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BmoreArt’s Picks: March 3-9

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This Week:  2020 Scholastic Art Exhibition at School 33, The Cliff Banquet presents Collective Dreaming at MICA BBOX, Helen Zughaib: Unfinished Journeys at Creative Alliance, and more!

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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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Talk: Power and Politics
Thursday, March 5 • 6:30-7:15pm
@ The Walters Art Museum

Nicole Berlin, Zanvyl Krieger Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, explores the portraiture and extraordinary lives of two Roman empresses who served as the leading women of ancient Rome. Learn about their legacy, a story that is particularly significant during the celebration of Women’s History Month.

This event is free, but registration is requested: bit.ly/363oq27

 

 

Baltimore School for the Arts: Forty and Flourishing Performances and Gala
Thursday, March 4 + Saturday, March 6 – Sunday, March 7
@Baltimore School for the Arts

Celebrate what the Baltimore School for the Arts has accomplished in its first 40 years, and imagine how the school will continue to invest in Baltimore’s youth for 40 years to come! Stage One, our young professionals, play a key role in assisting with fundraising efforts, events, and using their influence.

Tuesday Night Expressions is now THURSDAY Night Expressions!
This year, StageOne is kicking off Expressions Weekend 2020 with a flourish. Join Baltimore’s best to celebrate BSA’s 40th Anniversary in the school’s iconic building with cocktails, light fare, and debut performance featuring our talented student artists.
Make sure you stay for the after-party in the Gallery – there may be some surprises in store!

Saturday Expressions Gala: 6:30 – 9:30 pm – SOLD OUT
Join us as we celebrate our 40th Anniversary with an Expressions that is truly exceptional and imagines how the BSA will serve the community for 40 years to come!
Following an exhilarating student Gala performance, celebrate the BSA’s monumental 40th birthday with a festive soiree like no other – dinner and cocktails, as well as our signature art, dance, theatre, and music classes throughout the school’s iconic building.

Sunday Family Performances
Join us Expressions Weekend to celebrate BSA’s 40th Anniversary with the one-hour performance in the school’s iconic ballroom. Perfect for the whole family.

Baltimore School for the Arts
712 Cathedral St, Baltimore, Maryland 21201
Show Map
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Tickets
www.mt.cm

2020 Scholastic Art Exhibition | Opening Reception
Friday, March 6 • 4-8pm
@ School 33 Art Center

Maryland Scholastic Exhibition 2020 Opening Reception: March 6th, 4-8pm Please join School 33 Art Center in celebrating the award recipients for the 2020 Maryland State Scholastic Art competition. Over 700 young artists received recognition this year for their artwork. This show includes artists working in a variety of disciplines, including fashion, video, animation and painting. Award recipients received a Gold Key, Silver Key, or Honorable Mention for their individual works, or for their whole portfolio. The top five submissions in the region for Visual Art were named American Visions nominees.

 

 

Stephanie Garmey: Pathways
Friday: 6 PM – 9 PM
@Hillyer Art Space

Stephanie Garmey creates imagery inspired by her collection of natural objects, materials, and taxidermy animals. Her meditations on nature use a variety of media approaches: constructions and installations, book arts, painting, cut paper, embroidery, encaustics, wood, glass, drawing, and light. In Pathways, Garmey creates tableaus of animals’ habitats from around the globe, inspired by these animals’ instinctual flow with the balance of their ecosystem, reminding of our ancient roots in positive and fruitful acknowledgement of animal power and coexistence.

9 Hillyer Ct NW, Washington, DC 20008

 

 

Collective Dreaming
Friday, March 6 + Saturday, March 7 • 7pm
@ MICA BBOX

The Cliff Banquet presents Joy Li’s 2020 theatrical production ​Collective Dreaming​, exploring the possibility of performance art in theatrical form and discussing how an individual self can be constructed by collective experience.

Collective Dreaming u​nites the relationships of mediums such as performance, sound art, sculpture, and garments with their narrative possibilities. The collaborative production features artists Joy Li, Xingqi Liu, and Tyler Brunner. Debuted with her experimental fashion line ​The Skin of Human Being​ in the 2019 Benefit Fashion Show, Joy Li furtherly enriches the conversation around collective consciousness. The play presents sculptures, both stationary and wearable, created by Joy as an extension to the previous collection. Xingqi Liu and Tyler Brunner, artists who both utilize sound as media, create music pieces in response to ooze an illusory atmosphere.

Emphasizing the quality of collectiveness, the theatrical production splices inspiration from multiple artifacts including “the Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges and “Icarus” by Yukio Mishima. The story depicts a dream in which a woman is created. From her physical body to languages, the woman is completed by the imagination of a collective. Pin Yin (拼音), a fundamental pronunciation system for Mandarin, is sung by the performers to embody the weaving of the dream. ​Collective Dreaming​ seeks to amplify the dynamic and tension generated from the interaction between individuals. It provokes reflections on self-perception and leaves the audience to ponder how a person is influenced and shaped by shared actions. The question lastly asked by the main character—“Are we living as an inauthentic existence?”— sheds light on the uncertainty this piece has harbored.

