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Looking Back at 2025: A Note of Gratitude From BmoreArt

Milestones: Publications, Exhibits, and Events

Words: BmoreArt Team, 

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Dear BmoreArt Community,

As we reflect on 2025, we want to begin with a sincere thank you. Everything BmoreArt does is made possible by our community—our members, artists, contributors, readers, partners, and supporters. Your engagement allows us to continue documenting, supporting, and celebrating Baltimore’s art ecosystem.

Our work is grounded in three core pillars: documentation and archiving, community building, and curatorial expertise. Below is a snapshot of what we accomplished together this year.

Documenting and Archiving

In 2025, BmoreArt continued its commitment to documenting Baltimore’s cultural landscape:

  • 172 original stories published on bmoreart.com featuring a broad freelance team based in Baltimore
  • 104 BmoreArt Picks highlighting exhibitions, events, and creative voices
  • Two print journals released: Hidden Gems and The Icons
  • One full length book published in partnership with artist Jackie Milad: Shabtis Gather
  • A new, custom-build website by Mission Media launched in October, 2025 with new capabilities including an audio player for each story, an updated calendar, and streamlined navigation
  • A beautiful semi-weekly newsletter sent out to thousands of (free) subscribers keeping our community in the know and helping the “culturally curious” plan their weekends around art

These efforts contribute to a growing public record of artists, ideas, and cultural activity in Baltimore. We are seeing the results in our increased web traffic, social media engagement, and interest in attending events in person.

Community Building

This year marked an important milestone for BmoreArt as a community-centered organization:

  • Our first Ball & Benefit, celebrating Issue 20: The Icons and 10 years in print, brought together over 400 people, including members, featured artists, contributors, and sponsors
  • A release party for Issue 19: Hidden Gems for 300+ guests at True Chesapeake for subscribing members, featured artists, contributors, and media partners

In addition, through gallery programming:

These gatherings created opportunities for conversation, collaboration, and connection.

Cultural Expertise

In 2025, BmoreArt presented three curated exhibitions through Connect+Collect:

In Silver and Earth, featuring works by Elena Volkova and Jonna McKone
Exhibition at BmoreArt Connect+Collect Gallery | February–May 20 2025

Photographers Jonna McKone and Elena Volkova explore the intersections of time, memory, and history through distinct but resonant photographic practices. Both artists turn to slow, meticulous processes to interrogate how place and identity are inscribed and reinterpreted through personal and collective experience.

In Silver and Earth reflected the materials central to their practices. Silver, the foundation of traditional photographic processes, and earth, a marker of place and history, serve as essential elements in crafting their imagery. These materials grounded their work in both the tangible and symbolic, highlighting delicate landscapes and portraits.

Close Enough, featuring works by Aliana Grace Bailey and Brandon Donahue-Shipp, Exhibition at BmoreArt Connect+Collect Gallery | June–September 2025

Close Enough explored the intimate power of gesture and memory. Rooted in care, legacy, and presence, the exhibition held space for quiet boldness and deep connection. Aliana Grace Bailey’s weavings, locs, and collages entered into conversation with Brandon Donahue-Shipp’s oil paintings on stretched T-shirts, offering layered reflections on Black life, softness, and everyday beauty.

Curated by Inés Sanchez de Lozada, the exhibition opened portals of familiarity and connection. Through bold textures and tender gestures, Close Enough invited viewers to consider the legacies we carry and the ones we are building. It did not ask to be decoded, but to be felt—by those close enough to recognize themselves in the folds.

Iconically Yours, Baltimore: Exhibit & Auction, featuring 20 works by Baltimore artists, Exhibition at BmoreArt Connect+Collect Gallery | October-December 2025

Baltimore-based artists have long been living proof that we exist in a City of Artists, brimming with creative excellence. Their vision extended far beyond studios, galleries, and museums. They captured shared experiences in diverse and beautiful ways, turned city blocks into sites of discovery, and reminded us that coming together to share art matters. When given the opportunity, the art of our place and time brought thoughtful beauty into our homes.

For over a decade, BmoreArt has had the privilege of engaging with this creative force through our magazines, online stories, books, partnerships, and exhibitions. As we grew alongside these artists, we celebrated ten years of print publications with Iconically Yours, a fall exhibition and benefit auction honoring the dedication, creativity, and collaboration that contributed to Baltimore’s iconic reputation. The exhibition presented twenty artworks by artists featured by BmoreArt over the past decade, offering a cross-section—across stylistic and conceptual approaches—of some of the strongest work being made in Baltimore during that time.Iconically Yours, Baltimore: Exhibit and Auction, featuring 20 works by 20 Baltimore artists
October 21 – December 5, 2025

Each exhibition included public programming that supported deeper engagement with artists and their work.

Works by Linling Lu, Edgar Reyes, and Erin Fostel at JHU Frary Gallery

Strong, Bright, Useful, and True: Recent Acquisitions and Contemporary Art from Baltimore, Irene and Richard Frary Gallery in Washington, DC at the Bloomberg Center, April 15 – September, 6, 2025

This year we helped Johns Hopkins University acquire art by Baltimore-based artists, which culminated in the exhibit Strong, Bright, Useful, & True: Recent Acquisitions and Contemporary Art from Baltimore, which included contemporary Baltimore artists shaping the national and global arts landscape. The exhibition illustrated the vibrancy of Baltimore’s contemporary art scene and showcased a broad spectrum of media, including painting, sculpture, time-based media, and photography, with public talks and events, as well as a catalog.

The exhibit received a multitude of accolades and press, including a Washington Post review, which stated: “When it comes to buying art, institutions often turn to consultants who can deliver demonstrable returns, which leads to safe picks from New York or Los Angeles (or, worse, decoration). It’s rare for a research university to premise its collection on serving its community. That tilts the scales. Johns Hopkins’s investment in Baltimore — inspired in no small part by Ober’s dedication to building a first-class platform for the city’s artists — may be measured best by how it pays off for the arts community, not for the school.”

This year we launched a new BmoreArt C+C Program: Artist to Artist Consultations, a free service for artists to receive individualized professional development coaching from C+C Co-Director Jeffrey Kent, which is set to continue in 2026.

Continuing This Work Together

If you read our stories, attend our events, visit our exhibitions, collect our journals, or support us as a member—thank you. Your participation sustains this work.

As we look ahead, we invite you to become a BmoreArt member or renew your membership. Membership directly supports our publishing, programming, and curatorial efforts and helps ensure this work continues.

With gratitude,
The BmoreArt Team

BmoreArt Team: Cara Ober, Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, Raquel Castedo, Aya Dixon, Inés Sanchez de Lozada, Maria Sanchez, Ami Dang, Lillian Jacobson, Rebecca Juliette, & Michael Anthony Farley

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