This Week: African American Art Song at Peabody Library, Mark Anthony West Jr. opening reception at Lord Baltimore Hotel, despite // bất chấp artist reception at UMBC, Highlandtown First Friday Artwalk, opening reception for Elliot Doughtie and Danielle Mysliwiec at MONO Practice, and Paula Phillips in conversation with Vetiver at SBM Gallery — PLUS Mary B. Howard Invitational call for entry at Tephra ICA 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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In the Stacks: African American Art Song
Tuesday, March 31 :: 6:30-7:30pm
@ George Peabody Library
Experience an evening of powerful music as singers from the Peabody Institute’s Vocal Studies department, led by Associate Professor Carl DuPont, present a curated recital of art songs by African American composers. Blending live performance with fresh scholarly perspective, the program will explore how race, gender, sexuality, and class have shaped these works and their reception.
Through brief contextual insights, the student performers will connect each piece to its historical moment, revealing how these songs respond to political realities while expanding and challenging the art song tradition.
Join us for a thought-provoking performance that offers a layered exploration of music rooted in the Black experience and affirms the ongoing relevance of this repertoire in shaping our understanding of the United States’ complex past.
Thursday, April 2 :: 6-8pm
@ UMBC CADVC
The Intermedia and Digital Arts Master’s Program presents despite // bất chấp: The 2026 Intermedia and Digital Arts (IMDA) MFA Thesis Exhibition. On view from April 1 through 18 at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, the exhibition features work by graduating students Taylor Goad, Nia Hampton, Bao Nguyen, and Lynn Nguyen.
An Artist Reception will be held on Thursday, April 2, from 6 to 8 p.m.
On April 15, from 12 to 1 p.m., the public is invited to attend the annual RTKL Lecture featuring Taylor Goad.
Highlandtown First Friday Art Walk
Friday, April 3 :: 5-9pm
@ Highlandtown Arts District
Free and open to the public.
The Highlandtown First Friday Art Walk is a free, self-guided walking tour of arts venues, exhibitions, performances, pop-up shops and more! SBM Gallery will be participating beginning at 7:30 pm this month with a free artist reception. Join us for snacks and a chance to meet some of the exhibiting artists!
Details about other happenings in the neighborhood, such as participating venues are posted on the Highlandtown Arts District website: ihearthighlandtown.com and on social media here: @highlandtown arts on FB and IG.
PULSE: Elliot Doughtie • Danielle Mysliwiec | Opening Reception
Saturday, April 4 :: 2-4pm
@ MONO Practice
On view: April 4 – May 2, 2026
MONO PRACTICE Baltimore is pleased to present PULSE, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Elliot Doughtie and Danielle Mysliwiec. The exhibition explores how material, form, and perception generate meaning in contemporary art.
Danielle Mysliwiec’s paintings merge the structured discipline of weaving with the fluidity of oil paint, creating tactile, visual, and associative abstractions. By extruding individual “threads” of paint, she builds physical surfaces whose dimensionality is enhanced by linen armatures and elements. These surfaces and forms combine to produce unfolding visual “events” that shift with the changing light of the day and the position of the viewer in space. Openings, closures, planes, and textures are alternately hidden and revealed.
Elliot Doughtie’s Fangs series, begun in 2025, transforms plastic vampire fangs through experiments with scale and diverse materials. By stretching and abstracting the form, the works explore vampires as social, sexual, and cultural deviants while examining fear, desire, and the act of ingestion within a queer context. Constructed from wood, foam, resin, and reinforced fiberglass, each sculpture engages viewers through its physical presence, creating tension and a sense of the uncanny.
Together, these works reveal how time, emotion, and imagination emerge through the transformation of materials and objects. This modification of physicality and play expresses an unpretentious pulsation. PULSE invites viewers to encounter these reinterpreted forms directly, allowing meaning and emotion to emerge through a sensory and embodied experience.
Mark Anthony West Jr.: Seven Stars Between Two Skies | Opening Reception
Saturday, April 4 :: 5-7pm
@ The Lord Baltimore Hotel
The Lord Baltimore Hotel will continue its Good Taste art exhibition series with “Seven Stars Between Two Skies,” a luminous new body of work by Baltimore-born visual artist Mark Anthony West Jr. Created in Rio de Janeiro, the exhibition presents portraits of American and Brazilian creatives envisioned as sovereign forces, powerful beings fully in command of their own universes.
In “Seven Stars Between Two Skies,” seven stars appear above and within each subject, symbolizing abundance, divine alignment and the multitude of gifts each figure carries. Layered shadows and silhouettes reflect the ability to occupy multiple identities and realities at once, while a ribbon gently winding around each body represents an invisible connection to ancestral, spiritual and universal sources. West’s signature terra cotta noses and multicolored metallic leaf infuse the portraits with warmth and radiance, grounding celestial themes in earthly form.
About the Artist:
Mark Anthony West Jr. is a Baltimore-born visual artist, historian, curator and storyteller based between Downtown Baltimore and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He directs Art Space Vidigal, an Afro-diasporic arts center in Rio.
Working across drawing, painting, multimedia, photography, public art, animation and sculpture/installation, West creates immersive scenes rooted in historical research, personal travel, life in Baltimore and biblical and diasporic themes. He often depicts human figures, especially Black subjects, in spiritually charged settings through a process he calls Afro-reverence, reclaiming African art histories and recontextualizing them within contemporary narratives.
What:
Good Taste Art Exhibition Series Featuring Mark Anthony West Jr.
