This week’s news includes: BMA announces Open Call photography winners, a proposal to honor Divine at Towson High, new board chairs for MCHC + AVAM, cornrow controversy outs BROS’ Kelly Carnes, a review of Pyramid Atlantic’s Ruminations, two new NGA shows announced, Aja Roache appointed to Driskell Center Assistant Director of Exhibitions & Programs, David Simmons’ Baltimore horror stories, The Doll House Boutique’s 23rd anniversary, remembering former Hippo owner Charles “Chuck” Bowers, and Leon’s to reopen as Leon’s Homecoming.
BMA Announces Flashback Open Call Photographers and Public Programs
Press Release :: September 30
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) today announced the 12 photographers whose work will be digitally presented at the end of the Flashback: Two Centuries of Baltimore Photography exhibition as well as projected at BMA Lexington Market. Flashback is the first comprehensive survey of the history of photography in Baltimore from the invention of the medium from 1840 to the present. Through 210 images by 90 named artists and historic studios, the exhibition features rare daguerreotypes and Civil War-era photographs, images captured during landmark cultural moments, and innovative contemporary works to show photography evolving across generations and offering a rich, nuanced portrait of the city.
The Open Call encompasses even more diverse photographic perspectives—particularly from photographers who have not had extensive professional exhibition opportunities. The featured Open Call artists are Anthony Bryant, Ben Cricchi, Nick Freeman, Kelis George, Drayden Hebb, Kim “Jinx” Jenkins, Debra Lanouette, Blake “Blakehasnoface” Lyle, Harold E. McCray, Berkeley Reddick, Kaori Maiyiah Taylor, and Carters Vision. Their projected works can be seen during regular museum hours in the BMA’s special exhibition galleries and at BMA Lexington Market, Sunday through Wednesday, 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursday through Saturday, 6–10 a.m.
Will Towson High School get a Divine Auditorium?
Now that parts of Towson High School’s campus have been named after graduates Michael Phelps and Randy Dase, can a Divine Auditorium be far behind?
That’s the hope of a group of fans of the late Harris Glenn Milstead — the 300-pound actor, singer and drag queen known as Divine, and a 1963 graduate of Towson High School.
When plans for the school’s renovation were in the discussion stage several years ago, fans suggested that its refurbished auditorium be named after Divine, who first gained attention appearing in movies written and directed by Baltimore filmmaker John Waters.
The Maryland Center for History and Culture welcomes Stiles Tuttle Colwill as its new Chair of the Board of Trustees
Press Release :: September 25
The Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC) is pleased to announce that Stiles Tuttle Colwill has been elected Chair of the Board of Trustees. Colwill began his term on July 1 and succeeds John Banes, who served in this role since 2023. He assumes leadership alongside a new class of Trustees that includes Cyril Brennan, Henry H. Hopkins, Sylvia Parker, and Susan Schnaars.
Colwill is widely recognized across the region for his active community involvement, volunteer activities, and philanthropy. He received his BA in Art History from the University of Louisville and completed graduate work in Museum Studies at George Washington University, which included early internships at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and a Helena Rubenstein Fellowship at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
American Visionary Art Museum elects Rachel Perić as board chair, succeeding Christopher Goelet, and adds four more board members
by Ed Gunts
Published September 24 in Baltimore Fishbowl
The American Visionary Art Museum has elected Rachel Perić as its board chair, succeeding longtime chair Christopher Goelet.
Other new board members include Sarah H. B. Kahl, a partner with the law firm Venable LLP; Jim Conley, President and CEO of Bert Davis Executive Search; Jason A. L. Timoll, an attorney, and Elfreda Winstead Massie, a nationally-recognized education leader and author who served as a Distinguished National Faculty member at the National Center on Education and the Economy.
The infusion of new leaders marks the start of a new chapter for the Inner Harbor museum as it advances a five-year strategic plan under Executive Director Ellen Owens, who was appointed in 2025.
After cornrows controversy, Baltimore Rock Opera Society’s new leader is out
by Wesley Case
Published September 30 in the Baltimore Banner
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society fired its executive director weeks after she was hired following controversy over a video that showed her wearing cornrows.
