This Week: Queer Archives performance at Peabody Library, BMORE WITH US reception + community festival at MICA, Jo Smail book signing at Goya, 2026 Charm City Fringe, PANTOMIME multi media event at MICA, closing reception at Baltimore City Crit Club, Phyllis Arbesman Berger’s opening reception + artist talk at Rosenberg Gallery, and a performance of Black musical traditions at Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts — PLUS apply for Fashion Remix at the Walters and more featured opportunities!
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.
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Tuesday, April 21 :: 7:30-8:30pm
@ George Peabody Library
Join us for an exploration of queer and trans identities across history through historic postcards that offer powerful evidence of queer presence in the past. Though small in scale, these objects carry rich stories about how queer people expressed identity, resistance, desire, humor, and liberation across time.
In dialogue with these archival materials, flutist Willie Santiago, pianist Ben Shaver, and drag artists Lula Lioness, Divoid, Syren 7, Bratz LaVey, and Oberon the Demon will bring the past into conversation with the present through performance, storytelling, and fashion.
Together, the archive and the stage remind us that queer history is not marginal or newly discovered—it has always been here. This evening of fabulous and fierce archival discovery and performance will highlight the vibrant intersection of history and Baltimore’s local drag scene.
While this performance is geared toward adults, all are welcome.
BMORE WITH US: Our Chosen Family – Exhibition Reception & Community Festival | Reception
Wednesday, April 22 :: 2-4:30pm
@ MICA Brown Center
MICA Community Art & Service Presents: BMORE WITH US: Our Chosen Family
On View from April 14, 2026 – April 27, 2026 Reception: April 22nd 2026 // 2pm – 4:30pm
Check out the amazing work of MICA’s Community Art & Service Program Student Leaders by attending the CAS Reception & Community Festival!
This exhibition will feature a selection of works from our Community Site Partners across Baltimore. The works are made in collaboration with our Community Site Leaders and France-Merrick Fellows, and represent their commitment to the role art plays in supporting the community!
Join us on April 22, from 2pm – 4:30pm for special treats, activities, and more at our CAS Exhibition and Festival! – Including a family-style Nacho Bar, lemon sticks, cake, and more! Meet representatives from our Community Site Partners and learn more about what they do! Or, join us at one of several activity stations, including our collaborative community rowhome project, and our interactive puzzle!
We hope to see you there!
Book Signing with Artist Jo Smail
Thursday, April 23 :: 5-7pm
@ Goya Contemporary
Join us for a special evening with artist Jo Smail to celebrate the release of the exhibition catalog published on the occasion of Jo Smail: Thinking Like an Oyster.
This 74-page, fully illustrated publication features insightful contributions by
Louis Fratino, Amy Raehse, and Kristen Hileman, offering deeper context into Smail’s practice and the works on view.
Charm City Fringe Festival 2026
Friday, April 24 – Sunday, May 3
@ The Peale
THEATRE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES
The Charm City Fringe Festival celebrates bold, new, innovative theatre and performing arts in Baltimore.
Join us April 24-26 and May 1-3 for a dynamic line up of new, funky, always-thought-provoking, and occasionally sexy shows and artists, plus exciting after hours events you won’t want to miss.
All 2026 Charm City Fringe Festival performances will happen at The Peale, Baltimore’s Community Museum located in the heart of downtown Baltimore at 225 Holliday St, Baltimore, MD 21202.
SEE THE FULL PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE HERE
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LET’S GET THE PARTY STARTED
Join us for our opening night party at Peabody Heights Brewery on Thursday, April 23
RSVP HERE
“Pantomime” – MICA Annual Multi Media Event Show/ MME 2026
Friday, April 24 + Saturday, April 25 :: 6:30pm
@ MICA BBOX Theater
The Multi Media Event course is a year-long collaboration, utilizing experimental fashion, performance, and body-focused sculpture.
