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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Rhizome DC
6950 Maple St NW, Washington, District of Columbia 20012
An uneasy wind blows through Karen Yasinsky’s films. It rustles clothing indoors and makes green grass wiggle in unnatural ways. It sends tumbleweed rolling east and west. A sense of dislocation and a disturbing tranquility share a stage where everything is in constant motion or very, very still. Her characters are awkward and anatomically incorrect, and sometimes you can see up their skirts. Their arms and legs twitch restlessly, and then suddenly they stand up and twirl like jewelry-box ballerinas. There is no storyboard, no dialogue. Silence and sound alternate, forming a conversation of their own, while the music is most often a chorus of otherworldly voices and instruments—a fitting accompaniment for the ragtag band of magical homemade figures that form Yasinsky’s cast. (Laurie Simmons: Essay. Hammer Museum.)
Using hand-made puppets, quirky rotoscoped animation and re-purposed footage (citing the likes of Cassavetes, Bresson and Tarkovsky among others), the films of Karen Yasinsky address deep themes of empathy, violence, spiritual grace and redemption as they veer between the cloyingly cute and the viscerally confrontational. Karen Yasinsky will appear in person to present a survey of works, followed by Q&A.
Karen Yasinsky is an artist and filmmaker working with animation, collage, painting and drawing. Her video installations and drawings have been shown in many venues internationally including the Mori Art Musuem, Tokyo; PS1 Contemporary Art, NY; UCLA Hammer Museum, LA; the Wexner Center, Columbus, Museum Folkwang, Essen and Kunst Werke, Berlin. Her films and videos have been screened worldwide at various venues and film festivals including the National Gallery of Art, DC, MoMA, NY, the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde, Crossroads, SF, the San Francisco International, Images Festival, Toronto, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Ann Arbor Film Festival where she won the Leon Speakers Award for Best Sound Design in 2013. She is the recipient of a Baker Award, Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the American Academy in Rome. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Film and Media Studies.
George Peabody Library
17 East Mt. Vernon Place : 21202
The Institute for Expanded Research and the George Peabody Library present Commune Diverge Shift Connect: A Press Press Chronicle, a project by Press Press, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative and current artist-in-residence of the GPL Research Residency.
Through this engagement, the library has acquired Press Press’s complete body of work and will support the production of a new publication that explores the nuances of their approach to publishing. A public display of the Press Press archive is on view at the library through September 7th. The new publication will be released in fall of 2019.
Launched in 2014, Press Press is an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that aims to shift and deepen the understanding of voices, identities, and narratives that have been suppressed or misrepresented by the mainstream. Press Press was founded as an artist project by Kimi Hanauer and is produced through the collaborative involvement of Valentina Cabezas, Bomin Jeon, Bilphena Yahwon, as well as a network of family and friends who participate in and extend Press Press’s ongoing activities.
Press Press defines publishing as the action of gathering a public. Their approach places equal value on the relationships that develop between individuals and the communities involved in producing the resulting product, publication, or program. Through their experimentation with collaborative work, Press Press has attempted to create and refine an approach for cultivating ethical and compassionate frameworks of cooperation.
As Press Press enters into its fifth year of operation, the GPL Research Residency enables the team to reflect on its history and past projects, such as their long-term partnership with Baltimore City Community College Refugee Youth Project, If I Ruled The World, Sentiments: Expressions of Cultural Passage, and more. Through this process, and in collaboration with a broader community, Press Press aims to develop, collect, and share emergent models and methodologies for collective work that aid the efforts of cultural organizers.
This reflection also marks a year of transition for Press Press, as the team initiates a nomadic presence in Los Angeles, expanding their national reach. Through this work, Press Press ultimately aims to provoke the question: What are the conditions necessary for cultivating and sustaining ethical and compassionate frameworks for being with and cooperating with others in the world?
Commune Diverge Shift Connect: A Press Press Chronicle is free and open to the public.
Please contact us with any accessibility questions.
www.expandedresearch.org/presspress
Alchemy of Art
10 Art Musem Drive : 21218
The Alchemy of Art is proud to welcome local artists Hiro Hubbard and Carter Roach. Along with their paintings they have collaborated and created 3D sculptures. Along with their art we will have a live performance from local band The Adventures of Matte Black
Hiro’s art is characterized by his vibrant use of color and his dynamic fusion of surreal imagery, abstract shapes, and in some cases hand lettering. He is an illustrator and muralist who has painted murals for a variety of Arts Festivals and clients including the city of Hoboken, NJ, The Sarasota Chalk Festival, and Disc Jam Music and Arts Festival. Hiro actively creates a variety of work including paintings, sculptures, hand painted signs and illustrated show bills for The Adventures of Matte Black and Peoples Blues of Richmond. He is inspired by the natural world, music, typography and sign painting, psychedelic culture and surrealism.Contact info: www.hirohubbard.com, hiro.hubbard @gmail.com, (443)370-4684
Carter Roach is an artist from Baltimore, who loves creating dynamic characters and letters with energetic colors. Growing up learning to do graffiti, he formed a style that uses some of those urban influences along with vibrant colors and a cartoon character twist to create his work. Carter uses spray paint, acrylics, oils, markers and other mixed media to form each character and its surroundings. He has had his art work displayed at many venues and galleries including Elements Natural Hair Care & Design, The Alchemy of Art, Load of Fun, The Filling Station, Zekes Coffee, CCBC, Studio L, holy frijoles and Elevation Underground. Every so often Carter puts on an interactive and unique art show called The Quest for Breignstorm. The Quest for Breignstorm takes viewers on an epic journey through a large wooded area on a path showcasing his art in nature. The Quest invites viewers to open their senses and experience art in a natural environment where paintings are hung on trees, sculptures are hanging from the treetops and seemingly coming out of the ground. Carter has been featured as a live artist at Camp Barefoot, Pretty Lights, Rusko, Younger Brother, Eliot Lipp and Emancipator. www.breignstorm.com, [email protected], (410)-718-5118
The Alchemy of Art is a local contemporary gallery focusing on but not limited to local up and coming artist. The building itself is a unique space as it is a converted convent and the gallery is on the entry level and one of the two rooms is the old chapel room with beautiful arched ceilings. Along with the gallery there is a boutique which carries locally made art and goods. The gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday 12:30pm to 6:30pm and 1pm to 6pm on Sunday but subject to change. To keep posted on hours of operation and events follow us on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/
Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224
Watch the world’s greatest stories unroll before your eyes! Baltimore’s beloved festival of scrolled panoramas known as crankies, returns for it’s 6th year of fireside wonder. A full lineup of artists and musicians will be announced in the coming weeks.
