This Week: We are featuring online events that you can participate in from the comfort of your own couch plus a few calls for entry to get involved locally and nationally. Stay home, stay healthy, stay engaged in the arts.
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“Paint it Black Baltimore” – A visual collaboration by Kondwani Fidel x Kirby Griffin
presented by The Medicine Show
Virtual Tour of Kim Rice: Inheritance with Kim Rice and Jeffrey Kent
Thursday, January 7 • noon–1 p.m.
Sponsored by The Peale
Take a virtual tour of Kim Rice: Inheritance with the artist and exhibition curator Jeffrey Kent.
In this timely and ground-breaking exhibition curated by the Peale’s artistic director Jeffrey Kent, artist Kim Rice confronts her white privilege. Inheritance explores how Rice’s “fair” complexion is exactly the cause of so much inequality for others who do not look like her. Created over the past decade, these artworks confront the harsh realities of systemic racism from the perspective of a white American woman whose ancestors enslaved hundreds of humans for hard labor.
See also: BmoreArt’s review of Inheritance.
BmoreArt at Grimaldis Gallery | With Giulia Piera Livi and Carol Brown Goldberg
Thursday, January 7 • 6:30pm
sponsored by BmoreArt + C. Grimaldis Gallery
BmoreArt’s Cara Ober and Jeffrey Kent discuss Entanglements, a solo exhibition at the C. Grimaldis Gallery by DC-based, Baltimore-born artist Carol Brown Goldberg and Gallery Manager Guilia Piera Livi. The exhibition of large paintings delves into the artist’s interest in quantum physics and entanglement theory, linking her own upbringing in a closely-knit Jewish Baltimore community to the evolution of human and other kinds of natural relationships. We look forward to a lively discussion with the artist and gallery director and welcome our subscribers to this invite-only online event.
Yoon Sun Shin | Opening Reception
Thursday, January 7 • 6:30–10:15 p.m.
@ The Alchemy of Art
Sign-up here
Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Yoon Sun Shin received a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018. Since his graduation, Yoon Sun has exhibited at local galleries such as Flip gallery, Maryland Art Place, Resort Gallery, and VisArts. Being an active skateboarder since the age of 6, it has provided him a language of interpretation to architecture, acclamation to his adolescence, and the ambitious means to discover. Recently, he has been busy preparing for his first solo show at The Alchemy of Arts Gallery, opening in the winter of 2021. Yoon Sun currently has a studio at Resort Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland.
While concentrating on figurative painting and sculpture, I have been using these disciplines to document occurring events. In these recent works I have been reflecting on the often perverse occurrences that have so far characterized my life, seeking a space of playfulness through the depiction of absurdities. For example, getting pulled over while hotboxing a car, the weird strip games you’d play when you were young, and falling in love with someone that you naturally grow apart from. What makes these events unique is the fact that they are painted, but I assure you, they are not foreign. I moved to the states at 3 years old from the city of Incheon. It was breathtaking from what I can remember, but western culture has embedded this work. I didn’t learn english in school, it began through watching television, until I made friends, and as I made new friends, their stories. Whether it was about home life, or a grand vacation, It was a speech based learning experience.
Joe Speier: The Waiter’s Lament
closes Saturday, January 9
@ Springsteen
In The Waiter’s Lament, Joe Speier mines different roles of the overworked artist. To make a living, like many artists, Speier waits tables. He most recently worked at a restaurant in a major museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art. In this new series, developed during the 2020 pandemic, Speier uses, in bulk, Bic ballpoint pens on canvas, the same he hands to diners to sign checks at restaurants. He also utilizes flatware and napkins, found in fine dining establishments. Such materials, intrinsically tied to the exchange between diner and server, turn the canvas into a table-setting, forcing the viewer to reconsider the painting’s indexical relationship to consumption, labor, and distribution. For Speier, artists and servers cater to the same milieu: patrons seeking hospitality and entertainment.
In his practice, Speier blurs the lines between these seemingly disparate modes of labor. Intrinsic to Speier’s art is affordable craft-associated materials such as store-bought canvases, beads, glitter, and acrylic medium. These material choices speak to a common vernacular, which he phrases as “a shared economy of artistic and therapeutic gestures,” seen in YouTube painting tutorials or the doodles of a bored co-worker. This alchemical material play results in the stylistic imitation of the Abstract Expressionists. A tongue in cheek jab to those artists of the ‘50s and ’60s, Speier is interested in the performance of modernist cliches to deconstruct the myth of the artist. In 2020, how does the artist eat? As the rift grows between emerging artists and the blue-chip market, Speier asks critical questions related to class, value, and taste.
Calls for Entry // Opportunities
Arts & Culture Transition Committee Reimagining Baltimore’s Arts Council Survey
deadline January 8
sponsored by The Arts & Culture Transition Committee for Baltimore City Mayor Brandon M. Scott
The Arts & Culture Transition Committee for Baltimore City Mayor Brandon M. Scott wants your input as we develop recommendations for how Baltimore City government can best support artists, cultural producers, creative hubs, and cultural institutions. Click here for more information on Mayor Scott’s vision and transition committees: https://www.brandonforbaltimore.com/post/december-1-mayor-elect-brandon-scott-announces-transition-team-members
Responses are needed by January 8, 2021!
Our city needs us! The transition committees are moving fast to deliver recommendations to the Mayor as soon as possible. Please share you feedback by January 4, 2021. This survey will stay live after that date to inform continued advocacy work.
Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize | Call for Entry
deadline January 11
sponsored by BOPA
The Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA) continues to accept applications for the 16th annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. The prestigious competition awards a $25,000 fellowship to assist in furthering the career of a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Greater Baltimore region. Approximately six finalists will be selected for final review for the prize. This year, the finalists’ work is scheduled to be exhibited at the Walters Art Museum. The deadline for submissions is Monday, January 11, 2021 and the application is available at www.promotionandarts.org
The finalists’ exhibition is scheduled to be on view Thursday, May 27 through Sunday, July 18, 2021 at the Walters Art Museum, located at 600 N. Charles St. Admission to the exhibition is free. In the case of continuing COVID-19 restrictions, the exhibition will occur on the online platform Kunstmatrix, with curatorial support from the Walters Arts Museum.
Additionally, works by the remaining semifinalists will be selected by BOPA curator Lou Joseph for a separate exhibition during the summer of 2021. The 2021 jurors are Naz Cuguoğlu, Michelle Grabner, and Meleko Mokgosi.
Past distinguished recipients of the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize are Laure Drogoul (Baltimore, MD) in 2006; Tony Shore (Baltimore, MD) in 2007; Geoff Grace (Baltimore, MD) in 2008; Baltimore Development Cooperative (Baltimore, MD) in 2009; Ryan Hackett (Kennsington, MD) in 2010; Matthew Porterfield (Baltimore, MD) in 2011; Renee Stout (Washington, DC) in 2012; Gabriela Bulisova (Washington, DC ) in 2013; Neil Feather (Baltimore, MD) in 2014; Wickerham & Lomax (Baltimore, MD) in 2015; FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture (Baltimore, MD) in 2016; Cindy Cheng (Baltimore, MD) in 2017; Erick Antonio Benitez (Baltimore, MD) in 2018; Akea Brionne Brown (Baltimore, MD) in 2019; and LaToya M. Hobbs (Baltimore, MD) in 2020.
In 2020, in response to COVID-19 restrictions, the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize competition occurred fully online with a virtual exhibition and an online award ceremony, during which LaToya M. Hobbs was announced as the winner. The ceremony is available to watch on BOPA’s YouTube.
Prisma Art Prize | Call for Entry
deadline January 31
sponsored by Il Varco
Il Varco is glad to inaugurate the seventh edition of Prisma Art Prize, a quarterly award with cash prizes for artists from all around the world that will become a collective exhibition for the first time in February 2021 in Rome.
Organized with the goal of creating a space for visual artists to share their work with hundreds of colleagues from all around the world, it offers 2000€ in cash awards every year, purchase prizes and packages of services worth 2500€ from Biafarin and Vivivacolors in four seasonal competitions and an online gallery where the artworks are put on display forever.
Jurors are qualified and esteemed painters, curators, mixed media artists and digital artists from different countries all around the world. The exhibition will take place at Atelier Montez, a contemporary art factory born in 2012 from the redevelopment of an urban wreck on a project by the Artist Gio Montez, that has already attracted international artists like Hermann Nitsch, Cheikh Zidor and Turi Sottile.
Visit our finalists gallery and submit on our official website
Signing up is fast and you can do it entirely online.
Baltimore Jewelry Center Residency Program | Call for Applications
deadline February 1
The Baltimore Jewelry Center offers 4 different types of residencies for artists at different places in their careers. Artists are given bench access to our fully equipped metalsmithing studio situated in a vibrant community of jewelers and makers.
We are excited to announce that we have a new residency specifically for BIPOC artists.
Superfine! Art Fair DC | Call for Artists
deadline February 1
82 exhibiting artists and galleries from around the globe. Inspired, authentic new contemporary art. Thousands of eager future collectors. Superfine DC 2019 was one for the books. 3,500 art-hungry Washingtonians passed through the doors of Dock 5 just days before one of our nation’s most historic elections, and hundreds of them took home brand new artwork (many for the first time!)
Washington DC exemplifies all that Superfine embodies: a fresh, inclusive, and receptive art landscape where eager buyers collect and connect with artists. We’re thrilled to bring our unique and accessible approach back to the DMV in fall of 2021. Deeper partnerships with local institutions, collaborations with local art superstars and membership based organizations, expansion upon our already extensive digital and print marketing campaign, and a focus on under-represented artists including women, LGBTQ+ artists, and artists of color — all hallmarks of our 2021 DC program.
Let’s work together to build a strong, sustainable art market in Washington DC next fall.
This week: Evan Woodward's museum, Blaze Star, John Waters turns 78, Juius Wilson at AVAM, Megan Lewis, Joyce J. Scott, MICA UP/Start Venture Winner Announced, and RuPaul winners to race at Baltimore Pride, and more!
In Conjunction with BmoreArt’s C+C Exhibit featuring Fostel’s charcoal drawings of women’s bedrooms, a conversation with the Co-Director of the Baltimore Abortion Fund
This Week: MICA Community Art & Service Program exhibition, In the Stacks performance at Peabody Library, City of Artists I closing reception at Connect + Collect, Mari Black at Manor Mill, Open Works yard sale, screening of Black Printmakers of Washington DC at Smithsonian Anacostia, and more!
This week's news includes: Baynard Woods on Larry Hogan's "error-laden" memoir, BMI's new Labor Activism Exhibit, Blacksauce Kitchen, Joyce J. Scott, Glenstone Outdoors this Summer, Rob Lee profiles Anthony Gittens, BSO's Summerfest at the Meyerhoff–and more!