PANTOMIME is a collaborative design effort tasked with revealing what is untold through fiber, sculpture, object, and movement. We define PANTOMIME as the art of conveying a story through gestures free of speech. This performance centered show seeks to present an alternative to our dystopian moment through the activation of function. Injecting imagination into the relationship between objects and the body allows the reality of survival to be surpassed.
PANTOMIME pulls on elements from the real world to manufacture something worth building toward. We craft narratives that mirror our reality and idealistic aspirations. With an open acceptance of changing technologies, a commitment to craft, and a willingness to collaborate, PANTOMIME builds a world ready for tomorrow. Together, we see our current moment and step toward something better.
Multi Media Event I and II combine as a year-long collaborative opportunity for students to operate across the boundaries of multiple artistic disciplines by utilizing experimental fashion, performance, and body-focused sculpture.
Throughout the year MICA will be announcing Landmark Exhibitions, Signature Speaker series, Performances, Art Tours and Lectures, MICA Fashion Week, Community Art Programming in Baltimore and beyond in celebration of the MICA Bicentennial.
BCCC April | Closing Reception
Friday, April 24 :: 7pm
@ Baltimore City Crit Club
As part of this expanded programming, we’re excited to introduce a new curatorial role within the Crit Club led by Jared Christensen, who some of you may remember from his exhibition with us in early 2025. Jared’s first exhibition in this role will feature:
Jay Sanborn (they/them) is a Baltimore-based transmasculine fiber artist and garment maker whose work uses traditional craft techniques to explore the intersections of labor, gender, queerness, and capitalism. Drawing from craft history, feminist readings of horror, and personal experiences of trauma and healing, their practice engages themes of repetition, mending, and accumulation as both material and conceptual strategies. Recent work incorporates collected textiles and garments to process grief and transformation, positioning craft as both a political act and a tool for survival, repair, and imagining new worlds.
Mick Prescott (they/them) is a Louisiana-born artist whose work draws from their upbringing in a small Evangelical church to both honor and challenge the visual language of religious craft. Through banner-making, they appropriate hymns, liturgical text, and cultural references to reframe queer and trans life as something sacred, joyful, and embodied. Their practice resists narratives that reduce queerness to struggle alone, instead creating works that function as celebration, protest, and ritual—holding space for reconciliation, defiance, and a reimagined sense of holiness beyond the constraints of institutional religion.
Onderduiker*: Hiding in Plain Sight at Amsterdam’s ARTIS Zoo | Opening Reception
Sunday, April 26 :: 3-5pm / Artist Talk 3:30pm
@ Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College
Baltimore photographer Phyllis Arbesman Berger’s powerful new exhibition, Onderduiker: Hiding in Plain Sight at Amsterdam’s ARTIS Zoo during WWII. This is the harrowing story of the Jews, resistance fighters, and young men escaping forced labor, who owed their lives to the staff at the ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo during WWII. Using infrared photography and lyrical poetry, Berger explores the psychological landscapes of the individuals who lived in constant fear, not knowing from day to day whether their hiding places might be revealed. Nazi soldiers loved the zoo and visited daily, not realizing that a wall away people were in hiding. Images and text chronicle the struggles of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances as they spend time with their memories, take flight with imagination, and experience longing, grief and at times terror.
Located near the Jewish neighborhood of the Jodenbuurt, ARTIS served as a hiding place for two to three hundred men, women and children, all of whom survived during their time in hiding. The zoo stayed open throughout the war, and Onderduikers spent months, even years hidden behind the scenes of animal enclosures in kitchens, attics and stables. All this took place within the beautiful grounds of the zoo. This setting, with its peaceful paths, sculpture gardens, and inventive architecture that served as hiding places, provides the stage for telling the Onderduiker’s stories.
The photographs and poetry in this exhibition are informed by conversations with the ARTIS Zoo historian, the former director of the Zoo (an Onderduiker himself), and groundskeepers during visits over the past seven years.
This exhibition is a collaboration between the artist and students at Goucher College, whose research and writing provide a foundation for understanding the historical context of this work.
