BmoreArt

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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Miguel de Cervantes is the single most read author in human history. In the early seventeenth century, Cervantes – a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain’s wars against the Ottoman Empire – penned the famous Don Quixote, which has sold more copies than any other book besides the Bible. With this story of a poor nobleman who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures, Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller. He invented a way of writing. William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction shows how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction.Egginton details the many influences that converge in Cervantes’ writings and shows how his work – especially Don Quixote – radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that outlook went on to infiltrate art, politics and science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.

William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and a professor of German and Romance languages and literatures at the Johns Hopkins University. His highly praised academic books include How the World Became a Stage, The Theater of Truth and The Philosopher’s Desire, and he has coedited several other volumes. He has written for The New York Times’ online forum The Stone, and regularly writes for Stanford University’s Arcade. Egginton lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and Vienna, Austria, with his family.

MICA
1300 West Mount Royal Avenue : 21217

Stamp Gallery
University of Maryland : College Park

Collective Monument presents works by three contemporary artists spanning three continents, all of whom investigate the concept of monumentality as a complex and suggestive cultural form. The exhibition elaborates the nuanced, transnational networks of power, memory, and participation that emerge from monuments as objects and as collaborative projects. It invites audiences to consider monuments as artworks that propose new forms of collective action and paradigms of belonging. The exhibition calls on viewers to question how monuments reflect conditions of global interconnectedness and speak in dialogue with diverse audiences today. Collective Monument is on view at the Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park, January 25 through March 11, 2017.

Bird in Hand
11 East 33rd Street : 21218

Heather Lyn Mann was a battle-weary environmental advocate in Madison, Wisconsin, struggling over what to do about climate change, when she and her husband decided to explore the Atlantic on a small sloop. Capturing six years of living afloat, Ocean of Insight is a chronological unfolding of disasters and discoveries – life-threatening storms, the boredom of isolation, societies on the brink of extinction, sinking ships, colorful Caribbean characters, near collisions, a pirate scare and more. Throughout, the ocean becomes Mann’s teacher, transforming her with uncompromising lessons on how to harmonize with natural order, and ways to let in fearlessness, resilience, happiness, impermanence, balance, compassion, skillful action and beginner’s mind.

Spiritual ecologist Heather Lyn Mann is a practitioner of Buddhism, sailing and mindful advocacy. Mann founded and led the not-for-profit Center for Resilient Cities – an organization mobilizing inner-city residents to restore natural beauty and function in damaged neighborhood landscapes. She also co-edits Touching the Earth: A Newsletter of Earth Holding Actions in the Plum Village Tradition.

Goya Contemporary
3000 Chestnut Avenue, Mill Centre 214 : 21211

Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Contemporary American artist Timothy App (B. 1947 Akron, OH), whose work is in numerous private and public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox in NY, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Santa Fe, The Tucson Museum of Art, Art Cloud Korea, among others.

Timothy App attended Kent State University in Ohio, where he received a BFA degree in painting in 1970. He continued his study of painting at Tyler School of Art of Temple University and in 1974 received an MFA. During his thirty-seven years of teaching, he has taught at Pomona College in California, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and since 1990 at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. With many one-person and group exhibitions since 1970, he has shown his abstract paintings regionally, nationally and abroad including in Poland and Japan.   App is a recipient of a NEA fellowship in painting, as well as an individual artist’s grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. Twice he has received the Trustee’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at MICA, and has been nominated for the Richard C. Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship. In addition to painting and teaching, App has written on the work of other artists, lectured on his own work, and curated exhibitions.

Rice Gallery
McDaniel College : Westminster

This exhibition features works by four McDaniel alumnae, including Caitlin Bennett, a 2013 graduate from Bothell, Wash., Sara Caporaletti, a 2014 graduate from Damascus, Md., Julia “Cheeny” Celebrado-Royer, a 2014 graduate from Baltimore, and chanan delivuk, a 2008 graduate from Baltimore.

Caitlin Bennett displays postcards from her “Greetings from America” series created in response to the media coverage of the race riots in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, while Sara Caporaletti displays her recent mixed media work examining her experiences as a practicing Catholic. A Filipino artist, Julia “Cheeny” Celebrado-Royer creates installations, sculptures and conceptual works using discarded, recycled and re-purposed materials. In addition, chanan delivuk uses new media, including photography, video and audio, to create installations that focus on family, conversation and food, such as “navigating family in an unfamiliar place” about her trip to Croatia.

Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive : 21218

MICA Meyerhoff Gallery
1303 West Mount Royal Avenue : 21217

Mickalene Thomas: Muse and tête-à-tête highlights photographs by Mickalene Thomas and various photographers. Mickalene Thomas, known for her large-scale, multi-textured, and rhinestone-encrusted paintings of domestic interiors and portraits, has also identified the photographic image as a defining touchstone for her practice. Thomas first began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale—a pivotal experience for her as an artist.

While working across multiple series, much of her photographic work functions as a personal act of deconstruction and reappropriation—both of images she has created herself and those she has singled out as influences. With each series, she grapples with and asserts new definitions of beauty and inspiration. Thomas’s portraits draw equally from 1970s black-is- beautiful images of women such as supermodel Beverly Johnson and actress Vonetta McGee; Édouard Manet’s odalisque figures; and the mise-en-scène studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé, to mention a few. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, this collection of portraits and staged scenes reflects a very personal community of inspiration as well—a collection of muses that includes herself, her mother, and her friends and lovers, emphasizing the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work. The accompanying Aperture publication, Muse, is the first to gather together her various approaches to photography, including portraits, collages, Polaroids, and other processes.

