This Week: Asia North 2026 closing event + Area 405 Pop-Up exhibition closing at The Club Car, Baltimore Design School + School for the Arts exhibition, Through Our Eyes teen photography exhibition at the Walters, Bria Sterling-Wilson JJC talk at the BMA, Baltimore Camera Club Photo-Culturalism panel discussion, BROS’ “American Vamp,” The Baltimore Film Summit at SNF Parkway, Unfinished Republic reception at Goya Contemporary, Greenmount West Open Studios, Everyman’s Founders Ball, and a performance by Stephanie Mercedes in PowerPlant Live! alley — PLUS The Galleries at CCBC call for curators 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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Closing Event: Asia North 2026
Wednesday, May 27 :: 5-9pm
@ SNF Parkway Theatre
Celebrate the conclusion of Asia North 2026. Congratulate the artists featured in Shoes at the Door. Enjoy performances by Soul of Persia and the Sutradhar Institute of Dance. Conclude the evening with a selection of APIMEDA film shorts curated by filmmaker Zara Kahan. Performances curated by Kandi Wong.
Asia North 2026: AREA 405 Pop-Up Exhibition | Closing
Wednesday, May 27 :: 6-9pm
@ The Club Car
AREA 405 presents Queer Manifesto, a pop-up exhibition featuring poems and visual collages of twenty-one (21) East and Southeast Asian queers.The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Wishing Fountain Project, a virtual diasporic queer ESEA art book library (@the.wishing.fountain.project). Founded by You Liang and Zao Zao Zhang (MICA Class of 2024), the project began with a writing workshop that encouraged participants to transform poetry, prose, and diary entries into visual forms. Queer Manifesto was later published as a zine. Exhibition Queer Manifesto loyally exhibited selected pages of zines, with renewed visualization of words arraying themes from family relationships to immigration processes.
Queer Manifesto is part of Asia North 2026, an annual one-month public program celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the Station North Arts District. The exhibition will be on view at the Club Car, a beloved queer art and cocktail club located at the historic North Avenue Market.
BDS & BSA Joyce Scott Art Gallery Exhibition
Thursday, May 28 :: 10am-12pm
@ Baltimore Design School
You are warmly invited to join us for a special celebration honoring the talented student artists from Baltimore Design School and BSA’s Visual Arts students. This event brings together our creative community to recognize outstanding student work, highlight the power of arts education, and thank the partners like you who help make these opportunities possible.
Thursday, May 28 :: 5:30-7:30pm
@ The Walters Art Museum
Join us for the opening of Through Our Eyes: Teen Photographers. On view May 27-June 28, this intimate installation showcases the work of eight local teen photographers who participated in a 10-week program hosted by the Walters Art Museum during which they learned photography and professional development skills from esteemed artist-photographer Anna Divinagracia. At this event, you can view the students’ work in the Carriage House Mezzanine and enjoy light refreshments in the Level 3 Lobby.
About the Teaching Artist:
Anna Divinagracia (she/they) is a lens-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is inspired by her shared experiences growing up in the Philippines and coming of age in Baltimore. Born in 1997 in Davao City, Philippines, Divinagracia’s artistic journey began at a young age when she discovered her passion for viewing and capturing the world around her through her camera. With a particular curiosity for the intricacies and nuances of Filipino and American culture, Divinagracia uses her art to explore themes of love, destiny, home, identity, and acculturation as an immigrant.
JJC Talks: Bria Sterling-Wilson
Thursday, May 28 :: 6pm
@ The Baltimore Museum of Art
Bria Sterling-Wilson (b. 1993) is a Baltimore-based photographer and collage artist. In 2021, she earned her B.F.A. in photography and digital arts from Towson University. Sterling-Wilson uses found imagery, magazines, newspapers, and fabrics to create captivating scenes, portraits, and interiors that explore the Black experience.
In addition to Baltimore, her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally, insuch cities as Sanquhar, Scotland; Brooklyn, New York; Los Angeles, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Washington, D.C. She has been featured in publications such as BmoreArt, Contemporary Collage Magazine, EBONY magazine, and Black Collagists: The Book. Sterling-Wilson is currently an artist-in-residence at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore.
Thursday, May 28 :: 8pm
@ Mount Washington United Methodist Church + Virtual
Across the photographic landscape, a persistent and often reductive question has taken hold: “Is this AI?” While framed as a technical concern, the question signals a deeper shift in how images are made, evaluated, and understood.
