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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Scott Pennington: Two Minute Joys | Opening Reception
Thursday, January 18th : 6-9pm

Maryland Art Place
218 West Saratoga Street :: 21201

Scott Pennington is a Maryland born artist specializing in large-scale participatory installation and sculptural assemblage works. Drawing upon his background as a furniture and cabinet maker, Pennington utilizes woodworking and construction techniques to create colorful, detailed works of art that engage varied audiences and invigorate public spaces. Pennington’s work suggests a tangible, yet illusory reality that examines labor, consumer culture and the pursuit of simple pleasures and the construction of nostalgic human connections both genuine and fictitious.

“Growing up in a small Maryland town, the traveling carnival that came for a single week every summer was a welcome distraction for many families including my own. We would anticipate the sounds, sights, and smells of this miraculous event all year, attending the annual spectacle with an almost spiritual devotion. The social space that the gathering of rides, games, and attractions creates is a comforting yet surreal landscape that seems to strike at our innermost desires to be transported from normality.” – Pennington

Pennington’s work has been featured in public arts festivals across the country. Notable exhibitions include Artscape in Baltimore, Maryland (2008, 2010 and 2014), The Scottsdale Arts Festival in Arizona (2013), Parking Day in Arlington, Virginia, as well as the inaugural Light City Baltimore (2016). Pennington has also worked in partnership with numerous arts organizations for public or alternative space projects including Art on the Artbus in Arlington, VA, and with Napoleon Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

<><><><><><><><>Film Screening: Troublemakers
Thursday, January 18th : 6:30pm doors, 7pm screening

The Kreeger Museum
2401 Foxhole Road :: Washington DC

Troublemakers unearths the history of land art in the late 1960s and early 1970s and features a cadre of renegade artists that sought to transcend the limitations of painting and sculpture by producing earthworks on a monumental scale in the desert of the American southwest.

The film includes rare footage and interviews which unveil the enigmatic lives and careers of storied artists Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), Walter De Maria (The Lightning Field) and Michael Heizer (Double Negative); a headstrong troika that established the genre. As the film makes clear, in making works that can never be possessed as an object in a gallery, these troublemakers stand in marked contrast to the hyper-speculative contemporary art world of today.

<><><><><><><><>Land/Trust | Opening Reception
Friday, January 19th : 6-8pm

MICA Meyerhoff Gallery, Fox Building
1303 West Mount Royal Avenue :: 21217

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) presents “Land/Trust,” an exhibition of six local, national and international contemporary artists exploring their relationships to the land and their positions as community activists, caretakers, investigators and researchers in an era of ecological crisis. In forging these intimate relationships, the participating artists illuminate systematically neglected spaces, question imposed political and social boundaries and facilitate conversations on issues of ownership and possession of the ground we travel on everyday. Accompanying the exhibition will be a panel discussion, artist talks, film screenings and a Toxic Tour led by Glenn Ross.

“Land/Trust” opens Friday, Jan. 19, and runs through Thursday, Feb. 22, at MICA’s Meyerhoff Gallery, Fox Building, 1303 W Mt. Royal Ave. A reception will take place Friday, Jan. 19, 6 – 8 p.m.

Featured artists include Margaret Boozer, Demian DinéYazhi´, MICA’s Rinehart School of Sculpture M.F.A. Director Maren Hassinger, Mary Mattingly, Nadia Myre and Glenn Ross.

“Land/Trust” was organized by the Curatorial Practice M.F.A. class of 2019 under the direction of José Ruiz, director of the M.F.A. in Curatorial Practice program, and Gerald Ross, director of exhibitions.

The exhibition was curated by Jingyao (Joan) Cen, Jared Christensen, Rhonda Dallas, Maria Emilia Duno, Margo Elsayd, Joshua Gamma, Tracey Jen, Minzi Li, Allie Linn, Joseph Orzal and Jiayi Zhong.

About the Artists

Margaret Boozer (b. 1966 Anniston, AL) explores the intersection of art and science through ongoing research into native clays and soils. Recent exhibitions include Harbor Studies at Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver and Dirt Drawings at the Katzen Arts Center at American University. Boozer lives and works in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

Demian DinéYazhi’ (b. 1983 Gallup, NM) is a Diné artist working to address decolonization, queerness, and feminism through poetry, posters, publications, and new media. Recent projects include Locusts: A Post-Queer Nation Zine and Death Dance at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. DinéYazhi´ lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Maren Hassinger (b. 1947 Los Angeles, CA) explores changes in nature in relationship to people through installation, video, and sculpture. Recent exhibitions include Magnetic Fields at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, which has traveled to multiple institutions. Hassinger lives and works in New York.

Mary Mattingly (b. 1978 Rockville, CT) creates living systems from existing industrial and military infrastructure to investigate humans’ relationships with each other, with wild and urban space, and with corporate and political entities. Recent projects include Swale, a public, floating food forest on a barge in New York City, and WetLand in Sag Harbor, NY. Mattingly lives and works in New York.

