BmoreArt

This Week:  Grey Matter: A Response to Blackness reception at AACC Cade Gallery, It Means Desert, Desert A Solo Exhibition by Jackie Milad opening reception at Julio Fine Arts, The Black Vote Mural Project opening reception at Banneker-Douglass Museum, WDLY Valentines Karaoke, Painted Pidgin opening reception at St. Charles, and more!

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.

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Grey Matter: A Response to Blackness | Reception
Wednesday, February 12 • 5-7pm
@ AACC Cade Center Gallery

CURATED BY: THOMAS JAMES
ARTISTS: Ernest Shaw, Charles Mason III, Omolara Williams McCallister, and McKinley Wallace III
EXHIBITION ON VIEW
February 6 – March 5, 2020

This exhibition is an examination of how Blackness has been perceived and responded to by America’s dominant society throughout history including the educational system, law enforcement, and public policies. The artworks explore how these responses have affected those that identify, or are classified as, Black.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
A native of the Washington DC Metropolitan area, Thomas James began his work as an independent curator in 2015. Before coming to Baltimore and joining Creative Alliance in 2018, he was responsible for crafting exhibitions with organizations such as Maryland Federation of Art, The Phillips Collection, Town Hall Education and Recreation Center (THEARC), The Jerusalem Fund, and Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts

http://www.aacc.edu/campus-life/visit-an-art-show/cade-center-gallery/

Shaun Leonardo with Deana Haggag and John Chaich
Thursday, February 13 • 7-8:30pm
@ MICA Decker Gallery

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space, arts advocate and MICA alum Deana Haggag (President & CEO, United States Artists, former Executive Director, The Contemporary) joins artist Shaun Leonardo and curator John Chaich for a conversation exploring accountability and efficacy for artists working toward social change and the intentionality and potentiality of medium and media in The Breath of Empty Space and the gallery experience.

Incidental Monuments: Designing With Discards | Artist’s Reception
Thursday, February 13 • 6-9pm
@ Silber Gallery, Goucher College

Co-curated by Alex Ebstein and Amy Boone-McCreesh

February 1 – March 14, 2020

Featuring work by:

Amy Brener
Rachel Klinghoffer
Sandra Lee
Chris Mahonski
Aurora Robson
Paul Simmons
Jessie Unterhalter & Katey Truhn
Agustina Woodgate
Dustin Yellin
And Goucher College students in Data Visualization and Design

Incidental Monuments is an exhibition that highlights artists and art practices that consciously repurpose every day, overproduced materials. Beginning from a student-initiated, data visualization project that calls attention to the volume of non-recyclable, plastic utensils that are discarded on campus each semester; the exhibition recognizes the incredible, formal, individual efforts of artists working within a similar set of concerns. Using the student installation as a thesis, the exhibition brings together artworks that question the way we use, dispose of, and often forget about certain materials on a daily basis.

While the show does not advocate individual responsibility as being greater than that of corporations and industries, it asks its viewers to evaluate their relationship to mass-produced material and examines the campus microcosm as a venue to move the meter on behavior and policy.

Anatomy of Living Color | Opening Reception
Thursday, February 13 • 6-9pm
@ Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College

In honor of Black History Month, The Anatomy of Living Color presents to Goucher’s campus a survey of Black artistic expression. Creating a conversation around culture, academia and shared experience, the exhibition is a student-initiated show and series of events organized by Olivia Douglas, class of 2022. Comprised of Baltimore-based artists whose work explores the power of black identity, The Anatomy of Living Color provides a hub for student-led events and creative output.  The exhibition encourages visitors to experience the colorful embodiment of Black art through painting, photography, performance artifacts and design.

Outside the Rosenberg Gallery, additional artwork and poetry by Goucher students invited to participate, have been placed around campus in spaces commonly occupied by students. These interventions bring the range of style, subject and emotion represented in the exhibition into the space of student life and create a dialog between the campus community and black creatives working in other Baltimore institutions.

