an extraordinary multi-discipline body of art, Cherry is poised to step beyond his unsung artist status with his solo exhibition, Barbers and Porters: Pillars of Community at The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall.  Opening on January 23rd and on view until February 28th, Barbers and Porters presents Cherry’s newest series, the Barber Shop, and glances from his poignant Porters series.

The Barber Shop Series is inspired by those safe places where African Americans gather for culture, grooming, community, entrepreneurship, debate, politics, and perspectives on every day events.  After the Civil War, Chicago businessman George M. Pullman hired thousands of African-American men, many former enslaved, to serve white passengers traveling across the country on his luxury railroad sleeping cars.  While they were underpaid, overworked, and endured constant racism on the job, the porters would eventually fuel the Great Migration, shape a new black middle class, and ultimately launch the civil rights movement.  This is the inspiration for Dr. Cherry’s Porter Series.

A native of Washington, DC, Cherry began making art and playing with puppets in his youth.  Cherry earned a Bachelor of Arts in Painting and Puppetry from the University of Michigan, a Master’s degree in Museum Education from The George Washington University, and a Doctorate in Museum Education from Columbia University.  Cherry’s works are informed by a broad sweep of narratives, literature, mythology, music, current events, and steep in United States history.  Although his preferred medium is acrylic with found objects on wood, audiences will find familiar items such as keys and locks, as well as cultural identifiers like cowrie shells in his creations.

Currently, Dr. Cherry teaches Museum Studies at Morgan State University.  He has held museums positions at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Maryland Historical Society.  His artwork has been exhibited at MAXgallery, Hamilton Arts Collective, Fleckenstein Gallery, Maryland Art Place, RESORT, The Peale Center, and the Watergate Gallery.

Cherry’s series present significant African American and American history through art.  His Porters Series is rivaled only by artist, Jacob Lawrence’s, The Great Migration series.  Schroeder Cherry’s Barbers and Porters: Pillars of Community, will be on view at The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall from January 23, 2020 through Black History Month, February 28, 2020.

Larry Cook: Eternal Splendor | Closing + Artist’s Talk
Saturday, January 25 • 2-4pm
@ Galerie Myrtis

In “Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood” Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson describe the posing and posturing of black men as a tool “to communicate power, toughness, detachment, and style-self – a carefully crafted persona that is key to the negotiation of black urban environments.” I am interested in how photography encapsulates this persona—specifically within prison and club photography aesthetics. Posing for the camera provides an outlet in which the subject can reclaim agency.

Eternal Splendor explores the cultural aesthetic of “club” and prison photography to examine how urban culture and incarceration systems become entwined through backdrops. The backdrop is central for its relationship to the formal, social, and cultural aspects of photographic history. My work includes found polaroids of subjects posing in front of backdrops to focus on elements of performance, expression, and spectacle. I employ elements of pictorial realism and fantasy to examine the broader questions of status, individualism, and materialism within black culture.

Lola Flash Now: 40 Years After MICA | Opening Reception
Saturday, January 25 • 4-7pm
@ Gallery Blue Door

Lola Flash uses photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. Since graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art forty years ago, she has established herself as an international artist. Lola’s work is included in public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2018 Lola and her photography were featured in an article in The New York Times. Her most recent solo show took place, in London in 2019, at Autograph Gallery. Lola is also a member of the long-standing Kamoinge Photo Collective in Harlem. Her projects are an insiders’ account of the many ways black and gay people are perceived and how selected images have affected our psyche. She identifies as black and gay and for 40 years Lola has been committed to deconstructing racism, sexism and homophobia through challenging photographic imagery.

Gallery Blue Door is very excited for this powerful exhibit and pleased to have this exhibit coordinate with Lola’s talk at MICA on Feb. 21st with Dr. Leslie King Hammond. (Details in the gallery website)

On the Verge: 25 New and Emerging Artists | Reception
Saturday, January 25 • 6-8pm
@ The Creative Alliance
On view: JAN 25 – FEB 22

The artists represented in On the Verge: 25 New and Emerging Artists embrace the rich diversity of the artistic community in both background and style. Discover works that range in style, media, and material created by artists from across the globe. Local talent representing Baltimore and Washington share the space with global up-and-comers from Japan and Pakistan. Each piece invites you to experience the artist’s culture, history, or personal story in a unique way.

Creative Alliance is proud to support these artists on their professional journey by providing a space within which they might push their visions, take artistic risks, and experiment in their storytelling. Celebrate our 25th year with 25 artists!

ARTISTS INCLUDED:
Jack Coyle
Walter Cruz
Sara Dittrich
Italo Duarte
Nicole Dyer
Alexandre Edoh Yao Amegah
Erin Fitzpatrick
Andrew Flanders
Kayla Fryer
Carrie Fucile
Jerrell Gibbs
Alexis Gomez
Taha Heydari
Jani Hileman
Kei Ito
Megan Koeppel
Amani Lewis
Charles Mason III
James “Alpha” Massaquoi
Murjoni Merriweather
Jason Patterson
J. Alex Schechter
Sul-Jee Scully
You Wu
Kyle Yearwood

Karen Yasinsky: One Night Only | Closing Reception
Saturday, January 25 • 1-5pm
@ Resort

Documentation of Karen Yasinsky’s solo exhibition One Night Only is up on our website. View individual works and installation views here.

One Night Only is extended for an additional week. Please join us on Saturday, January 25, 2020 from 1 – 5pm for the closing reception.

In the series that comprises One Night Only, Yasinsky examines the psyches and postures of the stand-up comedian and how the body is used in comic and stylized performance. Film stills from Aidan performing as well as portraits of her as an “other” are interspersed with re-photographed fragments of Paul Outerbridge fetishized studio nudes. The prints are altered with obsessive dots, small cartoon heads and ribbons.

While comedy and performance rely on timing, these works indulge in space. Individual seconds are picked apart into the minutiae that links them, creating a physical, anthropomorphic presence for the charged, static energy surrounding the figure. Desire and voyeurism enter these spaces, and are mollified with the artist’s orchestrated interventions, the superimposed a layer of activity over the still photographic image. The hand-applied layers focus on process and repetition, postponing completion and disrupting any anticipatory reading of the photographic image.

Header Image: Karen Yasinsky