This Week: a tribute to Marian Anderson, Objects at Hand reception + artist talk at XOXO Gallery, Phillips After 5 Summer Fiesta, opening reception for Jenn Kotler at Baltimore Art Gallery, Baltimore Interdependence Day Parade at Patterson Park, BSO’s Star Spangled summer performances at Oregon Ridge, and Unfinished Republic exhibition closes at Goya Contemporary — PLUS apply for the BMA’s open call for Baltimore photographers and more featured opportunties!
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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The Maryland Opera Presents: Marian Anderson
Tuesday, June 30 :: 1:30pm
@ Enoch Pratt FREE Library – Central Branch
A celebration and tribute to the first African-American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. This program explores the turbulent history of the civil rights movement, while presenting the wide variety of styles in Marian Anderson’s repertoire, including spirituals, art songs, and opera excerpts.
Objects at Hand | Artist Talk + Reception
Tuesday, June 30 :: 6:30pm
@ XOXO Gallery at Maryland Art Place
You are invited to a special artists’ talk at Maryland Art Place with Cara Ober, the curator, and a featured artist from Objects at Hand, an exhibit currently on display at XoXo Gallery, located on the 3rd floor of the Maryland Art Place Building.
Objects at Hand explores the conceptual potential of craft, curated by Elizabeth English. Our artist talk is a discussion with Sasha Baskin, who combines traditional lacemaking with images from pop culture.
XoXo Gallery at Maryland Art Place
Tuesday June 30th
218 West Saratoga St
Baltimore MD 21201
Reception: 6:30 – 8:00 pm, Talk starts at 7:00 pm
PHILLIPS AFTER 5 Summer Fiesta
Thursday, July 2
@ The Phillips Collection
¡Qué calor! Beat the summer heat and spend an unforgettable day in the galleries filled with music, dance, art, and family-friendly fun. Enjoy live music from Taisha Estrada, create your own piñatas and maracas, and learn salsa with Baila DC before joining a lively social dance in the Hunter Courtyard. Try your luck at Spanglish lotería for a chance to win prizes from the DC Public Library, and experience the vibrant folkloric traditions of Bolivia as Alma Boliviana performs Caporales and Tinkus in the auditorium. Throughout the evening, enjoy music from DJ Alcatraz of Eaton Radio Workshop and deepen your connection to the collection with a Spotlight Talk led by a Phillips Educator.
Jenn Kotler | Opening Reception
Friday, July 3 :: 5-8pm
@ Baltimore Art Gallery
First Friday in July: Jenn Kotler’s Showcase opens!
Join us to celebrate Jenn’s new series of high-energy plein air paintings, created on the spot around Baltimore City and including the Roman Space Telescope, Baltimore Bike Party, swimmers in the inner harbor, musicians jamming and scientists working mission control! Enjoy a glass of bubbles and a night out in eclectic Hampden!
Exhibit runs through August 6, 2026
The Baltimore InterDependence Day Parade
Saturday, July 4 :: 10am
@ Patterson Park
Vital Matters offers The Baltimore Interdependence Day Parade as an anecdote for fascism, right wing nationalism, and the many ills that plague our country as we are coming upon this 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We join many artists across the country, who are part of a “We the People” movement that seeks to offer altnernative visions and versions of democracy and “America” to the ones being offered by our current administration.
JOIN US, and make your voice heard! Show us what YOU value and what you envision for a more just, equitable, beautiful, and joyful future.
ALL SPECIES, GENDERS, AGES WELCOME!!
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Star-Spangled 250!
Friday, July 3 + Saturday, July 4 :: 8pm
@ Oregon Ridge Park
Celebrate our nation’s 250th at Oregon Ridge Park with Music Director Jonathon Heyward and the BSO. Each evening will open with “The Star-Spangled Banner” performed live with the orchestra and sung by one of this year’s O, Say Can You Sing competition winners. The program features a rousing “Armed Forces Salute,” the main title from Star Wars and Copland’s Hoe-Down, and culminates with a spectacular fireworks finale with the 1812 Overture. Pack a picnic, gather your friends and family, and join a classic Baltimore tradition.
Gates open at 5 PM each day. Each concert ends with a 12-minute firework display. Tickets ($30 for adults/$20 for children) include on-site parking.
Unfinished Republic: America at 250
Wednesday, July 8
@ Goya Contemporary
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.
Featured Opportunities
Open Call to Baltimore Photographers
deadline July 26
posted by The Baltimore Museum of Art
Concurrent with the 2026 exhibition Flashback: Two Centuries of Baltimore Photography, the Baltimore Museum of Art invites photographers to submit work for the Flashback Open Call, a rotating presentation celebrating diverse photographic perspectives on Baltimore life.
This open call seeks to amplify voices and visions that capture the complexity, beauty, and lived experience of Baltimore—particularly from photographers who have not had extensive professional exhibition opportunities.
Up to twenty (20) selected photographers will have their work featured in a rotating presentation within with the Flashback exhibition at the BMA’s Main Branch and Lexington Market Branch from October 2026 through February 2027. Please note that selected work will likely be projected or displayed on a screen, not printed.
Exhibition Proposal Open Call 2026
deadline July 3
posted by The Compound
In 2026, The Compound wishes to expand its curatorial voice by inviting external curators/artists to produce their own exhibitions in our spaces.
This year we will support two curated exhibition from an individual or group of artist(s) within two time slots. We will provide installation (curators are responsible for the installation with program manager’s assistance), promotion, and budget support in the amount of $800.