The idea of communities of inspiration will be further carried out via tête-à-tête, an installation of work from photographers and key images, which have inspired her. This will include work from older generations of artists, such as Malick Sidibé and Carrie Mae Weems, and by more contemporary artists, such as Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, who are part of her generation or younger, and may in turn find inspiration in Thomas’s own practice. Thomas will curate this portion of the exhibition.

VisArts
155 Gibbs Street : Rockville

VisAbility: This exhibit embodies the artists of VisAbility Art Lab and the variety of interests, techniques, and artistic viewpoints of the Art Lab’s members. Featuring the artwork of James Billian, Mara Clawson, Max DeMulder, Carlin Jones, and Lindsey Schaufelberger, the works presented make visible the thoughts and dreams of these artists, claiming their right to a place at the creative table.

Margaret Noble: Margaret Noble creates objects, installations, and performances that investigate the echoes of time in contemporary identity and environment. She focuses on narratives and legacies left behind by families, media, and technology. Noble uses found objects, constructs new objects, and designs sounds to activate spaces, reference history, and pose questions about perception. She draws on a wide variety of materials and symbols to juxtapose ideas. She plays with time travel as she moves between generational influences, historical myths, and the future.

2016 Breslar Residents: Stretch, Cut, Talk, Pull features paintings, drawings, and collaborative projects made by 2016 VisArts Bresler Resident artists Mei Mei Chang, Amy Hughes Braden, and Jay Hendrick. These artists were selected to spend four months in a studio at VisArts making new work. The 2016 VisArts Bresler Residency called for artists whose primary studio practice focuses on painting or drawing. The residency offers artists the time and space to create a new body of work, evolve an existing body of work, or develop a project in a stimulating, supportive environment. The results are three studio investigations that question what painting and drawing are, how they can be made, and how they fit into the historical context surrounding these two activities.

Amelia Toelke: Ornament, pattern, and decoration are the details that mark humanity. Through the vocabularies of jewelry, architectural ornament, and signage, Amelia Toelke’s work engages these details to address the rich human history of adornment and the shared understanding of visual language.

A combination of sculpture and installation, her work lies at the interstice of the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and hovers between object and image, the real, the representative. Through an integration of process, content, and material, and a balance of excess and restraint, she aims to invoke a sensorial experience and embody a collective human spirit.

The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224

Amy Sherald, the first woman to win the National Portrait Gallery’s prestigious Outwin Boochever Award (2016), an artist who is currently featured in the National Museum of African American Art and Culture, and on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine, is the center of the upcoming Creative Alliance exhibition About Face, opening Saturday, December 10^th. Since she became a resident artist at Creative Alliance in 2014, Sherald’s painting career has experienced a rapid rise the international art scene, earning important and well-deserved recognition for her life-sized portraits. Through her work, along with Rozeal, Tim Okamura, and Ebony G. Patterson, the exhibition About Face turns its attention to under-represented communities, historically marginalized by the genre of portraiture, combining her portraits with a selection of the nation’s best contemporary figurative artists.

Each artist in the exhibition tackles stereotypes of race in different ways: Amy Sherald paints the flesh of her subjects in grayscale to remove specific connotations of skin tone and race all the while costuming them in a manner that contradicts the roles and stereotypes historically associated with black culture; Rozeal addresses the historical use of black face and the crinkling of hair in Japanese culture to make subjects appear more African. Additionally her paintings update the classical look of Japanese woodcuts with modern settings; Tim Okamura juxtaposes the rawness and urgency of street art with realistic technique to create an accessible visual language through portraiture; Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson  creates highly embellished, collaged, and appliquéd tapestries, as well as photographic prints with subject matter that allude to bodies, yet lacks specificity.

The surface treatments, or “face” of each artist’s work, demand a deeper recognition from the audience that black identity is hardly as simple as it has been portrayed throughout western European art history. Through each artist’s work we are given, and asked to give, a more complex look at the composition of black identity and how it is perceived in society today.

The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224

The eight resident artists who live and work at Creative Alliance year-round invite you to “stay tuned” as they provide insight to their unique processes through this exhibition of purposefully unfinished work.

Featuring: Amy Sherald, Paul Rucker, Tiffany C. Lange, Alice Gadzinski, Jerry Allen Gilmore, Alfonso Fernandez, Cameron Shojaei, and Adam Davies.

Galerie Myrtis
2224 North Charles Street : 21218

Take Me Away to the Stars, explores how violence is processed through escapism, religion and myth. Using the historic and mythological chronicles of Nat Turner’s historic slave rebellion, Stephen Towns constructs a contemporary story through drawings, paintings and quilts.

The Walters Art Gallery
600 North Charles Street : 21201

Celebrate the Year of the Rooster with art activities and traditional Lunar New Year performances by the Baltimore Chinese School, the Johns Hopkins Lion Dance Troupe, and the Korean dance groups Sang Hee Ju Traditional Dance Company and Stepping Stones.

Supported by the Women’s Committee of the Walters Art Museum.

The Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive : 21218