*Dutch for a person in hiding during WWII
I’m Gonna Let it Shine: Praise, Power, and Protest in Black Musical Traditions
Sunday, April 26 :: 3-5pm
@ Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts
Join us as we celebrate the Black musical traditions that have sustained Black Baltimore churches and communities for over two centuries.
Music in the Black Church is worship – and so much more! For centuries, it has also communicated messages of hope, love, sorrow, and freedom. Based on archival research at three historic Black churches in West Baltimore – Union Baptist, Metropolitan United Methodist, and St. James Episcopal – this concert will explore sacred music traditions across denominations and their connections to popular music forms.
Featuring:
Heritage Choir of Metropolitan, Alicia Alston, director
UMBC Jubilee Singers, Dr. Janice Jackson, director
St. James Episcopal Choir, Cedric Lyles, director
Peabody Jazz Student Ensemble, Joshua Watkins, music director
This event is organized by Curating and Archiving Black Baltimore, a collaboration at Johns Hopkins University between the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, the Sheridan Libraries, and the Peabody Conservatory’s Jazz Studies Program.
“I’m Gonna Let it Shine: Praise, Power, & Protest in Black Musical Traditions” is part of the Being Human Festival (US), running April 17–May 3, one of 23 community events across the country supported by the National Humanities Center. This festival celebrates the humanities’ power to add depth and meaning to our lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us.
Featured Opportunities
Open Call: Lead a Public Program
rolling deadline
posted by Baltimore Museum of Art
BMA Lexington Market invites self-defined artists in recovery to lead public programming that explores the role of art in healing and personal growth.
This open call for proposals seeks artists of all disciplines who wish to share their stories, practices, and creative tools in talks and workshops focused on how creative practice supported their recovery journey and how art can be a resource for resilience, reflection, and connection.
Talks and workshops should explore empowerment, creativity, and lived experience. We ask presenters to approach the topic honestly and thoughtfully, with sensitivity and care for diverse audiences. Once a proposal is accepted, collaborators will receive an honorarium and materials stipend to create and lead a single two-hour program at the BMA’s branch location in Lexington Market, on the second or fourth Saturday of the month.
Baltimore City Crit Club’s first Open Critique
This Open Critique will happen every three months starting this May! The first Open Crit will be held on Saturday, the 23rd at 2 pm.
Important information:
There is no jury for this crit!
This crit is open to the first six artists who apply.
Register your interest to be involved with me at: [email protected]
All art forms are welcome!
One work per featured artist.
We ask that the featured artists please spread word about the event, post, and invite friends to the crit!
The Baltimore Crit Club is not wheelchair accessible, apologies! Have other accessibility needs or questions? Please email me at [email protected].
New/Next Film Festival
deadline April 30
New/Next Film Festival is a 4-day festival held in Baltimore at the historic Charles Theatre. The festival is curated by creative director Eric Allen Hatch (Maryland Film Festival’s director of programming, 2007-2018) and produced by Baltimore Public Media.
New/Next has built a public home-viewing guide of all the films screened in its previous editions at newnextfilmfest.com/archives. It provides free full-color PDF downloads of each year’s New/Next program guide, and indicates where each film screened is now available for viewing online, streaming, and/or on physical media.
New/Next is always happy to provide entry-fee waivers for filmmakers whose work has screened in prior editions of the festival. If you are a New/Next alum who would like to submit new work, please get in touch with your New/Next programming contact for a FilmFreeway fee waiver.
Open Call for Artists: SUPERIMPOSED
deadline May 1
posted by Pyramid Atlantic
Pyramid is pleased to announce an open call for collage artworks for its upcoming exhibition, SUPERIMPOSED.
As an organization that teaches multiple art forms, we encourage dialogue and collaboration between disciplines. With SUPERIMPOSED, Pyramid will showcase how practices can converge, and even be enhanced by, the art of collage.
