BmoreArt

Historically, depictions of fruit and flowers in various states of blossom or decay have been a common way to reference the brevity of human life as well as pious religious sacrifice, with one painter riffing on the compositions and technique of others who came before them.

Art really is made within a community of historical traditions, whether in Baltimore in 2025 or in 1660’s Belgium. When contemporary art might seem to be haphazard or irrelevant, you can look to the material choices of the very best artists to understand their work.

Consider the difference between an oil painting of a banana, a banana sculpture made out of sugar, and an actual banana duct taped to a gallery wall. All three reference capitalism, consumption, globalization, and entropy, but they function in completely different ways. When we take the time to consider the meaning of the material, not just its usage or appearance, but the history and politics of the material, the understanding of a work of art goes radically deeper than a passing glance. Materials contain meaning.

This year in the exhibit of Sondheim Finalists at the Walters there are just a few bananas, but all five finalists—Aliana Grace Bailey, Amanda Leigh Burnham, Lillian Jacobson, Jacob Mayberry, and Wonchul Ryu—expertly exploit the power of their chosen materials.

Although completely different, each artist constructs a unique language to tell a story that goes well beyond narration or depiction. Whether it’s painting, weaving, poetry, or sculpture, this exhibit offers up a multitude of rich narratives, crystallizing into five distinct solo exhibitions that reflect our current reality back to us in bold and subtle ways.

The Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize was established as part of Artscape in Baltimore in 2006, offering a $30,000 prize to one visual artist living (or collective) and working in the Baltimore region, but more importantly it has included an exhibition of finalists alternately hosted by our two major museums. Each year, artists from all over the region apply for this award and the finalists are selected by a different group of jurors, typically art experts sourced from outside the region.

This year, jurors Jaqueline Cedar, Mike Cloud, and Jennie Goldstein selected the five finalists whose work will be on view through Sunday, July 20 at WAM. This year the awards ceremony will be on June 26, followed by a public reception. If you’ve never attended before, I hope you’ll add it to your calendar this year.

Amanda Leigh Burnham’s Feral Cartoons

I have only recently discovered an appreciation for the dynamic lines in comic books. For those in the know, every single line from Dragon Ball, Tintin, Superman, X-Men, or The Phantom zings from thick to thin, suggesting (e)motion with lyrical precision. In the bold, dimensional works on paper by Amanda Leigh Burnham in the Sondheim exhibit, I am seeing the connections between comic books, Japanese woodblock prints, Expressionists like Edvard Munch, and Baltimore street writing, where lines contain multitudes of meaning.

Burnham, a Yale graduate and tenured Towson University Art Professor, presents energetic works on paper that abound with riotous color. Some are smaller, framed pieces, but her larger unframed installations tower over you and pulse with a frantic linear style that will beckon to comic book afficionados and fans of graphic novels.

As you lean in close, currents of intense, warm and cool colored tendrils vine around recognizable fragments of body parts, rocky outcroppings, architecture, and nets. The artist uses ink and watercolor on both sides of the paper; she then folds, cuts, layers, and weaves the paper back together into chaotic three dimensional compositions that recall biological overgrowth, convoluted maps, and crowded rooms. Burnham’s section of this exhibit offers a delirious, improvisational chaos that references Baltimore decay and energetic rebirth, coupled with the crisp linear brush strokes of a graphic novel, like feral cartoons.

Aliana Grace Bailey’s Radiant Color Fields

Similar to writing, woven textiles are constructed row by row, where each unique line is merged into a larger structure through a loom. Aliana Grace Bailey is the author of warm, vibrant-colored wall-sized woven fiber pieces, which are displayed horizontally like paintings on the museum walls, but also hung from the ceiling. In some cases, weavings hang next to album covers, including those from Chaka Khan and The Five Stairsteps, referencing the music and cover art that shaped her memories of the family members who inspired them. Weaving is a meditational, repetitive act, where moments of improvisation merge into a larger network; every line is a revelation and a unique mark. Bailey’s section of the Sondheim exhibit abounds with spirituality, calmness, and care. 

In newer works, Bailey moves into quilts where the artist’s self portrait, printed onto fabric, repeats and merges into fields of colorful dyed blossoms. These self portraits in fuchsia and saffron are cut, sewn, and embroidered, documenting a journey of exhaustion and restoration—where plants, flowers, seeds, and printed fabric merge into magnetic fields of radiant color. 

