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BmoreArt’s Picks: Baltimore Art Galleries, Openings, and Events June 27 – July 3

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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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<><><><><><><><>Undesign the Redline Exhibit & Conversation: Housing, Health & Education
Tuesday, June 27th : 6-7:30pm

Gallery CA
440 East Oliver Street : 21201

Enterprise Community Partners, Designing the WE, and Gallery CA invite you to kick-off the Undesign the Redline: Exploring the Transformation of Place, Race, and Class in America exhibit at Gallery CA, a contemporary arts space located on the ground floor of the City Arts Apartments I building. Our panel will explore how intentional and systematic racial housing segregation beginning in the 1930s impacts issues of health, education and neighborhood stability today. Engage with us in a conversation about solutions to address these challenges through a cross-sector approach.

Confirmed Speakers:

– Dr. Sonja Brookins Santelises, CEO, Baltimore City Public Schools

– Johnette Richardson, Executive Director, Belair-Edison Neighborhoods, Inc.

– Thibault Manekin, Partner, Seawall Development

– Dr. Samuel Ross, CEO of Bon Secours Baltimore Health System and Executive Vice President at Bon Secours Health System, Inc.

– Wendi Redfern-Curtis, Acting Deputy Commissioner for Land Resources, Baltimore Housing

– April De Simone, Co-Founder, Designing the WE

– David Bowers, VP & Market Leader, Enterprise Community Partners (moderator)

Guided tours of the exhibit will be available before the event from 5-6pm, register by contacting Jessica Sorrell.

<><><><><><><><>MICA MFAST Summer Lecture Series | Mildred Beltré and Oasa DuVerney
Thursday, June 29th : 6pm

MICA Lazarus Center
131 West North Avenue : 21201

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the M.F.A. in Studio Art program are pleased to announce the full schedule of summer lectures from visiting artists. The series begins June 22, and all events are free and open to the public.

The Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine is a project that began when Mildred Beltré and Oasa DuVerney started making art together in each other’s apartments. In the summer of 2010 they brought this activity to the street and co-founded the Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, a constantly evolving public art project exploring community through art-making on Brooklyn sidewalks. As part of this project they created temporary public work, published The Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine presents a guide to Tenant Rights and Community Activities book and held countless street art workshops. BHAM also created Gentrifiers Anonymous, a space where people can admit their complicity in gentrification and work towards being less of the problem and more of the solution.

<><><><><><><><>The Dog & Pony Show | A Sondheim Finalist Alumni Exhibition
Friday, June 30th : 7-9pm

Area 405
405 East Oliver Street : 21201

After twelve years, The Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize has generated an elite alumni of visual artists from the Baltimore / Washington region. Each year, esteemed international jurors select 6-7 finalists for a museum exhibition and the chance to compete for the $25k prize. At this point there are approximately seventy former Sondheim finalists.

The Dog and Pony Show is an Artscape Satellite exhibition that recognizes those who have been previously selected as Sondheim finalists as a community of high achieving visual artists. The exhibit at Area 405 is curated by Stewart Watson, Director of Area 405, and Cara Ober, Editor of BmoreArt, who reached out to all seventy former Sondheim Finalists and invited them, to the best of their ability, to participate. The result is an exhibit featuring over a third of the former finalists designed to celebrate the award and their evolving careers.

Although the title of the exhibit is a tongue-in- cheek response to the spectacle of competitive art, the exhibit will function as a celebration, as well as a critique, of Baltimore’s most prestigious art prize from the perspective of those who have experienced it directly.

Participating artists have been encouraged to create new works in response to the phenomenon of art prizes, both the positive and negative aspects of the experience, and can function as a critique of the artifice inherent in theatrical display. Using serious and humorous approach, as well as metaphorical imagery of dogs, ponies, and stage acts, the artists in this exhibit will honestly examine the vulnerability of artists, definitions of success in the art world, and performative public experiences. As Area 405 is a large space with inherent personality, large installation work and sculpture will form the centerpiece of the show.

The Dog and Pony Show seeks to build community and advocacy within a growing family of Sondheim Finalists, to recognize their achievements and struggles, and to visualize the long-term impact of this prize upon the careers of regionally based artists.

Participating artists include: Chris Lavoie, Chris Palios, Laure Drogoul, Darcie Book, David Page, Frank Day, Hasan Elahi, Jon Duff, Jason Hughes, Jim Leach, Karen Yazinsky, Lauren Frances Adams, Lisa Dillin, Leah Cooper, Magnolia Laurie, Mark Parascandola, Melissa Dickenson, Molly Springfield, Neil Feather, Ryan Hackett, Ryan Syrell, René Treviño, Stephanie Barber, Stewart Watson, Tony Shore, Wickerham & Lomax, and Zoë Charlton.

Top Image: Circus by Hasan Elahi

<><><><><><><><>

GRL PWR Presents Sweat!
Friday, June 30th : 9pm

EMP Collective
307 West Baltimore Street : 21201

A new event series celebrating queer identity and expression through DRAG!

With Performances by

LEGENDARY Drag Kings AND Queens:
Iyana Deschanel
Jen Erich
Saaphyri Wildz
Roman Noodle

GLAM Musical Guest:
Sateen
https://soundcloud.com/sateen-1

ICONIC DJs:
GRL PWR
DJ Pancakes

Location: EMP Collective @ 307 W Baltimore St.
Cover: $7 or $5 in DRAG

**Dnt forget to tip your Drag Queens/Kings**

No harassment, abuse, or violence will be tolerated in this space.

<><><><><><><><>Reverend Albert Lee Wagner: Miracle At Midnight
Saturday, July 1st : 10am-

American Visionary Art Musem
800 Key Highway : 21230

On Saturday, July 1, 2017, The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) proudly opens the first national retrospective of Reverend Albert Lee Wagner’s autobiographical art. Spanning the earliest to his very last creations, this exhibition provides rich visual testimony to a life begun amidst the dire poverty and racism of the South, progressed to self-made business success in the North (despite Wagner’s limited third-grade education), quickly devolved into excess and lust, to its final attainment of spiritual peace filled with Wagner’s ministry of forgiveness and love for all humanity.

Reverend Wagner’s Miracle At Midnight celebrates this Baltimore-based national museum’s latest donation of 51 original artworks by Reverend Albert Lee Wagner donated by Wagner’s close friends, biographers and collectors, fellow artist Gene Kangas and his wife and co-author, Linda. Wagner, recognized as an important folk artist in Ohio and throughout America, is considered Cleveland, Ohio’s premier visionary artist. Reverend Wagner’s large sculptural work, “City Beneath The Sea,” was featured in the Baltimore-based national museum’s 1995 inaugural exhibition, The Tree of Life. A decade ago, Ohio-born collector and philanthropist, Pat Handal, donated to AVAM two of Reverend Wagner’s largest paintings – “Flee From Egypt – Moses Parting The Red Sea,” and “Noah and The Rainbow Sign.” Recently conserved, these two masterpieces are joined by the Kangas’ gifted collection as prized treasures in AVAM’s permanent art collection and are further enriched by the abundant documentary materials collected over decades by Wagner biographers, Gene and Linda Kangas. Rebecca Hoffberger, AVAM Founder and exhibition curator states, “Our permanent collection has been abundantly enriched by these fantastical gifts that pay tribute to one of America’s truest, most personally honest, visionary artists. Wagner’s life and raw art chronicles a true American experience, both at its most imaginably ignoble and for its fertile promise for the attainment of true community and the sublime.”

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