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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Artist Conversation: Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley
Wednesday, April 4th : 6-7:30pm
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive : 21218
Join Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman for an in-depth conversation with Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Hear about their dynamic process of incorporating poetry, painting, and digital editing into their fiercely compelling videos. Learn how they mine literature to develop characters that operate at the margins of history and challenge established narratives.
Presented in collaboration with The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Advanced Media Studies.
Image: Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Harry S. Truman. 2017. Lightbox. 27 x 31.3 in. (68.6 x 79.6 cm). Courtesy the artists, Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects, Pilar Corrias Gallery, and Fredericks & Freiser.
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Media Lux | Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 4th : 6-8pm
Stamp Gallery
University of Maryland : College Park
The Stamp Gallery presents Media Lux, an exhibition featuring work by artists in the second year of MFA candidacy in the Department of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park. Media Lux includes works set in a dim environment by Clay Dunklin, Mason Hurley, Monroe Isenberg, Irene Pantelis, and Gina Takaoka. The five artists have collectively curated the exhibition, selecting among their own recent work and producing new artworks in dialogue with the Stamp Gallery’s distinctive space. Media Lux is on view April 2 through May 19, 2018. An opening reception, free and open to the public, will take place on Wednesday, April 4, 6–8 pm.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Clay Dunklin’s video, sculptural, and new media works serve to expand notions around the body and performativity. His work is situated on the thin veil that exists between the body and technology and marks a gooey, fluid, fragile state where various incarnations are reborn out of their former selves. Dunklin has exhibited his work nationally including shows at the Orlando Science Center and the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. Originally from East Texas, he received his BFA in drawing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. claydunklin.com
Mason Hurley is originally from Old Chatham, New York. He received his B.F.A. from Plattsburgh State University in Plattsburgh, New York. Before moving to Maryland, he worked as Sculpture Park Manager at Salem Art Works in Salem, New York and as a Preparator and Fabricator at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts. Hurley’s most recent works focus on the perception of the viewer as they move around or within a sculpture. The realization that one’s own brain can play tricks on oneself relates to an awareness of consciousness. masonvhurley.com
Monroe Isenberg is originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He completed his undergraduate studies, Cum Laude and with honors, in Sculpture and Psychology at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon in 2013 where he experimented with wood and metal working and developed an abstract, minimalist aesthetic. He worked as an artist and fabricator in Portland before moving to the Washington, D.C area. Monroe is the recipient of multiple awards, grants, and residencies including the prestigious International Outstanding Student Achievement Award recognized by International Sculpture Center, an Ann Bartsch Dunne Scholarship 1st place Award in sculpture, the coveted Dean’s Fellowship at the University of Maryland, and the Tom Rooney Prize awarded by the Washington Sculpture Group. Created from wood and steel, his sculptures and installations engage balance and tension and examine the relationship between industry, culture, and the poetics of nature. Monroe’s work is held in multiple private collections and has been exhibited across the nation. monroeisenberg.com
Irene Pantelis’ traditional and new media works dabble in history, culture, migration, memory, nature, and domestic life. She uses a multidisciplinary approach to create ontological grids, textures and soundtracks that obey their own rhythms and create a hybrid poetic. Pantelis grew up in South America, moved to the Washington, D.C. area as a teenager, and went on to become a labor lawyer for years before turning to art full-time. Her work is held in multiple private collections and has been shown regionally. irenepantelis.com
Gina Takaoka was born and raised in Southern California. She spent her late teens and early twenties studying art in college and building a career as a tattoo artist. Her personal experiences with moving frequently, as well as her work as a tattooer, helped to cultivate an interest in the poetic intersections between history, memory, and place. These three themes currently drive her artistic research. Often drawing from maps and satellite images, she uses a range of analogue and digital processes to create contemplative works that invite viewers to examine their relationships with time and place. ginatakaoka.com
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Joyce J. Scott + Kyle Hackett | Opening Receptions *Rescheduled*
Thursday, April 5th : 6-8pm
Goya Contemporary
3000 Chestnut Avenue, Mill Centre #214 : 21211
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2018 IMDA MFA Thesis Exhibit: Lucky Suns | Opening Reception
Friday, April 6th : 5-7pm
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
University of Maryland, Baltimore County : Catonsville
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents the annual MFA Thesis Exhibition, featuring works by the seven graduate students will who receive MFAs in Intermedia and Digital Arts in 2018. The work selected represents the culmination of each student’s unique experience in UMBC’s dynamic and demanding MFA program.
Parastoo Aslanbeik’s installation is an exploration of immigrants’ lives and the influence of the recent “Travel Ban” or “Muslim Ban” on a certain group of people due to their ethnicity and race. She investigates the idea of diversity and equality in her research and thesis by combining an old photographic technique (wet plate collodion) with sound, light, and sculpture. Simple materials such as tree branches and cardboard boxes are brought together in her monumental sculptures to create metaphors for equality.