The exhibition features work by:

Nina Q. Allen, Christopher Batten, Markele Cullins, Walter Cruz, Rob Ferrell, and Monica Ikegwu

It Means Desert, Desert, A Solo Exhibition by Jackie Milad | Opening Reception
Thursday, February 13 • 5-8pm
@ Julio Fine Arts

The Julio Fine Arts Gallery is proud to present It Means Desert, Desert, a solo exhibition by Baltimore artist Jackie Milad, in the gallery from February 13 – March 12, 2020. Inspired by recent travels to Egypt and employing her unique multi-media and collaborative processes, Milad’s latest exhibition explores the complexity and tenuous nature of value and representation through drawing, painting, collage, cut-outs, sound, and video.

Check out our website for more information, or follow us on Instagram, facebook, & twitter @JulioArtGallery All of our exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public!

Turbid Landscapes | Opening Reception
Thursday, February 13 • 6-8pm
@ Catalyst Contemporary

Group Exhibition Describes the Muddy Topography of Our Modern Internal and External Worlds

Catalyst Contemporary presents “Turbid Landscapes,” a group exhibition featuring Maren Henson, Gary Thompson, and Marcia Wolfson Ray whose works bring together the uncertain and shifting views of the physical and natural world, our shared spaces and collective understandings, and the more private, psychological spaces where the natural and social impress upon us in unique ways. Landscapes of yore with rolling hills and looming mountains, startling sunlight and a bucolic haze yield instead to faintly illuminated concrete chaos and the intricate inner workings of our cultural and personal connections.

“Turbid Landscapes” is a multimedia exhibition showcasing the ever changing and evolving landscape that we may find ourselves in at points throughout our lives, or even at any point in our day. Today, we project our own forms onto the landscape through culturally engrained expectations of nature, through states of psychological tension, and by means of utilizing our own physical bodies to manipulate and reinterpret an experience both universal and isolated. These are the new landscapes passed down to us that we must shape for ourselves.

Exhibition Dates: February 8th – March 7th, 2020

Baltimore Art Gallery Grand Opening Celebration
Friday, February 14 • 7pm
@ The Baltimore Art Gallery

The Baltimore Art Gallery in Hampden features local, original and accessible art by local Baltimore artists.  We believe that Baltimore deserves a place anyone to find new art talent as well as appreciate established masters at an affordable level. The Baltimore Art Gallery is as much for the artists of this great town as it is for the neighborhoods we find ourselves in.  Our aim is to deliver artwork that you can enjoy in a consistent size range and price point that allows anyone to own original paintings.

Hosts: Kristin Wiebe and Sonny Lacey

Event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/197987894717495/

The Black Vote Mural Project
Saturday, February 15 • 3-5pm
@ Banneker-Douglass Museum

A public arts project that transforms the interior galleries of the Banneker-Douglass Museum with 16+ murals that interpret the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) 2020 theme: African Americans and the Vote.

Artists: Steuart Hill Academic Academy, Ryan Allen, Bowie State University (Public Arts Class), Nikki Brooks, Jay Coleman, Brandon Donahue, Olivia Gittens, Jabari Jefferson, Gina Lewis, Megan Lewis, Greta McGill, Future History Now, Latoya D. Peoples, Zsudayka Nzinga Terrell, James Terrell, and Ernest Shaw.

David Jewell, “Day” | Public Reception
Saturday, February 15 • 5-8pm
@ Exeter Gallery

Two consecutive exhibitions, “Night & Day,” celebrate dualism in the work of David Jewell: light and dark, construction and destruction, drawing and painting, finished and unresolved, hope and despair.

“Day” is the second of two consecutive shows following “Night” which was on view at Exeter from December 2019-January 2020. Both exhibitions feature the work of Ohio based artist David Jewell. “Day” puts forth almost two dozen landscapes and still lifes celebrating the sun and natural light. Exeter is open by appointment only.