Photographers, especially, are increasingly finding their work scrutinized not for its meaning, but for its perceived origin. At the same time audiences and institutions are navigating a growing uncertainty where visual sophistication can provoke suspicion, and where interpretation is often replaced by a search for honesty.
This panel will not attempt to settle the legitimacy of AI as a tool, but examine the broader implications of its potential and consequences, including
- The instability of authorship and what it means to “make” an image today
- The emergence of aesthetic suspicion, where technical excellence is questioned
- The evolving role of the viewer, particularly in relation to trust, interpretation, and ethical judgment
- The pressures faced by competitions, galleries, and institutions in defining standards and policies
We are intentionally bringing together a range of perspectives by artists, educators, and curators to create a conversation that is not about consensus, but about clarity.
Friday, May 29 :: Ongoing through June 20
@ Baltimore Rock Opera Society
Laura van Felsing is a high-achieving, born and bred ladder-climber, and today is her very first day at PlasmaCorp—unfortunately for Laura, it’s going to be a very long day, because PlasmaCorp is a den of competitive, cutthroat, corporate vampires. Literally. And she’s arrived just in time for a shake-up in upper management, a shattering of the pyramid that forces two vamp execs, Amani Thalaba and Les DeVille, to decide who they really are: killers, or somewhere, deep down, still human? Around our trio, big egos fight to be top dog, the rich get richer, and a deep darkness moves beneath the foundations of this decadent corporate lair. As the facades crumble and blood flows, Laura must decide between her vicious ambitions—and her survival.
With 80’s-inspired synth ballads and killer rock (and a little Gregorian chanting for good measure), American Vamp is about capitalism, humanity, and living through it. Or maybe not.
The Filmmakers Playground presents: The Baltimore Film Summit
Friday, May 29 – Saturday, May 30
@ SNF Parkway Theatre
The Filmmakers Playground presents The Baltimore Film Summit, arriving May 29–31 at the SNF Parkway for a weekend celebrating Baltimore filmmaking through screenings, conversations, panels, networking, works-in-progress, and films spanning documentary, narrative, animation, horror, and experimental storytelling.
Whether you make films, love films, or just want to experience work being made in your own backyard—there’s something here for you.
Unfinished Republic: America at 250 | Reception
Friday, May 29 :: 6-9pm
@ Goya Contemporary
Sonya Clark, Kyle Hackett, Joyce J. Scott, Paul Rucker, Elizabeth Talford Scott, Louise Fishman, and Soledad Salamé
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”—but do we? What, in fact, are our truths as a nation?
At 250 years, the American experiment remains profoundly unresolved. Unfinished Republic brings together Sonya Clark, Kyle Hackett, Joyce J Scott, Paul Rucker, Elizabeth Talford Scott, Louise Fishman, and Soledad Salame to examine a nation still struggling to define itself—morally, historically, environmentally, and politically. The project of America is incomplete not only because its founding promises remains unrealized, but because its most troubling histories have been repeatedly reshaped, minimized, or erased.
This exhibition resists erasure. At a moment when efforts have escalated to suppress or sanitize narratives of enslavement, systemic violence, and dissent across cultural and educational institutions, these artists insist on confronting the full complexity of the nation and its narratives. Their work rejects the comfort of omission, addressing histories of bondage, lynching, sexual violence, misogyny, racism, hate and terror—not as distant events, but as forces that continue to shape American life. At the same time, it attends to beauty, to the plight—and profound contributions—of immigrants, and to those who have helped to build this complicated nation.
In many ways, the United States is built on fracture—contradiction, invention, violence, ambition, forced labor, and myth. These conditions are not incidental; they are structural, continuing to shift beneath our feet. The artists in Unfinished Republic probe our entanglements: with land shaped by extraction and environmental neglect; with military service and the inheritance of war; with education amid a growing distrust of intellectual life and a long history of unequal access to knowledge; and with national symbols—flags, monuments, emblems—that may project unity while concealing deep division, or, as in the case of the Confederate flag, operate as enduring symbols of hate. At the same time, many of these artists also attend to the textures of daily life—tenuous, beautiful, and worth protecting. The exhibition invites a critical examination of cohesion, allegiance, freedom, and liberty, asking what it might take to move this unfinished experiment toward something more just.
Echoing Langston Hughes’ assertion that America has yet to become itself, the exhibition foregrounds the gap between national ideals and lived realities. “Liberty Denied” resonates throughout—in bodies denied autonomy, in histories rewritten or silenced, and in landscapes marked by both visible and obscured violence.
