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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Visionary Pets on Parade
Saturday, July 7th • 7-9pm
American Visionary Art Museum
800 Key Highway : 21230
Calling all patriotic pet lovers! The American Visionary Art Museum presents its annual July 4th Visionary Pets on Parade on Wednesday, July 4th, 10am. It’s free to participate, parade, or spectate! Held each year in memory of supreme animal lover, Ellis Rosen, this is a competition for peaceful animals of kind not yet ready for Westminster. Prizes galore with a shot at Best Costume, Most Patriotic, Most Visionary Pet, Owner & Pet Lookalikes, Least Likely to Succeed as a Pet, Best Visionary Pet Tricks, and more! Friendly pets of ALL kinds are welcome. The best communal pet parade in town is followed by the Pet Talent [Or Not] Show. Click here for high resolution images.
About the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is a Congressionally-designated national museum and education center dedicated to intuitive, self-taught artistry. It champions the role intuition plays in creative invention and innovation of all sort — be it art, science, engineering, humor or philosophy, and especially in compassionate acts of social justice.
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Omnibus Filing 2.0: Empathy Mirror | Opening Reception
Friday, July 6th • 6-9pm
School 33 Art Center
1427 Light Street : 21230
Image Credit: Dr. Brian A. Korgel – incessive permutations 9!
School 33 Art Center presents “Omnibus Filing 2.0: Empathy Mirror,” a cross-disciplinary exhibition showcasing works by a collective of artists, scientists, and researchers. The exhibition features projects from Daniel Bozhkov, Steven Brower, Patrick Killoran, Dr. Brian A. Korgel, Julie Ann Nagle and James Sham. Visitors are welcome to view this exhibition in all three galleries at School 33 Art Center from Friday, July 6, 2018 through Saturday, August 18, 2018. On Friday, July 6, 2018, School 33 hosts a free opening reception from 6pm to 9pm. School 33 Art Center is located at 1427 Light Street and the galleries are open Wednesday through Saturday from 11am to 4pm.
In Omnibus Filing 2.0: Empathy Mirror,” each project is an intersection of research and art—exploring themes of empathy through multiple lenses such as interspecies architecture and artificial intelligence. From “cuddleable” research papers to a live performance debut by renowned chemical engineer Dr. Brian A. Korgel, many of the works employ interactivity or performativity. This multi-media exhibition presents art as an alternative model for scientific research, and empathy as a means of inquiry.
It is the result of countless intellectual jam sessions between minds that do not typically have the opportunity for radical collaboration, both intentional and accidental.
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Diaphanous Shades // Sweet Sweat | Opening Reception
Friday, July 6th • 7-10pm
Current Space
421 North Howard Street : 21201
Identifying the collapsed economies of the nation’s post-industrial cities as breeding grounds for new strategies of cultural production, we are interested in the potential for economic, social, and ecological collapse. This collapse comes as the Western world moves from a society that makes “things” to one that trades in ideas. This framework is inspired by our years living and working in Detroit. Detroit, once an economic hub for nearly 2 million people, has become a city of absence, filled with monolithic abandoned buildings and vacant houses reclaimed by nature and empty land. We realize that Detroit is not unique in this regard. In cities across the country, once active urban spaces have been abandoned and left to deteriorate. This is why we think it is so important to share our work with art communities in other cities; specifically at artist run spaces that represent the very new strategies for cultural production and dissemination that we are interested in.
The aesthetic of ruin, and the search for meaning and context in its discovery, is one catalyst for our collaborative work. As a collaborative team, we are interested in visually compressing the past, present, and future of Western civilization, focusing on the shifting cultural significance of ideas, objects and images. We consider Western culture’s objects and images as ephemera from our historic moment. Imagining a world where today’s glut of images have become functionless elements within a deteriorating landscape, we create a vision of a potential future for objects and images.
Our recent collaborative work has continued our research into these themes, as well as a new exploration into the Rubin’s vase. This vase/face ambiguous reversal of high contrast two-dimensional form provides the viewer with two different shape interpretations. The face and the vase are subjects and imagery that have appeared in both of our solo and collaborative endeavors, exploring the space between culture (artifacts) and politics (historical agents). We would also like to use this idea as a “face-off”, where we have elements in the exhibition that are in contrast yet also compliment one another. This can also be re-imagined as an internal personal struggle in our current era of highly conflicting sentiments.