Nadia Myre (b. 1974 Montreal, QC) employs collaborative processes as a strategy for engaging in conversations about identity, resilience, and the politics of belonging. Recent exhibitions include Code Switching at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Montréal and Decolonial Gesture or Doing it Wrong? Refaire le Chemin at the McCord Museum. Myre lives and works in Montreal where she is represented by Art Mûr.

Glenn Ross (b. 1949 Baltimore, MD) is an activist, urban environmentalist, and community organizer from East Baltimore who has been conducting Toxic Tours for over a decade in order to teach residents about the environmental hazards of Baltimore’s landscape. Recent exhibitions include Headquarters: Investigating the Creation of the Ghetto and the Prison Industrial Complex and Crowd of the Person, two multi-sited projects presented by The Contemporary from 2005 to 2006 in Baltimore. Ross lives and works in Baltimore.

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Test Pattern // Bodies in Sounded Space // (un)familiar territory | Openings
Friday, January 19th : 6-9pm

School 33 Art Center
1427 Light Street :: 21230

Test Pattern (Main Gallery)

A group exhibition featuring works by:

Tom Boram, April Camlin, Roxana Alger Geffen, Luke Ikard, LoVid and Rives Wiley

Curated by Melissa Webb

Test Pattern demonstrates a collective longing for reconnection with the simplicity of the analog era, while examining the psychology of our multi-generational society post Digital Revolution. Alternating between the material and the virtual, these artists layer analog and digital technologies through the use of video and sound, textile, painting, sculpture, and live performance. Throughout their processes of making they convert voltage into data, synthesized and percussive sound into imagery, and computerized experiences into physical objects. The resulting works explore social conventions and family life in the Information Age, the handmade vs the digitally rendered, the preservation and degradation of information, and ultimately, the relationship between the simulated and the tangible.

 Bodies in Sounded Space (Members Gallery)

An exhibition of sculpture and musical performance by Fionn Duffy and Katie Shlon

Bodies in Sounded Space explores the architectural and social boundaries that differentiate sound from music. Fionn Duffy and Katie Shlon investigate the role our bodies play in creating a score for new sound works and how what we see influences what we hear. The artists are interested in how humans alter the sonic fabric of our surroundings and how space, as a body, responds to our actions.

Transforming architectural space into the body of an instrument, the artists create sculptural interventions as structures for sound. These act as listening devices and instruments, creating new sounds or triggering collected audio recordings. The artists test the ways in which introducing a set of tools or pathways into a space transforms an audience’s experience. Movement through the space activates the instrument: bodies experiencing localized ‘music’ dependent on positions relative to permanent and interventional structures.

 This project is supported by a Rubys Artist Project Grant for Performing Arts. The Rubys Artist Project Grants were conceived and initiated with start-up funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and are a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. 

(un)familiar territory (Project Space)

An installation by Bobby Coleman

 (un)familiar territory by Baltimore artist Bobby Coleman is an immersive art installation that echoes the urban environment through an abstract lens. Through large-scale wood-panel paintings created with “oops” paint and sculptural components, Coleman interprets the visual noise and chaotic nature that confront us on an everyday basis. Common urban elements are translated into familiar yet foreign lines, forms, and colors, and incorporated into deeply layered compositions that force the viewer to consider time and space within the work. What once represented a street sign may be adapted and built upon until it is only a faint memory — clouded and recontextualized over time. Coleman explores the boundaries of traditional painting, allowing the works to interact by reaching from one to the next, creating an abstract urban landscape. To step inside Coleman’s (un)familiar territory is to enter an environment none of us know, yet all vaguely recognize.

<><><><><><><><>A Night Of Black Brazilian Film
Friday, January 19th : 7pm doors, 7:30 screening

Motor House
120 West North Avenue :: 21201

Nilewater Multimedia Presents

in partnership with Black Cinema Itinerant Forum and Motor House:

A Night of Black Brazilian Film will showcase a selection of short movies made by the new generation of black filmmakers to provide a panorama of the recent film production in the country. In the program, five films will be screened preceded by Soul in the Eye, a movie made by Zózimo Bulbul, the founding father of Black Brazilian Film, in 1973.

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Film Program:

Soul in the Eye, by Zózimo Bulbul (1973, 11 min).

Travessia, by Safira Moreira  (2017, 5 min).

Merê, by Urânia Munzanzu (2017, 15 min).

God (Vinicius Silva, 2016, 25 min).

Jerusa’s Day, by Vivane Ferreira, (2014, 20 min).

<><><><><><><><>Open Hours: YAAAS!: Towson University x Refugee Youth Project
Saturday, January 20th : 2-4pm

Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive :: 21218
Free, Limited Seating