“Seven Stars Between Two Skies”
When:
Exhibit runs April 1 through June 2026
Where:
LB Bistro & Bakery
(Lord Baltimore Hotel)
20 W. Baltimore Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
Admission:
The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. The event will feature free light fare and discounted beverages. All artwork is available for purchase.
Artists in Conversation: Creative Collaborations Paula Phillips & Vetiver
Saturday, April 4 :: 6pm
@ SBM Gallery
In conjunction with Paula Phillips’ solo exhibition, she will speak with Vetiver about how collaboration actively informs each of their creative practices.
Featured Opportunities
Submissions – Fiber Forward: An Open Call to Women and Non-Binary Artists for Fiber Art
deadline April 8
posted by Yellow Studio
The Gallery at Yellow Studio invites women and non-binary artists to submit work that challenges conventional perceptions of fiber art. We seek innovative approaches that expand the medium’s possibilities; work that complicates boundaries between decoration and concept, tradition and innovation, or material and meaning.
This exhibition will showcase fiber art as a site of experimentation, examining how artists are reimagining thread, fabric, rope, and other fibrous materials as vehicles for critical inquiry, spatial intervention, technological integration, or performative practice.
Dome House Al & Mickey Quinlan Artist Residency Program
deadline April 17
posted by The Miller Art Museum
The residency invites artists to Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula to reside for an 8-week period at the Dome House, a familiar structure for many locals. It is a twin-lobed (one side for a residence, the other for a studio) domed concrete structure built into sand dunes abutting Whitefish Dunes State Park situated on the shores of Lake Michigan. It sits on a large, heavily wooded plot of dunes and forest north of Sturgeon Bay in the small lakeside community of Whitefish Bay that provided solitude and inspiration for Albert Quinlan, advertising executive, and accomplished artist, who designed and built the home during the energy crisis of the mid-1970s. The concept for this “earth” home was that built into the earth, it would require minimal heating and cooling. The Quinlan family acquired the building after many years of neglect and changes in ownership and rehabbed it, returning it to a comfortable sanctuary in 2018.
The Martin House Creative Residency Program
deadline April 24
The Martin House Creative Residency Program is a project-based residency that provides creative individuals a designated time and space to develop new works of the imagination inspired by one of the great examples of 20th century architecture.
The residency is a competitive program that is open to applicants who seek the resources to support ongoing projects or the creation of new work. Creative makers who are selected to participate will generally spend 2-4 weeks onsite either consecutively or incrementally within the specified residency term. Length of stay is project-based and determined by the needs of the applicant and in alignment with the Martin House schedule.
Residents are also expected to deliver a free public program, performance, exhibition, or other creative presentation in order to share their Martin House-inspired work with the larger public.
The Pentimenti Grant for Emerging Filmmakers
deadline April 30
posted by Pentimenti Gallery
Pentimenti is pleased to announce the re-opening of the Pentimenti Grant for Emerging Filmmakers. This grant endeavors to support work by up-and-coming women, non-binary, and/or LGBTQ+ filmmakers. In keeping with Pentimenti’s mission, the project must pertain to art or artists in some way, although they needn’t necessarily be a documentary. Last cycle, Pentimenti awarded four grants to filmmakers Niya Leigh, Maya Horton, Alexandra Antoine, and Amber Nolan.
The recipient of the Emerging Filmmakers Grant will receive $2000 to spend on their film project, consultations with Pentimenti staff, and a spotlight feature on Pentimenti’s communication channels. The grant will be awarded by an appointed jury. Please find more information about grant specifics, eligibility requirements, and other details on the official grant application page.
“Pentimenti has expanded substantially since its inception nearly a decade ago. In addition to producing our own documentary projects, we’re actively dedicated to supporting and empowering fellow filmmakers,” says Executive Director Harrison Sherrod. “Simply put, the mission of Pentimenti is arts education, whether in the form of our own documentary projects, our filmmaking workshops, or this grant.” Founder and Artistic Director Leslie Buchbinder agrees, “Pentimenti aims to foster the potential of the next generation of filmmakers by providing a springboard for vital and trailblazing projects that may otherwise struggle to be realized.”
2026 Textures of Being
deadline April 30
posted by Contemporary Craft
Textures of Being brings together artists who honor the body as a site of knowledge and creative force grounded in lived experience. This exhibition reimagines disability as a form of freedom and an intimate sensory lens through which the world is perceived and shaped. The artists reveal how sensation, shared knowledge, interdependence, and embodied practice can generate new forms of connection and expression. Their works explore the complexities of presence, care, visibility and possibility, offering a tactile language for experiences often unseen.
Textures of Being invites viewers to slow down, to feel, to listen, and to recognize accessibility, inclusivity and sensory difference as shared human concerns. It is both an offering and a call: to honor the textures that make each of us, and all of us, fully and profoundly human.
Applications will be reviewed by the guest juror, Fran Flaherty and Yu-San Cheng, Director of Visual Engagement at Contemporary Craft.
Open Call for Artists | Mary B. Howard Invitational Exhibition
deadline May 1
posted by Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art
Every two years, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art(Tephra ICA) presents the Mary B. Howard Invitational, a group exhibition featuring the work of regional contemporary artists. For each iteration of the show, Tephra ICA works with a guest curator to produce the exhibition through an open call for artists. This program values exhibition-making as a meaningful collaboration between artist and curator and a generative process that feeds the development and public presentation of innovative new work. The Invitational is named in memory of Mary B. Howard, an artist, long-time board member, and staunch supporter of Tephra ICA.
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