BmoreArt

This Week: We are featuring online events that you can participate in from the comfort of your own couch plus a few ways to get involved locally. Stay home, stay healthy, stay engaged in the arts.

For more information and resources for artists during Coronavirus Quarantine, please see our previous post: Actionable Items: Arts-Related Resources in the Age of COVID-19

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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We’ll send you our top stories of the week, selected event listings, and our favorite calls for entry—right to your inbox every Tuesday.

Call for Entry | Love Letters to Baltimore Buildings
via Baltimore Architecture Foundation

Do you have a crush?

Declare your love to the Baltimore building that has you smitten in a 150- to 450-word letter. Don’t worry if you’re not a writer. Don’t worry that you are truly, madly, deeply in love with a building that other people don’t know exists. We want to hear from you! We will feature a letter in each edition of Keystone, our bi-weekly e-newsletter. All letters will then be archived here on our website.

Please include the address of your beloved building and if possible, a digital image. Authors should also include a short, 1-sentence bio. Letters will be reviewed and copyedited by BAF staff.

Send submissions to Nathan Dennies at [email protected].

Open Call for Submissions | COVID Landscapes
via Sense of Press

Submit to the inaugural Sense of Press open call for submissions! COVID Landscapes is a forthcoming risograph-printed book that will consider the act of observation and art-making in quarantine as not only a mode of combating isolation and fear in the wake of illness and quarantine but also a method of nurturing a sense of belonging in body and place. Follow the link in bio for the full open call. Artists may submit up to 5 images and written work of up to 5,000 words. Deadline April 24. No application fee.

Play at Home | Short Plays to be Enjoyed at Home
via Baltimore Center Stage

In March 2020 a bunch of theaters were producing plays, business as usual, when a global pandemic had other plans. Prioritizing the safety of their communities, they made difficult decisions to cease or postpone programming for the remainder their seasons. But the story doesn’t end there. With a spirit of resilience, adaptation, and invitation, they came together to create the Play At Home project, a series of short plays commissioned specifically for this moment of unprecedented isolation to inspire joy and connection for all.

We started as a small group: Baltimore Center Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, The Public Theater, Repertory Theater of St Louis, & Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company committed to finding ways to keep people connected to live theater. Every day, more theaters are jumping in to participate in what we’re hoping becomes a #PlayAtHome national past time.

Our goals are simple…

PAY SOME ARTISTS!

Freelance artists are among the folks hit hardest by COVID-19 closures. We want to support them in doing what they do best—creating! While we would love to be able to include anyone and everyone, right now, we’re just five theaters—we’re actively seeking more partner theaters and individuals to jump in and force-multiply.

INVITE PEOPLE TO GET OFFLINE AND INTO THEIR IMAGINATIONS!

Part of the irreplaceable magic of live theater lives in the unmediated space between artists and the audience’s imagination. We make worlds together! Play At Home is an invitation to unplug the tech, and plug into your creativity. You can binge watch The Office later. You’ve got a brand-new library of short plays at your fingertips!

INSPIRE JOY AND CONNECTION!

Read alone! Read with your friends virtually! Read with your roommates, families, pets, whomever! And, if you want, share what you’re up to by tagging #PlayAtHome.

Autism Acceptance Month | Virtual Exhibition
ongoing through April 30
@ Make Studio

April is internationally recognized as World Autism Awareness Month, and each year Make Studio chooses to mark this month by actively celebrating acceptance.

“During Autism Acceptance Month, we focus on sharing positive, respectful, and accurate information about autism and autistic people. Autism Acceptance Month promotes acceptance and celebration of autistic people as family members, friends, classmates, co-workers, and community members making valuable contributions to our world. Autism is a natural variation of the human experience, and we can all create a world which values, includes, and celebrates all kinds of minds.” (Autistic Self Advocacy Network)

Here, as we do every year, we are highlighting the enormous talents, diverse art-making styles, and varied perspectives of our artists with autism/autistic artists in a special exhibition with accompanying features; this year, like so many things, these activities have to be entirely online. Although that is disappointing, we are embracing this platform to highlight the importance of showing solidarity with people on the spectrum as well as the wider disabilities community: “Even in these unpredictable times, we must commit to consulting persons with disabilities and their representative organizations, and ensuring that our non-traditional ways of working, learning, and engaging with each other, as well as our global response to the coronavirus, are inclusive of and accessible to all people, including persons with autism. The rights of persons with autism must be taken into account in the formulation of all responses to the COVID-19 virus.” (António Guterres, WHO)

Some of the Make Studio artists chose to share brief statements about their pieces and/or a reflection about autism.