Mollye Bendellmakes digital and analog sculptures to connect with digital and analog worlds. Her work uses the intangible nature of electronic media as a metaphor for exploring vulnerability, visibility, and longing in a world that can feel isolating. Her immersive installation Wander/Wonder explores the nature of speculation and our changing relationship with physicality. The exhibition consists of two separate but connected experiences: the Wander, a walkable street map of Baltimore City with all buildings removed except for psychic reader storefronts and the Wonder, a zero-gravity digital astral plane experienced as a virtual reality environment. While a participant flies through the Wonder side, the Wander side is projected on a screen for spectators. A single crystal ball controller navigates both environments – one person guides the experiences of spectators in Wander while immersed in the VR environment of Wonder.
Jeffrey L. Gangwisch’s work explores the interaction of digital and physical media with a focus on the human figure. His contribution to Lucky Suns explores three-dimensional figure scans incorporated into laser-etched photographs, illuminated 3D printed sculpture, and augmented-reality installation.
Christopher Kojzar creates art in response to interactions he has with other people when he enters active public spaces and openly engages in practices such as drawing and live action video. Sketching in public has prompted interactions with security personnel, police officers, TSA agents, and pedestrians, and he explores the increasingly troubled phenomenon of observing and being observed in an era of escalating surveillance and mistrust—complicating it further by signaling his identity as an artist. The gallery showcases his drawings, immersive video and sculptural installation, shaping a nuanced body of work about the oppositional gaze and the implied hierarchies of observation.
MJ Neuberger’s thesis work, Mending Nona’s Piña, takes its title from her attempt to mend an heirloom cloth made by native Filipino weavers with strands of her hair, suggesting how forces of colonialism enabled intergenerational trauma and abuse in her family. Weaving her hair into natural materials and settings, Neuberger posits a return to an indigenous body/self that is Othered in abuse and colonization, and, combining her tears with water blessed in a native healing ritual, she suggests the transformative power of grief.
Mitchell Noah’s thesis represents an alternative vision of public service within public space—reimagining the participants, practices, tools, and iconographies through humor, craft, and design. Through playful reconfiguration, otherwise mundane maintenance activities become touchstones for serious issues: utopias, justice, social cohesion, mobility, infrastructure, and labor. By finding ways of working around failing structures and intervening with ad-hoc methods at a city-block scale, his works of sculpture, video, drawing, and found objects reclaim public space.
Idil Yakut evaluates various aspects of communication, questioning how translation can or cannot serve as a path to understanding the complex roles of language in expressing embodied experience. Mining language’s capacity in sound, text, and image, the videos in her installation challenge clarity of speech, showing its fundamental state of flux, and her texts test the power of translation, exposing its limits while also inviting embodied interaction.
Admission is free.
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Diana Guererro-Macia + a collaboration: Alex Ebstein & Sarah Eargle | Opening Reception
Saturday, April 7th : 6:30-9pm
‘sindikit
405 East Oliver Street, 2nd Floor :21202
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Triumphant Judy
Saturday, April 7th + Sunday, April 8th
Black Cherry Puppet Theater
1115 Hollins Street : 21223
A re-ending of the violent story of Punch and Judy.
Soundscape created by Greg Hatem and sounds and songs sung by Hanna Olivegren, Michael Willis and Liz Downing. Kathy Fahey and Hanna Olivegren will animate the puppets.
Saturday evening, Susan Alcorn is musical guest.
Sunday evening, Nathan Bell is musical guest.
https://blackcherry.
Saturday April 7, 8pm-10pm and Sunday April 8, 6pm-8pm
$10.00 admission
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Social Ingredients | Opening Reception
Saturday, April 7th : 7-10pm
Current Space
421 North Howard Street : 21201
Current Space is proud to present Social Ingredients, featuring artists Nobutaka Aozaki, Christine Ferrera, Rosemary Liss, Christine Stiver and Tracie Jiggetts, and Tattfoo Tan. Please join us for the opening reception including performances and a special food experience.
Opening Reception: April 7, 7 – 10pm
Exhibition Duration: April 7 – April 29
Gallery Hours: Sat & Sun, 12 – 4pm
Social Ingredients explores the significance of meal production and consumption as both a social component of everyday life and a meaningful art practice through sculpture, installation, video, performance, and public programs.
Social Ingredients provides an artistic viewpoint on the preparation, hosting and consumption of food, examining how people’s relationships with others are influenced by the meals they eat together, while creating a platform for diverse audiences to connect their everyday life with art.
Social Ingredients is curated by Rebecca Lu, and is an exhibition through the Curatorial Practice MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
About the Artists
Nobutaka Aozaki is a New York-based artist born in Kagoshima, Japan. He completed his MFA at Hunter College in 2012. Aozaki has been awarded the Artist Files Grant from A Blade of Grass Foundation, the C-12 Emerging Artist Award from Hunter College, and the Artists’ Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been shown in Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Sculpture Center, Temple Contemporary, Varmlands Museum in Sweden, SPIKE in Berlin, and Statements in Tokyo. He has participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Queens Museum Studio Program, and AIM program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. He is currently in the LMCC’s Workspace Residency program. Recent publications include Spike Art Quarterly, The New York Times, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, ArtAsiaPacific, and Cabinet magazine.