(Author’s Note: Bailey will be exhibiting later this month at BmoreArt’s C+C Gallery)

Lillian Jacobson’s Fractured Portraits

Lillian Jacobson’s figurative portrait paintings explore aspects of belonging in the United States, each featuring a single human figure with a contrasting image or pattern projected on top of them. In wall text, the artist explains that she was born in Colombia and adopted into a white American family in Baltimore, which has made her hyperaware of how she is perceived in public spaces by strangers who expect her to be fluent in Spanish or tell her to “go back to her country.” Jacobson’s meticulously painted figures capture the jarring sensation of being in-between realities and force the viewer to pay close attention to decipher their meaning, where symbolic words, architecture, flags, and landscape transform surfaces of skin and clothing.

The most powerful painting of the series is “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…” where Jacobson juxtaposes the vibrant reds and blues of the American and Colombian flags and cloud formations over a self portrait, hands outstretched with pointy fingernails. In this painting, the artist luxuriates in the exquisite depiction of details: pearl shirt buttons, ruffled fabric, glistening lips, while amping up the contrast between a blood-red shadow and cool, puffy clouds. You get a sense Jacobson is discovering new aspects of herself, embracing the dichotomy between her unique identity and a relationship with place. 

Jacob Mayberry’s Voice

“I leave my home.
They stare at me the way a tombstone stares at flowers,
Like I’m meant to lay before them.
I put on a suit
And they still saw a hoodie I wasn’t even wearing.
Transfixed a crucifix on my back.
Those same cops came back,
Turned me to the premonition of a funeral.
I closed my eyes to die,
But I just woke up Black again.”

A man wearing a black sweatshirt with the words BLACK POET revels in language, his voice a calibrated staccato snare drum on the video monitor. In the spoken word poem “Hoodie,” Jacob Mayberry uses words to paint a picture of lynching in contemporary America.” Like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Mayberry details the involuntary transformation of a narrator into a rich multitude of characters, with language that he revs up and flexes into subtle rhyme and dissonance.

I want to be seamlessly immersed in sound and the poet’s cinematic presence, but unfortunately you cannot experience his lyrical precision without putting on a pair of headphones attached to a smallish wall monitor. As a result, I cannot stop myself from reimagining this section of the exhibition in a black-box, surround-sound theater where moving image and sound merge into an immersive performance.

This is one of the challenges of an art prize exhibition, where jurors select the artists but have nothing to do with the display of the art, sometimes presenting an insurmountable challenge to curators working on a shoestring budget and an abbreviated timeline. At the Walters, there are several video monitors, the hoodie and an American flag displayed on the wall, and a glass vitrine full of the artist’s handwritten notebooks. 

Instead of emphasizing what’s not there, it’s important that we focus on Mayberry’s expertise as a wordsmith and performer, where cadence and alliteration, assonance and rhyme, enjambment and allusion merge into a passionate delivery. The vision he presents is one of America full of struggle, injustice, and hope. Rather than dividing us, Mayberry’s insistence on speaking truth, no matter how painful, reminds us that our First Amendment Rights in America are a uniting force and superpower.

Wonchul Ryu’s Migrant Experience

We have finally made it to the banana. “January 3rd, 1852, Hawaii,” is the title of Ryu’s golden sugar banana – the date  of the first Asian immigrants’ arrival to the U.S. under legal labor contracts to work on sugarcane plantations. But it’s not the only banana in the bunch. There are also porcelain bananas sitting on a pedestal, white with dark blue accents of hand-scrawled K-pop lyrics, referencing the white and blue Chinoiserie ceramic works in the Walters collection. 

Recent MICA graduate Wonchul Ryu’s section of the exhibit is visually more random than the others but each material choice is intentional. He includes plywood shipping crates, projected video screens, 3D printing, cardboard, resin, and Google Translate. Viewed together, the works share the artist’s “migrant experience” in the United States, placed in comparison to his grandfather’s history of displacement from North to South Korea.

There are a number of digital replicas of common objects that create an altar to honor his ancestors: white 3D printed oranges, dishes, platters of small cookies and cakes, candelabras atop a plywood box, and a sense of family nostalgia contained in the common objects of everyday and ceremonial use. 

Perhaps most curiously poignant is the hanging screen, “4 ((Un)Becoming White 4),” made of flattened shipping boxes: the lowly containers of millions of care packages sent across oceans. Rows and rows of grayish Korean text cover the screen and function as a pattern, while wall text reveals that its “Korean-accented English,” repeatedly written in Korean, pulled from study samples used to teach language acquisition skills.

I don’t know if cardboard will become the next “banana” of the art world, but the benign ubiquity of Amazon’s favorite delivery container to most of the planet and its detrimental environmental impact certainly makes a strong case. For those who visit this exhibit, a rule of thumb: if the work of art provokes even a small level of hostility or pushback within you, it has done it’s work. It will be remembered.