DC Metro Virtual Town Hall
Tuesday, April 14 • 6 p.m.
Co-hosted by the Third Space Network, McLean Project for the Arts, VisArts/Rockville, and Hamiltonian Artists/DC

The Third Space Network (3SN) announces DC Metro Virtual Town Hall: Strategies for Survival in the Arts on Tuessday, April 14, 2020, 6–7:30 p.m. The event will address the impact of Covid-19 on the visual arts in the DC metropolitan cultural community, an invitation for regional visual arts organizations, artists, curators, and other arts professionals to participate.

The DC Metro Virtual Town Hall will include short presentations by local arts leaders and funders along with open public dialogue intended to share solutions for the following: funding sources, future programming, support for artists, and engagement in community outreach. The event will also be an information resource for organizations facing the challenge of migrating their public events and exhibitions to the online medium. The Virtual Town Hall is envisioned as a timely opportunity to call for a region-wide arts consortium for initiating collaborative projects and joint funding, helping to unite arts & cultural communities in the DC region during these extraordinary times of crisis.

Confirmed guest speakers: Nora Halpern, Vice-President of Leadership Alliances, Americans for the Arts; Jack Rasmussen, Director of the American University Museum/Chair, Maryland State Arts Council; Robert Goudie, Virginia Commission for the Arts; Sarah Burford, Media Arts Specialist/Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts; TBA, DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities;

Planning Group: Randall Packer, Creative Director, & Christina Papanicolaou, Communications Strategist, Third Space Network; Nancy Sausser, Curator/Exhibitions Director, McLean Project for the Arts; Susan Main, Gallery Director/Curator & Frank McCauley, Assistant Curator, VisArts/Rockville; Lily Siegel, Executive Director, Hamiltonian Artists/DC; Richard Dana, Artist/Co-founder, Take Me to the River Project; Kerry Brougher, former Chief Curator/Deputy Director, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

For updated information: https://thirdspacenetwork.com/dc-metro-virtual-town-hall/

Zoë Charlton & Jessica Stafford Davis | Artist Talk
Wednesday, April 15 • 7–8 p.m.
Hosted by CulturalDC

Artist Zoë Charlton and curator Jessica Stafford Davis talk about Charlton’s exhibit, Rendition, in the Mobile Art Gallery. The Gallery is closed, but we wanted to bring this great conversation to your homes.

RSVP via the Facebook event page for the Zoom link.

MICA MFA Filmmaking Thesis Screening | Virtual Broadcast
Friday, April 17 + Saturday, April 18 • 7–10 p.m.
Presented by MICA MFA Filmmaking + SNF Parkway

In the midst of these Covid-19 uncertain days, the graduating MICA MFA Filmmaking Class of 2020 remain excited to share their thesis films. As a community, and through innovating, we have decided to move forward with showcasing our creativity virtually.

The Filmmaking MFA graduating class of 2020 requests your support in promoting the Live Broadcast of our thesis films showing on ​Friday, April 17 and ​Saturday, April 18th​ at ​7 p.m​. The live broadcast will be held at ​https://www.facebook.com/mdffparkway​ in collaboration with the SNF Parkway Theater in Baltimore, MD. We will be showing a total of 11 films; 5 documentaries, 3 dramas, and 3 horror films.

The program will begin with opening remarks, live Q&A sessions with the filmmakers, closing remarks, and of course screening of the films.

For more information visit ​http://micafilmmaking.org

Object Permanence | Instagram Live Opening Reception
Friday, April 17 • 6 p.m.
@ Baltimore Jewelry Center

We will be hosting an online opening for our forthcoming exhibition, Object Permanence. Join us on Instagram Live on Friday, April 17 at 6 p.m. EST for a walk-through of the exhibition.

Virtual Puppet Slamwich!
Saturday, April 18 • 6:30pm
presented by Black Cherry Puppet Theater

Though we had to cancel our originally scheduled Puppet Slamwich earlier this month…puppeteers, artists, musicians and our amazing curator/MC Emily Schubert have been hard at work getting pieces together for an Online VIRTUAL Puppet Slam that you can watch from the comfort of your own home!

Get ready for Black Cherry’s FIRST EVER VIRTUAL PUPPET SLAM!

It’s happening on April 18th! We will release the link to watch at 6:30 pm! Here’s a link to the FB EVENT PAGE where you’ll be able to get access! Please mark yourself as “Attending” and invite your friends!

We have NEVER done this before so we are still figuring out all the ins and outs but the plan is to release the link with an option to donate some $$$ to support all of our amazing puppeteers and musicians during this difficult and crazy time.

Puppeteers & Musicians Include:
Katherine Fahey
Matt Muirhead
Valeska Populoh
Emily Schubert
Felicia Cooper
Noah Ginex
Jonathan Vocke
Liz Downing
Shroeder Cherry
Eric Voboril
Bernie Beauchamp
Geraldine
and more……..!!!!!
​
Scheduled for online viewing Saturday April 18th
More info to come soon!