The nonprofit arts group has been dealing with fallout after Kelly Carnes, a white woman, wore the hairstyle at a recent event for the group, sparking concerns of cultural appropriation.
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society — which has staged original, live rock-and-roll theater in Baltimore since 2009 — informed volunteers of the new leader’s firing in a Sept. 23 email obtained by The Banner. In the same email, the group announced four of its six board members, including its chair, will step down Dec. 31.
Paper’s Long Memory: RUMINATIONS at Pyramid Atlantic
by Phil Hutinet
Published September 29 in East City Art
Thirty artists make up RUMINATIONS: Our Stories IN PAPER, but the exhibition at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center is less a survey of individual practices than a portrait of a working community. Curated by Helen C. Frederick, it marks two related anniversaries: Pyramid Atlantic’s tenth year at its Hyattsville location and the tenth anniversary of Reading Road Studio, the Silver Spring papermaking studio Frederick founded in 2016. Both milestones matter because Frederick’s role in this exhibition is unusually expansive. She is Pyramid’s founder, Reading Road’s founder, the exhibition’s curator and one of its artists. More importantly, she has created a setting in which paper is not simply a surface upon which artists place an image. It is a material collaborator with its own weight, absorbency, fibers, translucency, accidents and resistance.
That idea, articulated in Frederick’s statement for the exhibition, might sound familiar in the vocabulary of contemporary craft. Yet RUMINATIONS makes it concrete. Across pulp paintings, cast-paper sculptures, print installations, drawings, books and mixed-media objects, paper becomes body, memory, landscape, specimen, skin and record. The exhibition does not propose a single aesthetic, nor should it. Its achievement lies in demonstrating how a decade of collaboration can give a shared material practice unusual range without reducing the artists involved to a house style.
Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography
Press Release :: September 29
Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography charts the evolving understanding of portrait photography as a tool of representation among African Americans and illustrates the richness and complexities of Black life and culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Featuring some 70 works drawn from the National Gallery’s collection, the exhibition traces African American photographers and portrait subjects in the nascent days of photography’s development, chronicling the evolution of the medium as a means to define Black community, aspiration, and identity.
Unfolding over the course of three thematic sections, the exhibition is arranged chronologically and explores how portrait photography was both embraced as a means of self-empowerment and utilized to exert control over representation. The first section, Black Entrepreneurs, tells the story of James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington, three leading early African American portrait photographers who established thriving studios soon after the medium was introduced in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.
Major Survey Exhibition Exploring Glenn Ligon’s Textual References Opens at the National Gallery of Art in April 2027
Press Release :: September 28
Next April, the National Gallery of Art presents Glenn Ligon: Subtext, an exhibition tracing the process of the contemporary artist’s text-based, citational practice over nearly 40 years. Glenn Ligon: Subtext, Ligon’s first major solo exhibition in Washington, DC, in more than three decades, showcases the artist’s signature work of referencing literary texts and cultural legacies to convey historical knowledge into the present. The survey will feature over 40 works by the artist spanning paintings, prints, drawings, and neon sculptures as well as a presentation of nearly 20 works the artist curated, as a show-within-the-show, to honor the visual art of other artists with whom his own practice is in dialogue. In addition, there will be a reading room featuring a selection of Ligon’s literary source materials. The exhibition is on view from April 3 to September 6, 2027, in the East Building.
For over 40 years, Ligon has invited others to consider the changing conditions of representation. Incorporating selected text, his citational work draws from various cultural, literary, and historical references, allows viewers to engage in the pursuit of cultural literacy across a repertoire of knowledge.
Aja Roache Announced as Assistant Director of Exhibitions & Programs
Press Release :: September 28
The David C. Driskell Center is pleased to announce the appointment of Aja Roache, PhD, as our new Assistant Director of Exhibitions & Programs. She begins on October 19, 2026.