Yet Unfinished Republic is not only an indictment; it is an act of witness. Through material, gesture, and form, these artists create space for difficult truths to surface—unsettling, necessary, and at times unexpectedly beautiful. They ask what it means to reckon honestly with the past and whether a more just future can still be imagined.
Saturday, May 30 :: 12-5pm
@ Greenmount West Neighborhood
Join the Greenmount West neighborhood for an Open Studio Day on May 30th, from noon to 5pm. Several studio buildings will be open, such as the Cork Factory, the Copycat, and Area 405, as well as private studios in resident homes. The City Arts residencies and galleries will also be open for tours. Take a stroll in the Green Mount Cemetery to see the Hans Schuler sculptures. Visit the maker spaces, Tool Library and Open Works, to learn about their classes. Parking is plentiful and there are many delicious restaurants in the area.
This will be the first of an annual spring open studio day in Greenmount West and we hope that you will join us as we start this new tradition!
Everyman Theatre’s Founders Ball
Saturday, May 30 :: 5:30-10:30pm
@ American Visionary Art Museum
Join us as we celebrate the visionaries who built Everyman as well as the patrons and creatives who will sustain it for generations to come. This joyful evening will honor the theatre’s founding artistic director’s remarkable 35-year journey and celebrate the next chapter of Everyman’s great story with artistry and flair.
Velvet Rage (Act 1) by Stephanie Mercedes
Sunday, May 31 :: 7-10pm
@ PowerPlant Live! Alley
In Act1 of “Velvet Rage,” an experimental opera, attendees witness trench art in the making as artist Stephanie Mercedes and a group of queer metalworkers anneal and hammer one bullet into a bell. The “instruments”—forges, anvils, and power hammers—are the musical score for queer opera singers, percussionists, sound designers and dancers. This opera embodies the experience of duality: duality of gender, duality within a symbol, and duality within metal. This event will include a discussion and Q&A with the artist.
On Saturday, June 27, Mercedes will perform Act 2 of Velvet Rage at the Walters. In Act 2, queer opera singers, dancers, sound designers and percussionists will be scattered through the museum, hammering bullets into bells, using sounds and forms created in Act I and responding to the artist’s work commissioned by the Walters, We Were Treated Like Numbers Rather Than Stars (2025), now on view in the atrium of the Centre Street building.
Featured Opportunities
The Power of Color
deadline June 3
posted by Maryland Federation of Art
Color is a fundamental element of artistic expression that transcends language and culture. The psychology of color empowers artists to convey emotion, energy, and meaning. Artists use this invaluable tool to create an atmosphere, direct the viewer’s eye, and make a lasting impact. The Power of Color is an open call for artists who aren’t afraid to let color do the heavy lifting. Show us work where color isn’t just present, it’s the point.
Iconic colors in art history are imprinted in our memory such as Titian Red, Van Dyck Brown, and International Klein Blue. In science and fashion colors such as Perkin Mauve or Barbie Pink come to mind. The Impressionists aimed to capture the fleeting effects of light and color, The Fauves were known for their bold, eye-popping color choices, whereas The Great Colorists highlighted how color can convey a sense of motion, express inner feeling, and take the viewer into new imaginative realms. Contemporary artists experiment with color combinations, disrupting traditional color harmonies to elicit thought and emotion. Sculptors explore how color can alter spaces and physical appearance. The digital age has opened up opportunities for artists to explore, manipulate, and reshape the role of color in art.
Maryland Federation of Art (MFA) exhibitions are blind juried by professional and credentialed art experts. MFA invites all artists residing in any of the states or territories of the US, Canada, or Mexico to enter. Any original 2D and 3D artwork in any media will be considered. Works selected by the juror will be exhibited in Circle Gallery from July 29 – August 22, 2026. Exhibition Chair: Nada Abizaid
Literary Inspirations
deadline June 4
posted by Towson Arts Collective
Share works that have been inspired by novels, poetry, short stories, or plays ; show off your creative writing as well as your visual art. In collaboration with Everyman Theatre’s EMMA (May 17th – June 14th) Join fellow TAC members for the June 2nd Matinee.
The Artist-in-Education (AiE) Grant Program
deadline June 4
posted by Howard County Arts Council
The Artists-in-Education (AiE) Grant Program places professional artists in residence at Howard County private and public K-12 schools to help students foster creative exploration through hands-on experiences in the arts. The AiE grant is open to all Howard County Public School System’s 501c3 K-12 schools and independent 501c3 schools where a PTA is not in place.