Christine Ferrera is a Baltimore-based performance artist and comedian. She began her artistic career as a visual artist. However, after completing several series of paintings and artist books, she discovered a narrative thread running through her work and made the leap to time-based media. Inspired by the multi-media performance of Laurie Anderson and the experimental humor of Andy Kaufman, her current practice lives at the dangerous intersection of art and comedy. Ultimately, she strives to make work that blurs the line between the two, if such a line exists. In performance, Ferrera shares the surprising and vulnerable aspects of herself in order to connect with audiences through storytelling.
Tracie Marie Jiggetts, born and raised in Baltimore, is a captivating dancer, actor, choreographer and director who believes in the power of individualism and creativity. Jiggetts began her training at the Baltimore School for the Arts and continued at Catonsville Community College, Studio 801, Morton Street Dance Studio, and Towson State. She holds a BA in Urban Arts from Coppin State University. Jiggetts has performed at numerous venues, including The Lyric, Arena Players, Center Stage, and The National Black Theatre Festival. She is the founder of The ART of TRUTH and director for the Maryland Summer Center Arts program. Most recently, Jiggetts directed Skittles and Sweet Tea and Once on This Island for Connexions and The Wiz for Spotlighters Theatre.
Rosemary Liss is a painter and textile artist who entered into the comestible realm through fermentation. In 2015, she interned at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen where she continued to explore all things microbial and the relationship between disgust and deliciousness. Since this formative experience she has done site-specific projects, pop-ups, and residencies in Vermont, Pennsylvania, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Dublin that focus on the edge effect, liminal states, and the mind/body/gut connection. She is currently based in Baltimore where she leads Clavel’s Bar Lab and continues her fermentation research.
Christine Stiver’s interdisciplinary work has its beginnings in 2012 when she joined the Baltimore-based dance company Effervescent Collective. She is a founding member of Triptych: Movement Image Sound, which produces interdisciplinary, site-specific, and collaborative performance in the area. In the spring of 2015 she choreographed and produced her first full-length work, Dank, presented at the Ynot Lot in Baltimore. Her video, sculpture, and performance work have been exhibited in New York, Washington DC, and Baltimore at venues such as Baltimore Clayworks, Terrault Contemporary, St. Charles Projects, and Present Company. Stiver is a graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts MFA program in Art Practice, class of 2017.
Tattfoo Tan’s practice focuses on issues relating to ecology, sustainability, and healthy living. His work is project-based, ephemeral, and educational in nature. Tan has exhibited at venues including the Queens Museum of Art, Parsons the New School for Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Creative Time, and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Tan has been widely recognized for his artistic contributions and service to the community and is the proud recipient of a proclamation from The City of New York. He is the recipient of grants from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Art Matters, Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and Staten Island Arts.
About the Curator
Rebecca Lu is a curator, food blogger, recipe writer, barista, and traveler. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but raised in Taiwan, Lu earned her BA in Arts Management from the National Taipei University of Education. In her undergraduate work, she focused on the connections between design, history, architecture, and community by renovating an old building and re-activating it through exhibitions and programming. Lu is passionate about cooking and the ways to present food. She also enjoys exploring food culture while traveling around the world. Lu’s experience as a barista and assistant coffee shop manager became the catalyst for her to further combine art, design, community, and food through her thesis work at MICA.
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Visual Linguistics in the Landscape Photography of Adam Davies
Sunday, April 8th : 1-3pm
Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224
1-2pm | Talk in the Theater
Visual Linguistics in the Landscape Photography of Adam Davies
Talk by David Gariff, Senior Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art
2-3pm | Mingle in the Marquee Lounge
Mix & Mingle with Adam and David
ABOUT DAVID GARIFF
David Gariff is a senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and an adjunct professor of art history at The Catholic University of America. A specialist in modern art and the art of the Italian Renaissance, he has taught art history at the University of Wisconsin, Cleveland State University, Trinity University, and the University of Maryland, College Park, where he received his Ph.D. He was a graduate fellow in Italy at the University of Florence and the University of Pisa, and a Fulbright and Kress Foundation fellow at the Institute for the History of Lombard Art in Milan. Gariff has lectured and written widely on topics related to modern art, film, and the Italian Renaissance; his book The World’s Most Influential Painters and the Artists They Inspired explores the theme of artistic influence and inspiration in Western painting.
SUN APR 8 | 1PM-3PM | FREE (Ticket Required)
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Mike McConnell: Étude in See | Opening Reception
Sunday, April 8th : 2-4pm
Montpelier Arts Center
9652 Muirkirk Road : Laurel
After graduating from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1975, Mike McConnell worked for over 30 years as an illustrator. His paintings, drawings, and constructions are fueled by life experiences and nature. His show, Étude in See, makes extensive use of an early childhood technique of drawing with crayons and ink on paper. He is currently a resident studio artist at the Motor House in the Station North Arts District of Baltimore.
