This week’s news includes: 2026 Sondheim Semi-Finalists announced, Wide Angle Youth Media celebrates 25 years, Joshua Johnson Council and Tribe 55+ foster intergenerational connection, John Waters’ keynote speech at AWP, Nate Brown’s colorful cigarettes, Art with a Heart mural invitation, Chad Helton’s Pratt Library chronicles, El Suprimo records in Fells Point, and Broken exhibition at National Gallery of Art.
Create Baltimore Announces 23 Sondheim Semi-Finalists
Press Release :: March 5
Create Baltimore proudly announces the semifinalists for the 2026 Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize. This prestigious visual arts honor is presented by Create Baltimore in partnership with the Walters Art Museum and supported by the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC). The 21st edition of the Sondheim Art Prize will award $30,000 to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Baltimore region. Five finalists will be selected, and their work will be exhibited in the Walters Art Museum June to September 2026.
This year’s panel of accomplished jurors — Lauren Haynes, Jinny Khanduja, and Shellyne— have selected 23 visual artists and visual artist collaborators for the semifinal round. These artists are asked to share an expanded submission — including up to 30 images or time-based works — and a description of how they will use the fellowship if selected. Semifinalists not selected for final consideration will receive an exhibition at Artscape 2026.
The 2026 Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize semifinalists are:
Sarina Angell
Mollye Bendell
Thea Canlas
Leigh Davis
Anna Divinagracia
Brandon Donahue-Shipp
Elliot Doughtie
Emily Francisco
Curran Hatleberg
Chung-Wei Huang
Tae Hwang
Noël Kassewitz
Mo Kessler
Michelle Shengyu Li
Noah McWilliams
Daniela Mileykovsky
Emily Hanako Momohara
Danni O’Brien
David Page
Kristin Putchinski
Edgar Reyes
Joana Stillwell
Pamela J. Thompson
25 years in, Baltimore’s Wide Angle Youth Media has many more stories to tell
by Wesley Case
Published March 9 in The Baltimore Banner
The U.S. Soccer Foundation needed a touch of Baltimore to tell its story to the world.
With America co-hosting June’s FIFA World Cup — expected to be the most-watched sporting event of all time — the charitable nonprofit organization, which aims to grow the sport in the U.S., wanted a public service announcement to promote youth coaches’ influence on kids.
It could have chosen any big advertising firm for the job. It turned to Wide Angle Youth Media, a relatively small-but-mighty Baltimore nonprofit group and creative studio that teaches city students and young adults how to tell compelling stories, in their own voices and styles, across all types of media.
The beauty of art and intergenerational connection in Baltimore
by Bry Reed
“It’s like all the grant and fellowship applications dry up after 30,” my dear friend says to me as I chop onions and garlic. We’re on the phone regaling each other with the happenings of the day, as we often are during the week, and we land on the subject of arts funding and craft. They, a visual artist and filmmaker months away from the big 3-0, and I, a writer squarely planted in my late 20s.
Their qualm about arts funding and grant opportunities isn’t new. With cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and rise in institutional censorship, artists in the United States are vying for limited funding.
Keynote speaker John Waters shares tips on writing at AWP conference in Baltimore
by Ed Gunts
Published March 6 in Baltimore Fishbowl
After years as a writer and raconteur, John Waters has a talk for just about every occasion.
At Christmastime, he tells audiences how to get through the holidays. On Valentine’s Day, he gives advice on how to get laid. Around his birthday last year, he gave interviews about how to avoid becoming an “old fart.”
Assigned on Thursday night to welcome a ballroom full of writers and educators to one of the nation’s largest writers’ conferences, Waters gave his listeners exactly what they wanted to hear: tips on becoming a successful writer and knowing when they’re on their way.
All the smokes: How a Hopkins professor’s mushroom trip led to 1,000 paintings of cigarettes
by Wesley Case
Published March 5 in The Baltimore Banner
Nate Brown decided to try psychedelic mushrooms to beat a weed habit and fell into another passion instead.
While participating in a Johns Hopkins Medicine study on mushroom-derived psilocybin, and the drug’s ability to curb addictive behaviors, the local writing professor discovered he loves to paint cigarettes. Specifically, brightly colored, pop art-inspired depictions of cigarettes with water-soluble paint. Brown calls it a compensatory compulsion.
“The day of that first trip, I got home and I started painting, and I’ve painted all but four days since Sept. 12,” he said. Brown had tried figurative and abstract works in the past, but painting cigarettes came easily for the self-described “doodler” and former smoker.
Love to paint? Art with a Heart invites you to help create their 26th birthday mural
by Aliza Worthington
Published March 11 in Baltimore Fishbowl
Art with a Heart (AWAH) is celebrating its 26th birthday with a hands-on community art project at its social enterprise store, HeARTwares in Hampden, starting on Wednesday, March 18, from 11 a.m.–1 p.m.
photo of long wooden table with various ceramic mugs and other art pieces on itHeARTwares photo via AWAH.
Everyone is invited to color outside the lines, including supporters, volunteers, friends, families, and neighbors who would like to pick up a paintbrush and contribute to the 26th birthday mural. The mural will become the permanent backdrop to workshops and other HeARTwares events.
The Pratt Library’s new leader traveled to Asia and Africa last year on library donations
by Emily Opolio
Published March 10 in The Baltimore Banner
When Chad Helton took the reins of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library in late 2024, he said he would focus on the needs of the city.
Helton, who took an unconventional path to library leadership, touted his work in a previous job in Los Angeles to use library property to house the homeless, and promised a similar community-driven focus in Baltimore.
In the year since, however, Helton’s attention has been focused on the library’s reputation far beyond Baltimore. Last year, Helton and his staff took three international trips in the span of three months — first to Egypt, then China, then Japan — using $45,000 in funds donated to the library.
El Suprimo Records is a Treasure Trove of Vinyl in Fells Point
by Amy Scattergood
Published March 4 in Baltimore Magazine
Descend the stairs from Aliceanna Street into the basement shop of Fells Point’s El Suprimo Records and you’ll quickly feel like you’ve entered not so much a record store as an archive, which indeed you have. As many as 7,000 records fill the tiny space, which is 10-by-12 feet at most.
The center is a maze of stacks reaching toward the ceiling, itself decorated by discs like a vinyl version of the tin ceilings that still top many bars in the neighborhood. Bins fill both sides of the shop, divided into genres, with radios and speakers and other sonic paraphernalia jigsawed in between more records. So many records.
In the back, owner Jack Moore spins tunes on a turntable all but hidden by more stacks—John Coltrane, The Talking Heads, P.J. Harvey, Philippe Besombes, Henry Mancini, Chet Baker, Lalo Schifrin, Max Roach. One could go on.
National Gallery Announces Broken: The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture
Press Release :: March 6
For millennia, broken sculptures—or fragments—have captivated viewers and been admired for their ability to elicit a range of responses, including awe, curiosity, and empathy. As visually alluring as they are emotionally challenging, fragments bear witness to the histories they have endured, histories of violence, war, conquest, and upheaval. Broken: The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture is the first exhibition to consider the fragment as a transhistorical and transgeographical concept. The exhibition brings together more than 70 works from over 50 lenders worldwide, including several that have never been on view in the United States. Following its presentation at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy, from September 25, 2026, to January 24, 2027, Broken will debut in the United States at the National Gallery of Art in March 2027.
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