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 and nationally. Stay home, stay healthy, stay engaged in the arts.

After postponing our Spring Print Journal – Issue 09: Craft – we are moving ahead to print with a New Subscription Service! We will mail issues to you safely at home! Subscribe by June 15 to guarantee that you will receive Issue 09!

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]!

BmoreArt Newsletter: Sign up for news and special offers!

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.

Fourth Annual International Short Film Festival | Open Call
deadline June 28
sponsored by Aggregate Space Gallery

ASG is pleased to announce our “Fourth Annual International Animated Short Film Festival.”

In our ongoing effort to present unique and challenging art experiences to the public, Aggregate Space Gallery is proud to launch this celebration of non-commercial and experimental animation. Animation, as a subset within video art, is unique in its versatility as a communicative form and its ability to place viewers inside adjacent realities. It is a medium without rules or restrictions, and its content can address ideas as simple or as complex as the animator intends.

We will be accepting films from 2 – 25 minutes of length in the categories of narrative and non-narrative. Animations of all styles, digital and analog, will be considered. Submissions are DUE JUNE 28 / 11:59 PM PST. You will receive an email by our team regarding your submission in early July, 2020.

Due to COVID-19 and our concern for the health of our staff, artists, and audiences, this year’s festival will reshape and adjust to new online and offsite screening possibilities, where everyone can access and enjoy the videos safely. Further information will be announced as we figure out the new adaptations of how we present this important programming.

During the presentation of the program, audiences will be rating each film based on the Most seductive, Best Technique, Best Sound Design, and Best in Show, each winner will be included for our award ceremony next to the juror’s awards for Narrative and Non-narrative films. This year, our Award Ceremony will likely take place online and will include screenings of a film by each of the jurors, the viewer’s choice awards, and the juror’s top 2 films and an honorable mention from each category.

The films and their presenters will be publicly announced on our website and social media the day the viewing period opens. Also to be announced are the identities of the jurors, who will come from the San Francisco, Bay Area art and animation scene, and beyond.

There is a required submission fee of $20

*** WE WILL EVALUATE ONLY ONE SUBMISSION PER PERSON ***

F.E.A.S.T. at VisArts 2020 A MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD
deadline August 30
sponsored by VisArts

F.E.A.S.T. 2020 encourages artists, thinkers, and organizations to expand their everyday practice and create project proposals that address the theme of A MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD. Imaginative, sustainable, and provocative projects that explore and make visible a more-than-human perspective are welcome! F.E.A.S.T. 2020 advocates for proposals that join art with social, cultural, political, economic, historic, and environmental dynamics. Imaginings, actions, performances, dance, theater, writing, visual art, walks, physical and virtual, analog or digital, and beyond.

Project proposals offer opportunities for creative interaction within or between our communities. Great ideas specific to one community may also inspire action in another.

Restore active relationships with a wider community that includes animals, plants, natural objects, patterns, and phenomena!

Cultivate many-sided experiences!

Join diverse partners for inclusive investigations!

Generate empathy and engagement!

Proposals are evaluated for artistic innovation, community impact, feasibility, proposal clarity, and content.

F.E.A.S.T. at VisArts (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics) is a bridge between artists and the community. F.E.A.S.T. is a public meal designed to use community-driven financial support to democratically fund projects that use art and creative thinking to impact the community. Patrons will give a donation for a meal and a ballot. Diners listen to and review a series of project proposals and converse with the artists and thinkers behind each idea. Attendees cast a vote for their favorite proposal, and by the end of the event, the artist who garners the most votes is awarded a grant comprised of the event donations. This year we will be hosting a virtual F.E.A.S.T. over Zoom. Tickets by donation, $15 minimum, 100% of donations go to fund the micro grant of up to $2000.

F.E.A.S.T. at VisArts is based on F.E.A.S.T. in Brooklyn’s  (www.feastinbklyn.org) model for sustaining artist projects directly through community participation and InCubate (http://incubate-chicago.org). Another great resource: sundaysoup.org

Plan now to participate in F.E.A.S.T. at VisArts 2020.  We look forward to reviewing your proposals!

DIARIES | Call for Exhibition
deadline September 7
sponsored by LoosenArt

Accepted media: Photography
Group Exhibition in Rome or Milan city. December 2020

This call, following the path of a photographic genre developed from the experience of artists such as Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Boris Mikhailov, will collect photographic shots capable of expressing everyday life, such as the private and intimate one of the relationships between who describes and what and/or who is described. Diaristic photography is an approach to photography that allows you to grasp first-hand aspects of an experience through which you may create personal memories for a diary or family album. Nowadays it is made even more shareable thanks to social media platforms on the web, as well as those useful for therapeutic use: photography used to tell about yourself, as a liberating act that allows the manifestation of a condition and a first step towards awareness.