Photo by Y. Shen
 

Surfacing | Artist’s Reception
Saturday, March 7 • 2-4pm
@ MONO Practice

MONO PRACTICE is pleased to present Surfacing, a group exhibition curated by artists Alex Paik and Mark Joshua Epstein, featuring the work of Sarah BednarekRicki DwyerGlendalys Medina, Nontsikelelo MutitiCory Siegler, and Patricia Zarate.

Surfacing brings together six artists whose work employs pattern in various iterations. Repeated forms behave and misbehave– looping in and out of systems and structures we might have previously understood as fixed. The visual patterns that emerge in Surfacing are drawn from a variety of external and internal sources — aesthetic histories, cultural references, personal experience, and even studio daydreams. These patterns are places, times, people, communities. They are memory; personal and collective recollections made visual through shape. The artists here, in different ways, argue against distinctions between ornamentation and content. Rather than having pattern act as a decorative device, artists in Surfacing instead use pattern as a way to bring forth the complex visual, cultural, and personal histories that underpin their work.

Sarah Bednarek is a 2005 MFA graduate of the Sculpture program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her exhibition record includes solo shows (most recently at TSA New York), curated shows, and group shows, both nationally and internationally. She has received several awards and scholarships in support of her art. Currently a cancer survivor, she is focusing on her work, which explores formal relationships such as symmetry, repetition, texture and color through rigorous geometry and craftsmanship.

Ricki Dwyer received their undergraduate degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design and an Art Practice MFA from UC Berkeley. As an artist they have exhibited with Anglim Gilbert, Eleanor Harwood, Embark Gallery, Root Division and the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in the Bay Area. The have been artist in resident with Recology San Francisco, Jupiter Woods Gallery London, The Textile Arts Center New York, and The White Page Gallery Minneapolis. They have been recipient of the Eisner Prize, Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Queer Cultural Center’s Emerging Scholar Award. Ricki is currently teaching in the Textiles department of California College of the Arts, and holding a studio fellowship with University of California Berkeley.

Glendalys Medina is an Afro-Carribean interdisciplinary artist who received her MFA from Hunter College. Medina’s work has presented work at such notable venues as The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Kitchen, The New Museum, PAMM, Artists Space, Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo Spain, the Bronx Museum of Art and El Museo del Barrio. Medina is a Jerome Foundation Fellow and will be a Resident at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2019, was a SIP fellow at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in 2016, a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES artist resident at El Museo Del Barrio in 2015, a resident at Yaddo in 2018 and 2015, a Rome Prize fellow in Visual Arts in 2013, a NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art in 2012, and a participant in the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace residency in 2010.

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born interdisciplinary artist and educator. Mutiti holds a diploma in multimedia art from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in graphic design. She has been a resident artist at the  Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Recess, and the Centre for Book Arts, both in New York City. In 2015, Mutiti was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in its inaugural year. Mutiti has participated in several group shows including “Salon Style” at the Studio Museum, a special screening for “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum, “Talking Pictures” at the Metropolitan Museum, and “THREE: On Visibility and Camouflage” at We Buy Gold. Mutiti produces project-based works, founding Black Chalk and Co with Tinashe Mushakavanhu, a collective of writers, artists, curators, and educators that initiate research-based projects that result in publications, archival projects, and events. As cofounder of Black Chalk & Co. Mutiti has produced projects cultural projects and events. She is also artistic director for Reading Zimbabwe, a platform for archiving and publishing. Mutiti is currently Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Utilizing a variety of media, including patchwork quilting, drawing and bookmaking, Cory Emma Siegler’s practice explores the tactility, functionality, and inherent potential of art objects. Cory earned a BFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute in 2008. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, 80WSE at NYU Gallery, Bard Graduate Center Gallery, and Printed Matter, Inc., among others. She has been an exhibitor at the NY Art Book Fair (PS 1 MoMA), the Odds and Ends Art Book Fair (Yale Art Gallery), and the Brooklyn Art Book Fair. Her artists’ books are held in the permanent collections of the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Library, among others. Cory has been an artist in residence at the Textile Arts Center and at Eileen Fisher. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Patricia Zarate is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, including museum exhibitions at Queens Museum of Art (Flushing, NY); El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY); Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (San Juan, PR); and Gwangju Art Museum (Gwangju, South Korea). She was awarded a fellowship at Bau Institute artist residency, Otranto, Italy in 2013 and she was the recipient of an individual artist support grant from the Queens Council on the Arts in 2004. Her work has been reviewed in Artnexus, Art News, Newsday, and the Philadelphia Weekly. In 2013, Patricia co-founded Key Projects an art space, devoted to creating dialogue and community with other artists through group exhibitions. She received a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Baruch College, City University of New York. Born in Cali, Colombia, she currently lives and works in New York City.