Eligible works must include at least one collage element from the following techniques: hand pulled prints, artist made paper, and/or hand binding techniques including gluing, chine-collé or stitching. Preference will be given to work made in the last two years. All artworks must be for sale.
SUPERIMPOSED will be held from June 20 – August 2, 2026, and hosted in the Helen C. Frederick Gallery at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.
Awards will be given to recognize excellence among the entries. Jurors to be announced.
Fashion Remix: Art Inspiring Designers
deadline May 3
posted by The Walters Art Museum
The Walters Art Museum is now accepting applications for Fashion Remix: Art Inspiring Designers, a creative initiative that invites local fashion designers to take inspiration from artworks in the Walters collection to create original, wearable designs. Finalists will have the opportunity to present their work in a public celebration at the museum as part of Baltimore Fashion Week!
Fashion Remix highlights how historic art continues to inspire new forms of expression, celebrating Baltimore’s vibrant creative community and connections between past and present. This year’s program connects fashion, history, and storytelling alongside Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture, an exhibition on view at the Walters April 18–August 9.
The Hopper Prize
deadline May 12
The Hopper Prize was established to provide grants, visibility, and career enhancing validation to artists who demonstrate a serious commitment to their work.
We accept submissions for grants through a bi-annual open call. For each grant cycle, a new cohort of artists is selected to receive financial support and widespread exposure. Grant winners and finalists are chosen solely on the basis of artistic excellence and the promise of future potential.
We view the field of visual art in its broadest and most inclusive sense and therefore make our awards available to artists working in any media.
Monson Arts Fall Residencies 2026
deadline May 15
Monson Arts’ residency program supports emerging and established artists and writers by providing them time and space to devote to their creative practices. During each of our 2-week and 4-week programs throughout the year, a cohort of 5 visual artists and 5 writers are invited to immerse themselves in small town life at the edge of Maine’s North Woods and focus intensely on their work within a creative and inspiring environment. They receive a private studio, private bedroom in shared housing, all meals, and $500 stipend for 4-week programs or $250 for 2-week programs.
The Abbott Watts Residency for Photographers offers access to the private photography studio and darkroom of Todd Watts in nearby Blanchard, adjacent to the former home of Berenice Abbott and takes place concurrently with the other sessions.
The Art of Healing
deadline May 17
posted by The Harford County Cultural Arts Board, the Harford County Public Library, Ashley Addiction Treatment, and the Harford Artists Association
The Harford County Cultural Arts Board, the Harford County Public Library, Ashley Addiction Treatment, and the Harford Artists Association invite artists to submit work for a community art exhibition The Art of Healing. Recovery is deeply personal and not a one-size-fits-all, and we recognize that creativity can be an important part of the healing journey.
We welcome artists of all abilities and encourage submissions from those whose artwork played a pivotal role in their healing and recovery process from addiction, or whose artwork served as a creative outlet or support as a family member or friend navigated addiction and recovery.
Visual artwork (2D and 3D) will be installed in the Bel Air Library. Literary art will be displayed for reading in the Library exhibit room, outside of the Passport Office. Selections may be read at the opening reception.
Submissions will be reviewed for eligibility (based on restrictions below) by HCCAB, Harford Artists Association, and Library staff.
Exhibition address: Bel Air Library, 2nd Floor exhibition room and other public library spaces, 100 E. Pennsylvania Avenue, Bel Air, MD 21014
RFQ: Activate the Avenue Public Art and Creative Placemaking for the Black Arts District
deadline May 30
posted by the Black Arts District
The Black Arts District (BAD) is seeking to create a talent pool of experienced, Baltimore-based public artists or teams of artists. For the next year and beyond BAD will be investing in building on a legacy of public art in our arts district footprint, which journeys along and branches out from Pennsylvania Ave. See map. We would like to build a short list of qualified artists with community engagement experience that we can call on to implement public art installations as projects arise.
Projects on the horizon include themes from afrofuture to historical legacies. Project opportunities include murals with compensation packages of $25k+.
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