ArtFusion Call to Artists
deadline July 10
posted by Holt Park and Center for the Arts
Holt Park and Center for the Arts is seeking community participation for the ArtFusion festival’s 2026 juried exhibition: Earth, Moon, and Stars.
Earth, Moon, and Stars is inspired by the return of NASA’s Lunar Program and the recent Artemis II mission; however, this is not just about space and astronomy. This theme is about how we, as humans here on Earth, are deeply connected to the cosmos and celestial bodies. We tell stories about the stars and name them, we depend on the moon for tides to play in, and the sun for warmth and light to grow. We navigate by the stars, divide the year by the movement of the sun in the sky, and track the passage of days by the phases of the moon. This fascination has taken humans from painting constellations on cave walls all the way to photographing the universe and traveling to the moon and back.
The festival hopes to see a wide interpretation of the theme.
Artworks can be literal or conceptual, realistic or abstract. We are open to both 2D and 3D art, with no restrictions on the type of media.
For 2D work, work should be ready to hang and a maximum of 24 inches high.
“Aesthetic Inheritance: Art, Archive and African American Life” Symposium Call for Proposals
deadline July 10
As part of the Build.Serve.Unite @ Bowie State University (BSU) initiative, BSU, The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture (MCAAHC), and The Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum (BDTM) invite abstract submissions for the Aesthetic Inheritance: Art, Archive, and African American Life Symposium, to be held on October 1-3, 2026 at Bowie State University, with opening programming at Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum.
The organizers welcome proposals for individual presentations, workshops, and panels. Selected presentations will help shape a two-day symposium convening scholars, artists, curators, cultural workers, and researchers in dialogue on African American art and its relationship to historical documentation, its function as a research methodology, and within critical archival practice.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words are due by July 10, 2026. Submissions should include an abstract for the proposed presentation, panel, or workshop, a short bio, and current affiliation. For panel submissions, please include the bios and affiliations of all participants.
BLACK AUGUST: FROM HARLEM TO HAVANA Art Exhibit Submission
deadline July 10
posted by Baltimore Artists Against Apartheid and Crow’s Nest Baltimore
Black August commemorates and carries forward the struggle and sacrifices of Black political prisoners and freedom fighters. With its origins in 1979, and George Jackson’s organizing in California’s San Quentin State Prison, observers of Black August call for the freedom of all political prisoners in the United States. This year we want to highlight the international character of Black August, and the interconnected struggles of resisting efforts to disenfranchise Black communities, terrorize immigrants, and deepen environmental and climate injustice. We also celebrate the long history of Cuba’s solidarity with Black revolutionaries, and call for resistance to U.S. imperialism and its brutal blockade and sanctions on Cuba, which grows more deadly by the day. Just as U.S. imperialism presses its boot on the Black population in the U.S., it uses the same violence on oppressed peoples around the world.
This Black August, Baltimore Artists Against Apartheid, Crows Nest, and Baltimore PSL present BLACK AUGUST: FROM HARLEM TO HAVANA, calling for art submissions that honor this international legacy of struggle for liberation. More than just a reflection on the fight for the freedom of political prisoners at home, this exhibition is a rallying cry to carry forward this international struggle today.
2026 Artist Travel Prize – Call for Artists
deadline July 14
posted by Create Baltimore
On behalf of The Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City (The Society), Create Baltimore is proud to announce the annual awarding of the Artist Travel Prize. This year, The Society will award $8,000 to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators, living or working in Baltimore City.
The successful proposal selected by The Society’s Board of Directors must clearly articulate the artist’s reason for travel to a specific destination and how this travel is essential to their studio practice. The Society’s focus will be on emerging artists.
Applicants must live or have a studio in Baltimore City during the time of application and during the granting period and may not be full-time students or be enrolled in a degree-granting program at the time of application or during the granting period.
This year, as an additional component of the Travel Prize, the selected artist must present, within one year of return from their funded travel, a public-facing presentation to be scheduled by the artist, The Society, and Create Baltimore. This presentation will be a showcase of new work created during the artist’s travel or as a result of their travel experience.
26th Annual Wills Creek Exhibition of Fine Art
deadline July 15
posted by Allegany Arts Council
The Will’s Creek Exhibition of Fine Art—one of the Allegany Arts Council’s premier events—is accepting submissions through July 15th. Now in its 26th year, this juried contemporary art exhibition invites artists working in all media to engage with the issues shaping our world. The exhibition will run August 29–September 6, 2026, at the Allegany Museum in Cumberland, MD.
Free Fall Grant – Individual Artists
deadline July 23
posted by
The Free Fall Baltimore grant program provides funding to individual artists and small arts organizations to produce arts & cultural events throughout Baltimore City during the month of October that are free and open to the public.
Free Fall showcases the importance of accessible arts programming with a month of free concerts, dance and theater performances, festivals, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, artist talks, special events, and more.
Individual artists/creatives can apply for this grant if their event is
Free without contingencies
Open to the public, and
Located in a venue or public space in Baltimore City.
Baltimore area nonprofit arts & cultural organizations with annual operating budgets under $500,000 are also eligible to apply for grant funds to produce a Free Fall event. Organizations can apply for a Free Fall grant here: https://www.eventeny.com/events/vendor/?id=50339
Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship
deadline July 27
The Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship is a two-year program for emerging visual artists seeking to establish and sustain a professional art career. The Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship distinguishes itself as the only program in the area to offer artists two years of in-depth formal career development alongside support for artistic production. We provide fellows and the broader public invaluable opportunities to better understand the art world at large, and develop a deeper appreciation for contemporary art.
Become a Member
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