Dr. Roache joins us from Florida A&M University, where she has served as Director of Museum Operations at the Foster-Tanner Fine Arts Gallery since 2009. There she led the gallery’s exhibition program and oversaw curation, installation, grant writing, marketing, public programming, and visitor evaluation, while training interns, docents, and volunteers. She has also taught Museum Studies and Arts Administration at FAMU, developing courses on exhibition planning and design, public art, and museums and society. Her interpretive planning work includes an institutional interpretive guide and docent training program for the Havana History and Heritage Society. She is active in the American Alliance of Museums, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, and the Association for African American Museums.
At the Center, Dr. Roache will oversee our exhibitions, events, and education programs, support development and grant writing, and lead communications with our members and the public. Her nearly two decades of experience at an HBCU gallery and her commitment to visitor-centered practice make her an ideal partner in advancing our mission: preserving, documenting, and presenting the visual arts and culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. As we mark 25 years, she will help carry the energy of this anniversary into our next chapter and bring new audiences to our gallery, library, and archives.
David Simmons Revives Baltimore’s Hallowed Horror Genre—With a Twist
by Brandon Soderberg
Published September 29 in Baltimore Magazine
The first piece of fiction David Simmons wrote “was about a dealer who sells heroin in exchange for cheese,” says the 41-year old author. When he shared the short story with his wife back in 2020, she was impressed and entertained. She also had one question: “What are you trying to do with it?
So the D.C.-area-born, Baltimore-based Simmons submitted that darkly comic story, “The Wheel of San Geronimo,” to the literary journal Snarl (their tagline: “literature and art that bites back”). It was accepted. He even made a few bucks on it. Since then, Simmons’ hardboiled horror has afforded him cult status among local literary types and Internet gorehounds alike.
His first two novels, Ghosts of East Baltimore, which came out in 2022, and its sequel, Ghosts of West Baltimore, released in 2023, tie the city’s notorious history of segregation to a cosmic drug conspiracy. Last year’s Eradicator follows a young woman losing her mind, thanks to too many pills, too much Internet, and a grim gig at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The Doll House Celebrates 23 Years of Fashion, Culture + Baltimore
Press Release :: September 29
On Sunday, October 4, 2026, The Doll House Boutique celebrates 23 years of fashion and individuality with an anniversary fashion show and party at The Assembly Room. Presented with Flywire Magazine, the evening brings together designers, artists, media, creatives and the community that has shaped The Doll House.
Founded by designer Natalie Karyl, The Doll House has grown from its Baltimore roots into a creative fashion world connecting Baltimore and Los Angeles. Its signature label, Ragdoll’s Couture, transforms existing garments into one-of-a-kind pieces.
The runway will celebrate the brand’s past, present and next chapter alongside guest designers and fashion installations featuring Bishme Cromartie, Dermaine Johnson, Different Regard, AMOUR and ROOTS.
Charles Bowers, former owner of Baltimore gay bar the Hippo, dies
by Wesley Case
Published September 24
Charles “Chuck” Bowers, former owner of the storied Baltimore gay club the Hippo and a prominent advocate for Maryland’s LGBTQIA+ community, died Tuesday. He was 81.
Bowers turned the Mount Vernon club — located at the corner of North Charles and West Eager streets — into a judgment-free refuge for queer and straight locals looking to find and express their authentic selves on a packed dance floor.
“He truly tried to make the Hippo a place for everybody — a safe space,” said an emotional Rik Newton-Treadway, who befriended his “mentor” Bowers at the club in 1979.
Leon’s, one of Baltimore’s oldest gay bars, will reopen on Sept. 30 at 3 p.m. after a 45-day hiatus
by Ed Gunts
Published September 28 in Baltimore Fishbowl
Leon’s, one of Baltimore’s oldest gay bars, is reopening this week after a 45-day hiatus.
Staff members announced on social media that the bar with entrances at 870 Park Avenue and 227 W. Chase St. will reopen on Wednesday, Sept. 30, at 3 p.m. They’re calling it “Leon’s Homecoming.”
Before its temporary closure, Leon’s was considered the oldest continuously-operating gay bar in Baltimore and one of the oldest gay bars in the country. Its name comes from Leon Lampe, who owned the bar in the 1930s. It has operated as a gay bar since 1957.
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