Brian Barr and Lauren Rice have been regularly collaborating since 2011. Their collaborative solo exhibitions include, Totems at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Fake Empire at Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, DC, The Shades of Night are Falling at Purdue University, DATA/TRANSFER/OBJECT at the Artist Alliance Inc.’s, Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space in New York, Nothing Beside Remains at Shockoe Artspace in Richmond, VA and Heartache and the Thousand Natural Shocks at Neon Heater in Findlay, OH.
Website: brian-barr.com
Website: lauren-rice.com
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Sweet Sweat
Lindsay Bottos is a photographer and writer who’s work focuses on issues surrounding intimacy and personal narratives. Her work has been featured in various galleries in the US and abroad, on network television, and most notoriously online.
Website: lindsaybottos.com
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Juncture: Works by MFA Students at the University of MD College Park | Opening Reception
Saturday, July 7th • 7-10pm
The Holtzman Gallery
Towson University : 21204
A showcase of MFA student work from the University of Maryland, College Park, will be on view at the Towson University Holtzman Gallery in the Center for the Arts, opening July 7th, in conjunction with Artscape. In exchange, Towson MFA students will exhibit their work this fall in College Park at the Herman Maril Gallery in the Department of Art.
This exhibition, titled Juncture, represents the diverse practices of students working in a three-year program towards their masters degree. Material value, contemporary approaches to form, and mining cultural histories are some of the common threads present in this work. This exhibition exchange is an exciting opportunity to expose the MFA work to entirely new audiences, and to contribute to the greater programming of Baltimore’s yearly art’s festival, Artscape. Participating artists are: Lauren Koch, Matthew Robertson, Michael Thron, Beki Basch, Clay Dunklin, Monroe Isenberg, Jeremy Kunkel, Irene Pantelis, Mason Hurley and Jessica van Brakle.
The Holtzman Gallery at Towson University is located in the Center for the Arts on the Towson University Campus in Towson, MD. It is free and open to the public Tue-Sun 11am-8pm.
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Up like a sun, down like a pancake. Kelly Lloyd | Opening Reception
Saturday, July 7th • 7-9pm
Institute of Contemporary Art Baltimore
16 West North Avenue : 21218
In Up like a sun, down like a pancake. Kelly Lloyd presents new work and new collaborations. Up like a sun, down like a pancake seeks to examine the humor and hypocrisy in inevitable physical decay, and presents an alternative to intellectual decay. This part-exhibition part-reading room will expand on Lloyd’s interests in generosity, spaces constructed for social engagement, and literature as objects.
Kelly Lloyd is a transdisciplinary conceptual artist who focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production, and prioritizes public-facing collaborative research. Lloyd received a dual M.F.A. in Painting and M.A. in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and earned a B.A. from Oberlin College in 2008. Recent projects include a solo exhibition at Shane Campbell Gallery, “Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect” for the Museum of Vernacular Art in Chicago, Zürich and Vienna, and inclusion in “Habeas Corpus” at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. Lloyd performed with Jesse Malmed and ACRE TV at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016, and her essay “Katie Sokoler Your Construction Paper Tears Can’t Hide Your Yayoi Kusama Neurotic Underbelly” is included in The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (punctum press, October 2017). Lloyd was named one of NEWCITY’S “Breakout Artists of 2015,” was a 2017 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Semi-Finalist and attended an artist residency with KulturKontakt Austria this Spring. Lloyd will attend an artist residency in Aarhus, Denmark hosted by the Aarhus Center for Visual Art during the Fall of 2018, and in Chicago hosted by ADDS DONNA during the Winter of 2018/19.
Institute of Contemporary Art Baltimore, icabaltimore.org
Institute of Contemporary Art, Baltimore is a collaboration of volunteers working to stage contemporary art exhibitions in available spaces in Baltimore. Up like a sun, down like a pancake. is the twenty-fifth exhibition by ICA Baltimore since 2011.
Up like a sun, down like a pancake. is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.
All images copyright 2018 Kelly Lloyd
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Waller Gallery Panels: Beyond the Immigrant Story
Saturday, July 7th • 7-9pm
Waller Gallery
2420 Calvert Street : 21218
Often in discussing the artwork of artists who have immigrated to the United States the moderator or programming cannot get past this fact. The artist is often only defined by their immigrant story and not by the artwork that we make. In this panel Artists Tsedaye Makonnen, Khanh Le, and Gabriel Amani Emina will discuss their own stories, their art practices, how they relate, and what they look forward to as emerging and established artists in discussing their stories and their cultures through their work.