Call for Makers in America
rolling deadline
sponsored by ROOM 608

We are seeking talented makers and crafts people from all over America to be featured in a new series for PBS, produced by Room 608 Inc., a production company based in New York. The series will showcase the best and most original handmade items and makers in America – your process, skill, and your unique story.

Our ideal candidate is a skilled craftsperson with a unique product and an interesting and visually compelling process – everything from crafting handmade motorcycles to guitars to copper distilleries. We are currently looking for talented crafters of: WOOD, PLASTIC, TEXTILE, GLASS, LEATHER, COPPER, AND STEEL. We would also like to hear from you if your craft does not involve these materials but is so exciting that we absolutely have to hear about it. 

Shooting is expected to begin this fall and will take place locally, so no traveling will be required. We greatly encourage anyone regardless of age, race, nationality, or gender to respond.

If you would like to be considered, please send an email to [email protected] with a link to your website or photos of your work. Please include a brief description of your process and how you got started.

We are casting on an ongoing basis this spring. However, the earlier we hear from you, the more time we will have to review and share with our team. We will get in touch with each maker, individually, if we wish to speak further.
We look forward to hearing from you!

SPECTRUM
Tuesday, June 9 | Ongoing through June 11
hosted by Social Capital Markets

Join the SPECTRUM community for three days of interactive virtual conversations about access, inclusion, and impact.

How can we build a truly equitable economy? This June, SPECTRUM will gather multicultural changemakers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, and investors from around the country for a virtual event focused on closing the racial equity gap. For three days, the SPECTRUM community will share tools, networks, and knowledge while collaborating on ways we can build new systems that support and drive capital to leaders of color and increase access, embrace inclusion, and drive impact in communities across the country.

The conversations we are planning for SPECTRUM are more urgent now than ever. This pandemic is shining a light into the cracks in our systems where inequities live and affect our most vulnerable populations. We have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to usher in system level changes as a result. SPECTRUM is an important piece of pushing on the systems and creating the pathways for action to build upon.

Join us as we gather as a community to rejuvenate and lay the foundation for an equitable future.

The First Pride was a Riot
Wednesday, June 10 • 7-8pm
hosted by Baltimore Center Stage

Featuring poetry by Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi and music by Diana Oh.

As we experience the interconnected impacts of a global health pandemic and a long-lasting societal pandemic of anti-Blackness, it is more important than ever to raise up the histories of resistance and resilience of queer communities. Pride was born out of an uprising, led by Black and brown queer and trans folks, and that history must guide us as we celebrate today, across social distance. For this virtual Baltimore Butterfly Session, we come together to discuss and practice how queer community can show up for each other and for justice during this quarantined Pride season.

HOW TO JOIN?
This virtual event will be held as a Zoom meeting and will also be live-streamed to our Facebook page:

To join by Zoom, click here and register for free

To join by FB live, visit our FB page on June 10 at 7PM

Studio Visit: Sculpting with Merle Davison
Thursday, June 11 • 5:30-6pm
hosted by The Walters Art Museum

Local artist Merle Davison creates bronzes, clay sculptures, and jewelry. Merle discusses her artistic process and how the vast collection of the Walters Art Museum inspires her creations. In current works, Merle takes inspiration from classic sculpture to create clay busts of her own family members. When she is not sculpting, Merle works as a security officer at the Walters.

About Merle Davison

Merle Davison is a poet, self-taught sculptor, and jewelry artist with no formal art education. Born in Washington, DC in 1963, she has an innate talent and skill for sculpting, evident in her ability to capture the intimate realism of the human form, the unique characteristics of the individual human face, as well as the subtleties of architecture in her relief sculptures. Her sculptures are originally free-hand sculpted in plasticine clay, and she currently creates her art and jewelry in a small studio in her home in Baltimore, MD.

Maryland Film Festival | Virtual
Friday, June 12 | Ongoing through June 21
hosted by Maryland Film Festival

We’re back in action! The Maryland Film Festival rises from the ashes in an all-new virtual format for 2020!

This MdFF is going to be a little different – and a whole lotta fun. Get ready for TEN DAYS of film fest extravaganza: the best of emerging, independent cinema in the world today at your fingertips with our brand new Parkway Virtual Theatre.