Email [email protected] or call/text 443-250-2345 to coordinate your visit.

David Jewell (b.1976) received an MFA from Bowling Green State University, and a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. He is a three-time winner of the prestigious Greenshields Foundation Grant

Bromo Selzer Arts Tower Exhibitions | Opening Reception
Saturday, February 15 • 5-7pm
@ Bromo Arts Tower

Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower presents three powerful new exhibitions: “Walking forward, looking back,” by artist Carol Maurer, alongside Maurer’s companion exhibit “Entwined,”  and “Sandy Hook Shooting: Triumph over Tragedy,” by artist John David Ehlers, on view Saturdays startingFebruary 8, 2020 from 11am to 4pm. The exhibitions run through May 30, 2020. An opening reception takes place Saturday, February 15, 2020 from 5-7pm. Managed by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA), Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower is located at 21 S. Eutaw Street, Baltimore, MD 21201.

“Walking forward, looking back,” by artist Carol Maurer, is a practice-based project utilizing a journey through landscape. By walking from her ancestral home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland through Delaware to Chester County, Pennsylvania, Maurer collected stories, photos, memories and objects along the route. The journey began as a way to experimentally confront her responsibility as a descendant of enslavers, and slowly weaved into a meditation on the time, tempos, conversations and understandings that walking can make space for. Maurer’s companion exhibit, “Entwined,” reveals the names of those enslaved by the artist’s great-great-grandfather, as documented in Robert Bell’s Book of Slave Statistics, Dorchester County Maryland 1864 – 1868. The names are knitted with wool sourced from Dorchester County, Maryland, and mounted on barn wood as a visual representation of the legacy of slavery and how it is knitted in the fabric of our history and society.

In “Sandy Hook Shooting: Triumph over Tragedy,” artist John David Ehlers illustrates the horror of the tragedy by presenting his emotions graphically through numbers and color. By creating both a numerical icon embodying the vital data of the event, as well as seven emotional combinations of color and icon design, Ehlers goal is to interpret the event as a permanent artistic memorial. Ehlers lives in Baltimore, 275 miles away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, but has been haunted by the incident since it happened in 2012. Although created at the time of the tragedy, Ehlers has waited seven years to share it.

The Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower is open every Saturday from 11am to 4pm. Visitors have an opportunity to view artwork throughout the building, including 15 floors of working artist studios and special exhibitions. Guests can also learn more about the historical building and participate in a tour of the clock room ($8).

For more information on the events and exhibitions at the Bromo Seltzers Arts Tower, visit www.bromoseltzertower.com or call 443-874-3596.

Painted Pidgin | Opening Reception
Saturday, February 15 • 6-8pm
@ St. Charles

Yevgeniya Baras

Brendan John Carroll

Fabienne Lasserre

Tracy Thomason

St. Charles is thrilled to announce our winter group show, Painted Pidgin, including works by Yevgeniya Baras, Brendan Carroll, Fabienne Lasserre, and Tracy Thomason. Each artist in this exhibition uses paint to bridge visual languages. Through text, truncated sign systems, textured surfaces and 3 dimensional space, a new living vocabulary emerges.

Moving through Painted Pidgin, one will encounter paint in complex and sophisticated manifestations. Yevgeniya Baras’s surfaces are built up through a multitude of actions, leaving fragments of language behind. Brendan Carroll’s paintings over resin reference architectural stucco on stained glass. Geometric sculptural objects by Fabienne Laserre are accented with color and gestural marks. Tracy Thomason’s tactile surfaces possess a paradoxical grit and precision through simplified symbolic forms.

A pidgin is created when there is no pre-existing form of communication, but common ground needs to be generated. In Painted Pidgin, ingenuity breeds hybrid territories in order to convey something new which needs to be said.  Paint used in combination with other media explores the possibility of the unknown. These works possess something familiar, yet question what else can be transmitted or made receivable through paint.