I spent the dawn of 2025 trying to come up with a relatively succinct headline for BmoreArt’s first story of the year after a sleepless night out. I distinctly remember watching the year’s first sunrise over Mexico City from my friend’s balcony, sinking—stumped—into an Acapulco chair while cupping a mug of coffee with my open laptop in front of me. I found myself getting uncharacteristically misty-eyed as I did one final proofread before hitting publish.
I maybe didn’t nail the “succinct” part of that task, but it went on to be one of the BmoreArt stories I found myself thinking about the most over the past 364 days.
Patrice HuttonEvery day, hundreds of thousands of strangers encounter Ryan’s unapologetic queer joy. They’re wowed by his movement and his embodiment of their favorite songs on the ice. He’s made them feel something through their screens.
Read: Keep on Dancing: Ryan Dunk Queers the Surprisingly Heteronormative World of Figure Skating
Published January 1, 2025
Patrice Hutton’s profile of an ex-professional figure skater from the suburbs of Baltimore (with gorgeous photography by E. Brady Robinson) was one of those feel-good stories all-too-rare in the media landscape of a year dominated by wave after wave of very bad news.
You know that iconic scene in Muriel’s Wedding wherein Toni Collette says—with absolutely heartbreaking sincerity—to her wheelchair-bound, cancer-stricken roommate that she no longer locks herself in her room all day long to listen to ABBA songs because, thanks to their friendship, her life is now “as good as an ABBA song… It’s as good as Dancing Queen!”? Well, for most of 2025, whenever I am burned-out by doom-scrolling through utterly dystopian news, I now restore my serotonin by locking myself in my room and watching Instagram Reels of Ryan Dunk glide, leap, and twirl with absolute gleeful abandon and liberation to Dancing Queen, Chappel Roan, or The Cranberries.
I don’t think I had ever really watched figure skating before editing this story (I am a bad gay!) but now I am hooked. Dunk’s reels are like a mini-Muriel’s Wedding for the generations who no longer possess the attention span to sit through a 101 minute cinematic emotional rollercoaster. You will laugh, you will cry, you will feel the vicarious catharsis of holding your best friend’s hand while leaning out the window of a taxi and screaming goodbye to suburbia with the wind in your hair on your way to somewhere so much more glamorous.
Pinky ColeI want people to see that somebody from Baltimore left and came back. That really doesn’t happen often. But I actually came back so that people can be excited, and you know, the return is real.
Read: Baltimore Gets Slutty: Pinky Cole Brings Two Seductive Vegan Restaurants Home
Published March 17
When Cara Ober asked me to reflect on a year of editing and writing for BmoreArt, she stipulated: “make it personal!” In that spirit, I announce my next “top pick” by saying I have been pretty slutty for almost as long as I have been a diehard vegetarian! So I was personally overjoyed when our omnivorous Food Critic Nani Ferreira-Mathews pitched a story about Baltimore native chef Pinky Cole opening hometown chapters of her successful meat-free chain Slutty Vegan.
Jill Fannon is one of the many talented photographers I have the privilege of working with at BmoreArt, and it’s a testament to both her skills and those of Cole that they can make a simmering pan of brown textured vegetable protein look so seductive even carnivores flocked to our Instagram comments with salivating emojis. (Jill, if you’re reading this, let’s talk about my headshots for dating apps?)
Zody BurkeSometimes Europeans have really shocked me with their unwillingness to give young, feminine artists the benefit of agency or possession of critical thought. It’s like, you’re in the labyrinth too, jackass. Where was “Ways of Seeing” while you were studying? People are simultaneously afraid of and dismissive of sexiness, even in 2025. It’s like being scared of teenage girls, and I put it in the same category of lazy misogyny. It’s like, obviously these things have power. That’s why they’re trending. That’s why they’re buzzy. Why aren’t you curious about that power at all?
Read: From Baltimore to the Baltic: Zody Burke on “The House of Asterion”
Published April 25
A few weeks later, I received a flattering invitation I couldn’t possibly refuse (no, I’m not talking about the aforementioned apps). Zody Burke—an artist whose work I had always appreciated during our overlapping years living in Baltimore—wrote to me from Tallinn, Estonia, where she has been based since leaving the United States for grad school post-pandemic. Thanks to a grant enabling artists to invite foreign critics to Estonia, I got the chance to visit lovely Tallinn; get a behind-the-scenes preview of Burke’s epic, mythology-informed solo show; and catch-up during one of the most rewarding interviews of my career.
I hadn’t seen Burke IRL in years, and yet our meandering conversation could pick up threads from late-night conversations on cigarette-burned couches in some West Baltimore warehouse in 2011 and weave them into a discursive tapestry of critical theory, studio process, and cultural displacement that was so good it ended up getting republished by Eastern Europe’s Most Magazine.
Cara OberIf artists can dream it and build it – it can be done! If SCOUT is any indication of forward momentum and a high bar for excellence, Baltimore may end up in a better place culturally than it has been in the past. After an intense weekend, I am exhausted but also exhilarated and I look forward to what comes next.
Read: SCOUT Art Fair, Artscape’s Newest Addition
Published May 26
I spent a good deal of 2025, as in most years, living out of a suitcase while bopping around jetlagged from art fairs and biennials for BmoreArt’s Artworld Global coverage. Madrid one month, New York the next, back to Spain for SWAB, and literally collapsing from exhaustion by the time the Miami fairs wrapped.
But coming home to Baltimore to attend the opening of SCOUT Art Fair with Cara Ober and Mollye Miller this spring was probably the most memorable art fair moment. I’m forever grateful they captured the evening in words and pictures, respectively, so I could—for once!—just relax and have fun at an art fair. Chief moments of optimism from the city’s newest cultural offering: getting to meet pillars of Current Space Julianne Hamilton and Michael Benevento’s new baby, and seeing our new-ish progressive Mayor Brandon Scott hang out with rising art star Emma Childs. [Because it’s an art fair… Insert some obligatory bad joke along the lines of “oh to be a fly on the banana on the wall” or whatever.]