These won’t be just any regular old online screenings. We’re giving you the full Maryland Film Fest experience with:

– North American & World Premiere Films
– Exclusive Filmmaker Interactives
– Hosted Virtual Events & Afterparties
– Signature Short Film Programs
– And More!

To help you get ready for this very special #MdFFVirtual, we’re bringing back some old favorites in our Festival Encore series from now ’til June 12th. Find ’em at https://watch.eventive.org/parkway.

More info with film announcements, events, and much much more soon to come. We are SO excited. June 12 – 21, 2020. Put it on your empty calendar!

UMD Spring Exhibitions | Online Exhibitions
hosted by UMD Art Studio

At the end of a normal Spring semester, the Department would hold three separate exhibitions that highlight the creative work of our undergraduate and graduate students: The MFA Thesis Exhibition, The Department Honors Thesis Exhibition, and the Graduating Seniors Exhibition. Since we were unable to mount these shows that define the end of the academic year, we offer these online alternatives to display our

href=”https://www.umdartstudio.space/graduation”>Graduation Statement by the Department of Art Chair: W.C. Richardson

Ashley M. Freeby: (un)sterile soil | Online Exhibition
hosted by Gallery 102

Gallery 102 presents the first of our Summer Solo Series projects, (un)sterile soil from artist Ashley M. Freeby. The exhibition runs from June 1 – July 17, 2020. Consisting of six horizons, the exhibition will debut a new horizon every Monday throughout the run of the show.

(un)sterile soil creates legacy, shifts perspectives, and rewrites the narrative of Black lives taken by the hands of law enforcement. It examines sites from above to below the surface to analyze the essence of trauma remaining at locations of police involved shootings. The inspiration for Freeby’s work over the last five years has been a poetic gesture made by a grieving family; a gesture that created an unexpected back-to-Earth monument in Ferguson. The thin layer of road was removed to extract the tainted grounds and replaced to extinguish the trace of a life lost. This re/construction of the Earth has continued to influence their artistic practice. It has stimulated their thinking in the investigating of police-involved shootings through the land.

You can view an introduction to the project here.

The horizons and their time frame are as follows:

Introduction – June 1-7
Horizon #1 – Coordinates to Memories – June 8-14
Horizon #2 – Off the Record – June 15-21
Horizon #3 – By The Land – June 22-28
Horizon #4 – Access/Fear to Play – June 29-July 5
Horizon #5 – Excavating the Trauma – July 6-12
Horizon #6 – Rewriting Our History – July 13-17

In addition to the work on view, Gallery 102 has commissioned written works from a group of writers, artists, poets, academics, and critics, which will pair with each horizon that is released. Contributors include: Rohan Ayinde, Sophia Park, Angela N. Carroll, Jesse Meredith, Dr. Daniel Quiles, Kelly Dolan, and more.

BIO

Designer, artist and truth-teller, Ashley M. Freeby uses natural materials, poetic language and minimalism to explore site, monuments and data as a way to investigate the essence of memory and legacy. Her recent solo and dual exhibitions include ‘Plots & Hems’ at Hyde Park Art Center (2019), ‘As gesture’ at Chicago Artist Coalition (2019), ‘Non-constants’ at The Annex @ Spudnik Press (2019), and ‘Unjustified Patterns’ at Kanzlei, Berlin (2018). In addition, she has participated in group exhibitions in DC, Miami, Chicago, Toronto Canada, and Pennsylvania. She is currently a Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow in DC and was previously a HATCH Projects Resident in Chicago. She has also attended Vermont Studio Center and the Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin Germany. Freeby was awarded the SPARK grant. Earned a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Bucknell University. Freeby currently works for Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency as Communications Manager & Head Designer.

Logical Elasticity | Online Exhibition
hosted by Catalyst Contemporary

Catalyst Contemporary presents Logical Elasticity, an online exhibition showcasing the work of Salt Lake City painter Nolan Flynn, whose multivalent abstract fields and sketches question the presence of weighted ideas like relational aesthetics within the lens of human experiences, and ultimately questioning what we believe to be a finished piece.

The selections featured in the show encapsulate a threshold of time within the constraints of Flynn’s experience, whether it is personal input or global issues. During the act of creation, Flynn emotionally and autocratically responds to the visual and literary elements evolving on the surface of his canvas with a personal critique and subconscious awareness of the interactions and symbolism each stroke creates. This act of self critique and sketch-like visuals comes from a lack of predetermined movements, and the ideas unfold naturally. Flynn relates his process to that of Jean Claude Christo considering the initial idea and plan as a completed piece rather than a final work. In Christo’s work, the sketch and initial plan is revered and is the only contribution to the actual secondary goal that the original idea presented.