About the curators:

Mark Joshua Epstein received his MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art in London and his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University. Epstein’s work has had solo exhibitions at Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY), Caustic Coastal (Manchester, UK), Vane Gallery (Newcastle, UK), Biquini Wax (Mexico City, Mexico) and Brian Morris Gallery (New York). Group shows include: Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Monaco Gallery (St Louis, MO), Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University (New York, NY), Beverly’s (New York, NY), and Hoffman Lachance (St Louis, MO). Epstein has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, Macdowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and the NARS Foundation, amongst others.

Alex Paik is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work explores perception, interdependence, and improvisation within structure through site-responsive geometric modular wall installations. His work has been shown at galleries and art fairs nationally and internationally. He is the founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and Gallery Director at Trestle Gallery, a non-profit arts organization in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. From 2015-18, he was Curator of Satellite Art Show, an alternative art fair in Miami.

 

 

Turbid Landscapes | Closing Reception
Saturday, March 7 • 4-7pm
@ 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

 

 

Helen Zughaib: Unfinished Journeys | Opening Reception
Saturday, March 7 • 6-8pm
@ Creative Alliance

Helen Zughaib was evacuated from Beirut in late1975 and, upon her return in 2010, her optimism and hope for change in her country was at a peak as the “Arab Spring” began. But as time wore on, she watched this “Arab Spring” devolve into war in Syria displacing over 13 million refugees, more than 5,000 dead, and the conflict continues with no end in sight.

In this exhibit, Zughaib captures her emotional journey through this “Arab Spring,” by focusing on the most vulnerable victims, the women and children who are left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives series.  The “Syrian Migration Series.” draws parallels between Zughaib’s paintings and those of Jacob Lawrence, to tell the stories of injustice, struggle, violence, change, hope and even beauty that surround this conflict. Zughaib follows the initial uprisings of the Arab Spring from the Syrian civil war to the current refugee crisis which continues to affect the Arab world, Europe and the United States until today.

 

 

Unnatural Causes: Blake Conroy, Bridget Parlato, and Lynne Parks | Opening Reception
Saturday, March 7 • 6-8pm
@ Creative Alliance

An exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day that focuses on climate change and biodiversity.

 

 

Migrations and Meaning(s) in Art | Exhibition Panel
Monday, March 9 • 6-8pm
@ MICA Lazarus Center

Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is pleased to present “Migrations and Meaning(s) in Art,” an exhibition curated by scholar and artist Deborah Willis, PhD, the inaugural Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography. Featuring a diverse range of local, national and international visual artists, the exhibition explores debates on the topic of migration from historical references such as slavery and emancipation; the Great Migration; and virtual communities from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Willis selected artwork that considers “how identities are realized, rejected, performed and desired,” as well as the urgency of our present moment, following Nina Simone’s famous statement that artists’ duty is to reflect the times. The exhibition will include photographs, prints, video, animation and sculpture.

“This exhibition foregrounds varied experiences on migration from concepts of dislocation, border crossings and storytelling,” Willis said. “The artwork embraces and challenges various narratives on identity through migration practices and looks at the impact and reception both empowering and subjective often explored through gentrification, longing and trauma — as well as drawing attention to race, class, gender and religion.”

For more information, visit: https://www.mica.edu/art-articles/details/migrations-and-meanings-in-art-an-exhibition-curated-by-dr-deborah-willis/

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Artists and collectives included in the exhibition are: Leslie King-Hammond, Albert Chong, Renée Cox, Carrie Mae Weems, Danny Wilcox Frasier, Tsedaye Makonnen, Nate Larson, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Hank Willis Thomas.

The full list of participants includes: Sama Alshaibi, Zalika Azim, Taylor Renee Bissey, Terry Boddie, Layo Bright, Albert Chong, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Renee Cox, Jennifer Datchuk, Sonia Louise Davis, Regina DeLuise, Nekisha Durrett, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Ivan Forde, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Daniel Castro Garcia, Lonnie Graham, Leslie King Hammond, Abbigail Hong, Jessica Ingram, Sarah Khan, Nate Larson, Nashormeh Lindo, Tsedaye Makonnen, Qiana Mestrich, Deyane Moses, Susan Harbage Page, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Hank Willis Thomas, HồngÂn Trương, Colette Veasey-Cullors, Carrie Mae Weems, Vicky Zambrano and ForFreedoms.

header image: costume design from Joy Li's 2020 theatrical production Collective Dreaming presented by MICA student collective, The Cliff Banquet

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