The Evolution Grant 2026
deadline June 19
posted by Art Fluent
Art Fluent’s grant cycle is now open to individual artists through an international open call. THE EVOLUTION GRANT will provide unrestricted funding to an individual artist with recognized artistic excellence in fine art media and a demonstrated commitment to their art.
Open to ALL fine art mediums (oil, acrylic, watermedia, pastel, drawing, printmaking, mixed media, photography, sculpture, fiber, wood, ceramics, digital art). AI will not be accepted. There is no restriction on style, genre, or subject matter. Work that is copied or done under the guidance of an instructor is not eligible.
Innovate Grant
deadline June 19
Innovate Grant supports artists and photographers through quarterly $1,800.00 grants.
We believe that new ideas come from sparks of inspiration and aim to provide just that, access to mighty bursts of financial support so that you can focus on making your important and innovative work.
Innovate Grant was created out of the frustration of applying to grants with time-consuming requirements. These lengthy applications took valuable time and energy away from making new work. Countless hours were always sacrificed in either writing artist statements, crafting project proposals and getting letters of recommendation.
We believe that time is one of the most valuable components to fostering creativity and innovation. Our aim is to provide the time you need to be fully immersed in your ideas and in creating your work.
Keeping the grant process simple enables us to continue to support you on your important journey of creation, inspiration, and innovation.
Artist Residency
deadline June 15
posted by Stoveworks
From February through November of each year, Stove Works’ Artist Residency invites eight Artists to live/work for one to three months at a time. Our residency serves as a moment away from the rigamarole of life and an opportunity for Artists (you) to take advantage of the dedicated time, space, resources, and community we have to offer.
We have no expectations for how Artists use their time at Stove Works. Do whatever is best for you. We only ask that you come with an open and kind mind. We believe the relationships you build onsite are as valuable as the work you create while you are here.
Our Open Call for the Residency runs from May 15 to June 15 of each year. Scroll down for more information.
Curatorial Application
deadline June 15
posted by The Galleries at CCBC
CCBC Art Galleries invites curators to submit exhibition proposals for the 2026–2028 roster. We are seeking innovative, engaging, and thoughtfully developed concepts across a range of media and themes. An immediate opportunity is available for September 2026 at the Catonsville Gallery. Submissions are reviewed quarterly; the next deadline is June 15.
2026 Emerge Cohorts
deadline June 15
posted by Delaware Art Museum
Emerge is a selective, cohort-based program for artists who are ready to grow their creative business through structure, accountability, and action.
This is not a program for artists just getting started. Emerge is designed for artists who are already creating work and are ready to take their practice seriously—financially, professionally, and personally.
We are selecting 20 artists total:
10 artists for the Sussex County cohort (Rehoboth Beach)
10 artists for the New Castle County cohort (Delaware Art Museum).
Applications are due by 11:59PM on June 15, 2025. If you need help email [email protected]
Call for Performances
deadline June 28
posted by Tacoma Park Arts
The City of Takoma Park, MD is seeking submissions for future performances in the Takoma Park Arts series to support the arts in the D.C. area and provide free performances for city residents and visitors. The series, which is organized by the City’s Arts and Humanities Division, provides a 155-seat auditorium, honorariums, extensive promotion, and a professional recording of the performance.
There is no application fee, and performers do not need to be Takoma Park residents to apply but are responsible for all travel expenses relating to a performance. Performances should be suitable for a general audience and may include music, theater, dance, stand-up comedy, multi-media, or other genres suitable for performance on a stage.
Performances are usually held on Friday evenings in the auditorium at the Takoma Park Community Center at 7500 Maple Avenue. Performances should be approximately 60 to 90 minutes in length.
8th Edition of the Future Generation Art Prize
deadline June 28
PinchukArtCentre
PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) announces the 8th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize, with the launch of the application process on May 11, 2026.
Entries can be submitted online from May 11 until June 28 here.
Established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in 2009, the Future Generation Art Prize is a biannual global contemporary art prize to discover, recognise and give long-term support to a future generation of artists. All artists aged 35 or younger from anywhere in the world, working in any medium are invited to apply.
A highly respected selection committee appointed by a distinguished international jury reviews every application and nominates 20 artists for the shortlist. The winner of the PinchukArtCentre Prize automatically becomes the 21st nominee. These artists will be commissioned to create new works on view in exhibition at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv.
The main prize winner receives USD 100,000 split between a USD 60,000 cash prize and a USD 40,000 investment in their practice. A further USD 20,000 is awarded as a special prize/s between up to five artists at the discretion of the jury for supporting projects that develop their artistic practice.
Become a Member
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