For 2019, we have added a Sunday matinee giving you four chances to witness the magic of the Crankie Fest. All performances will feature the same lineup of artists and musicians.
FRI JAN 4 | 8PM
SAT JAN 5 | 4:30PM & 8PM
SUN JAN 6 | 4:30PM
Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224
Researching different perspectives of the natural world, venturing at times to create images that are more fantasy then reality, Stephen Spartana’s HumanNature, Life in Layers is a selection of images created over the last two years. Stephen’s work utilizes a number of images which function in the same way that painters use brushes and paint palettes; his tools are a combination of various analog films mixed with digital and paint media. His intention is to create a provocative image, a complex and dynamic blend that invites the viewer to look deeper.
STEPHEN SPARTANA holds a BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art. While continuing his successful commercial career, Stephen has returned to his love of fine art photography which began in the 1990’s with 2 exhibits at the Gomez Gallery. Last year, his Interwoven series won international acclaim with Honorable Mentions at China and Tokyo photography exhibitions and a Bronze Award at the Moscow International Foto Awards.
ICA Baltimore
16 West North Avenue : 21218
By challenging perceptions of the built environment, Singular Space captures the essence and physicality of municipal art, viewed through an abstract lens and connected to the urban landscape. Collis and Donadio have created a multi-faceted portrait of Forum Fountain, a Brutalist-inspired public sculpture located behind Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in East Baltimore. The culminating installation expands the life of Forum Fountain and features immersive video projection and sound. Architecture can be an extension of the physical self: Buildings tell us about our bodies, both personal and social, and structure our experiences and behaviors. Singular Space serves as a multi-sensory palimpsest, reminding us that public space is mutable and cannot be erased- even in the face of continual destruction or neglect.
Shannon Collis – shannoncollis.ca
Shannon Collis is an interdisciplinary artist whose studio practice focuses on creating installations and interactive environments that explore various ways in which digital technologies can transform one’s perception of audio and visual stimuli. Her work has been exhibited widely across North America as well as in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Brazil. Collis is a 2005 graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and has completed postgraduate research at Concordia University in Montreal in the area of digital media and computation arts. She is also a 2015/18 recipient of a Visual Artist Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Collis is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, where she teaches digital media and sound.
Liz Donadio – lizdonadio.com
Liz Donadio is a multimedia artist whose work is centered on the nexus of art, ecology, and architecture. Donadio received her MFA from Towson University in 2012 and has been exhibited and screened nationally. She was the summer 2018 Bresler Artist in Residence at VisArts in Rockville, MD where she worked on a site-specific environmental project. Donadio is a Lecturer of photography and art history at Towson University and runs Color Wheel Digital, a fine-art print studio in Baltimore.
As collaborators, we combine our backgrounds in photography, digital video, and sound installation to create works that explore public spaces in transition, uncovering details of their past and possible futures. Our installations conjure meditations on the essence of urban landmarks and monuments.
ICA Baltimore – icabaltimore.org
ICA Baltimore is a collaboration of volunteers working to stage contemporary art exhibitions in available spaces in Baltimore. Singular Space is the twenty-ninth exhibition by the ICA since 2011.
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Musem Drive : 21218
See more than 160 photographs, sculptures, and video and sound works showcasing the iconic artist and filmmaker’s renegade humor and provocative insights. The exhibition concludes with objects from the artist’s home and studio that inspire him and three peep-shows, featuring footage from Waters’s rarely seen underground movies of the 1960s.
From October 7, 2018, to January 6, 2019, The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents John Waters: Indecent Exposure, the first major retrospective of the artist’s visual art in his hometown of Baltimore. Through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and video made since the early 1990s, Waters’ renegade humor subverts mainstream expectations of representation and reveals the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy. Waters freely manipulates images of less-than sacred, low-brow references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, Justin Bieber’s preening poses, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films—to entice viewers to connect to his astute and provocative observations about society.
John Waters: Indecent Exposure is organized around themes of popular culture, the movie industry, the contemporary art world, the artist’s childhood and identity, and the transgressive power of images. Among the exhibition’s highlights are a photographic installation in which Waters explores the auras and absurdities of famous films, their directors, and actors; a suite of photographs and sculpture that use humor to humanize dark moments in history from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11; and Kiddie Flamingos, a 2014 video work of children reading a G-rated version of Pink Flamingos (Waters’ notorious 1972 celebration of all things outsider and extreme). Other bodies of work explored in the exhibition include Waters’ renegade versions of abstractions, still lives, and readymades and iconic cult film images that constitute a photographic reunion of Waters’ Dreamland Productions actors and crew. The exhibition concludes with a selection of ephemera and some of Waters’ earliest films presented in a peep-show format.