Phaan HowngI love the idea that something we take for granted as “normal” in America can be so shocking if you’ve never seen a white person pick up poop before!
Read: Exceeding Expectations: an Interview with Phaan Howng
Published May 30
I love Phaan Howng. She’s a fun friend, an insanely hard-working artist, and—I discovered this year—arguably among the top 3 curators in Baltimore. Seriously. The survey show she put together in North Avenue storefronts with a shoestring budget, Exceeds Expectations, was better than most biennials I have seen in my decade+ of looking at art professionally (LOL, it’s still weird to say that).
Howng gave me a great tour of the show, and let me transcribe our conversation. That conversation is one I will treasure for eternity because while I may have to walk on cancellation-eggshells around the tricky topic of identity politics, she is refreshingly, unabashedly opinionated and insightful about just about any topic you’ve ever been afraid to bring up. Chiefly: it is weird and unproductive that the artworld and academia keep wanting to sort artists based on the biographical information one puts on a census form. So when Howng was invited to curate a group show of local artists from the Asian-and-assorted-surrounding-regions Diaspora, she approached the task with two curatorial tools all-too-often absent from shows organized by race or ethnicity: an eye for quality and a fucking sense of humor!
Phaan Howng is a gem. Baltimore, never let this one get away!
Sienna Cureton-MahoneyIt’s about waving your freak flag and fostering an independent music community. It’s great that people are still coming together for music in Baltimore. I’ve been listening to punk since middle school, and that background is integral to my identity.
Read: Party, a New Music Video & Interview with PEARL
Published June 11
In June of this year, I remember staring around the massive, sold-out music festival Primavera Sound (one of Europe’s biggest and most important music events) and thinking “this can’t be real”. Untold thousands of people were singing along in their second language to Baltimore hometown heroes Beach House, backlit on a distant stage. I was overcome with nostalgia for watching them in simpler times, surrounded by sometimes under two dozen of our mutual friends in a dusty warehouse. A few stages over at that same festival, I had a similar sensation watching a smaller (but still impressively dedicated) crowd of European punks thrash around to Baltimore’s own Turnstile, who just received 5 Grammy nominations.
I digress, but I found myself thinking about that festival a week later when editing Jaddie Fang’s interview with members of PEARL—an insanely fun band comprised of people I love very much. Baltimore is so crazily blessed to produce such a disproportionate amount of good music and the absolute freaks who perform it.
PEARL’s frontperson Sienna Cureton-Mahoney is one of my best friends, so getting the chance to edit an interview with her as part of my “day job” was a surreal treat. I vowed I would make more of a concerted (no pun intended) effort to see my friends’ bands live more often, because I actually treasure my memories of watching PEARL in friends’ intimate living rooms far more than seeing Sabrina Carpenter on an arena stage—but if this year’s Primavera Sound was any indication, Baltimore musicians might be on that same stage, and you’ll miss being in the sweat-spray radius of your buddies while tripping over a couch someone pulled from a dumpster. My first night back in Baltimore for BmoreArt’s Icons Ball, I ended up heading straight to the Copycat Building to see PEARL. It was my first time going to a punk show at the Copycat in probably a decade, but somehow the evening felt abuzz with potential as much as nostalgia.
Chloë VaughanIt’s the one place where everybody has known they’ve always been welcome without any pretense of prescribing to anybody’s identity politics… I think that’s really cool and missing in our society today.
Read: The Mount Royal Tavern
Published November 1 (print) and December 26 (web)
Unless you’ve been hitting the MRT’s infamous cherry bombs a little too hard, this story is probably pretty fresh in regular readers’ minds—so I will skip a lengthy introduction.
But I will say that the Tavern is always my first and last stop in Baltimore, whether arriving or departing via Amtrak, MARC train from DC, bus-from-the-bus-station, or light rail from the airport. It is truly one of the world’s best third spaces, and one of the things I love so very much about Baltimore and this publication is the ability to celebrate and think critically about the importance of places like this. The Tavern is the kind of bar people like me in less fortunate cities would bitterly eulogize as a victim of gentrification or simply time. And yet in Baltimore, against all odds, a group of artists came together to preemptively preserve it through creative, collective ownership.
It is chaos, it is nostalgia, it is bartender Chloë Vaughan hugging regulars and yelling at doorguy Rusty Burke when he doesn’t stop me from putting something dumb on the jukebox while Dan Deacon shakes his head with a grin. It is home. And now, I know it always will be. Thank you, BmoreArt, for letting me include this story in our Icons Issue—truly a family photo album for our wonderful, weird city.
Read: Looking Back at 2025: A Note of Gratitude From BmoreArt
Published December 30
The rest of the BmoreArt teamAs 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.
I’m ending with the post the rest of the BmoreArt team put together while they were all in the office over the past two days and I was an ocean away, marvelling at everything they do and their capacity to put up with my antics. Reading this—much like our first article of the year—made me uncharacteristically misty-eyed.
2025 was a pretty shitty year for so many people, including so many of our Baltimore neighbors who were taken by ICE, had their visas revoked for speaking their minds or simply the crime of being born in the wrong country, lost their jobs to DOGE cuts, or had their work censored or disappeared by the federal government.
And yet I am ending this year really proud of my city and coworkers. We resisted, we thrived, we partied with Carla Hayden—the world’s most badass librarian who brought Pink Flamingos to the Library of Congress and pissed off Donald Trump.
Cheers to the city that won’t be shushed!
