This week: An Artist’s Evolution: Shinique Smith in Conversation with Cara Ober at the Pratt, Renovations opens at Carroll Mansion, Breathing Room: Bound and Loose performance by Shinique Smith at the BMA, We Are One: Ernest Shaw, Jerry Prettyman, Monica Ikegwu, Latoya Hobbs, Mark Fleuridor gallery talk at Creative Alliance, Joan Cox: Frauenhaus artist talk + closing reception at Catalyst Contemporary, and the opening reception for Winter Workshop Show at Ink Spot Press.
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.
To submit your calendar event, email us at [email protected]!
We’ll send you our top stories of the week, selected event listings, and our favorite calls for entry—right to your inbox every Tuesday.
An Artist’s Evolution: Shinique Smith in Conversation with Cara Ober
** rescheduled ** Thursday, January 9th • 7-8pm
Enoch Pratt Free Library
400 Cathedral Street : 21201
Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sandra R. Berman. This program is part of ongoing 2020 Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative conversations at the Pratt Library.
Renovations | Exhibition Opening
Friday, January 10th • 8pm
Carroll Mansion
800 East Lombard Street : 21202
Renovations: A Story of Edifice and Ecclesiastical Influences on 19th-Century African American Education
Exhibition opening: January 10, 6:00-8:30pm
FREE with RSVP
In this immersive exhibition, strikeWare Collective weaves traditional and new media to present a visual experience about the institutions, educators and progenitors who shaped how Baltimore’s Black community acquired formal training and knowledge.
The exhibition examines Black education in Baltimore from the essential role of churches such as Bethel AME in the antebellum era to the first public schools available to Black students after the Civil War. RENOVATIONS uses the Peale Center building, known historically as “Male and Female Colored School Number 1” to begin to look at the Black experience in Baltimore throughout history. In addition to a critical examination of historical and contemporary segregation in Baltimore City public schools, the show tracks the nine students who graduated from School Number 1 in 1889 – Baltimore’s first all-Black high school graduating class.
Breathing Room: Bound and Loose | Performance
Saturday, January 11th • 11am + 7pm
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive : 21218
Swaths of deep blue fabric—dyed, bleached, and embedded with words and symbols by Shinique Smith—surround and envelop the artist (Baltimore, MD, b. 1971) during Breathing Room: Bound and Loose. For the meditative performance, Smith rhythmically inhales and exhales while wrapping herself in the indigo fabric. On the significance of indigo, she explains: “With roots in Ancient Peru, India, Japan and Africa, Indigo was once used as currency and was also a significant cash crop alongside cotton and tobacco during the slave trade. Indigo was considered in many cultures to represent the path to the infinite and bring one closer to the sky, a color and history that continues to inspire.”
Once the artist is bound beyond movement, Smith describes that she enters “a deep meditative state with the desire to release and transform a shared cultural experience of toil and bondage into a freed creative power for all who witness and participate as I am unraveled, and my bindings are loosened.” Smith seeks to expand her inner voice and commune with her ancestors through these actions and invites audience members to breathe in rhythm with her to create a shared tapestry of empowering sound.
This performance is part of Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, on view now. The performance environment is on view Thursday, January 9 through Sunday, January 12.
Image: Shinique Smith, Breathing Room, 2018. Performance still from Kansas City Open Spaces. Courtesy of Shinique Smith Studio. Photo by Graham Carroll.
We Are One: Ernest Shaw, Jerry Prettyman, Monica Ikegwu, Latoya Hobbs, Mark Fleuridor | Gallery Talk
Saturday, January 11th • 1-3pm
Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue : 21224
On view: DEC 14 – JAN 18
Gallery Talk: SAT JAN 11 | 1-3PM | FREE
This exhibition serves as a cross-generational conversation among Black artists working in Baltimore, exploring the complexity of these artists, their interests, passions, and what is currently driving the subject matters of their current practices.
Joan Cox: Frauenhaus | Artist Talk + Closing Reception
Saturday, January 11th • 4-5pm
Catalyst Contemporary
523 North Charles Street : 21201
Join us Saturday, January 11, 2020, from 4-5PM for a moderated artist talk for Frauenhaus, an exhibition showcasing the work of Baltimore painter, Joan Cox. Cox’s vibrant, textural, and richly painted works validate the presence of dynamic, complex, sensual, sexual and loving relationships between women, giving warrant to their permissibility.
The event will be moderated by Ann Shafer, an independent curator, art historian, and writer. Shafer, who spent a decade as Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, curated a variety of exhibitions in her tenure, including On the Mark: Contemporary Works on Paper in 2010, the annual Baker Artist Awards Exhibition in 2011 and 2012, Front Room: An-My Lê in 2013, On Paper: Spin, Crinkle, Pluck and On Paper: Alternate Realities in 2015, among others. She also organized the museum’s Baltimore Contemporary Print Fair in 2012, 2015, and 2017. Shafer has also worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art.
Catalyst will be open from 2-6pm. Parking can be found along Charles Street or in lots on Franklin, Charles and St Paul. The exhibition has been extended through Saturday, January 18, 2020.
About the Exhibition:
The selections featured in the show highlight narrative portraits of lesbian relationships and references their lack of presence in Western art history even though visibility and accessibility of the community has increased. Cox’s entrancing portraits, a mixture of large scale oil paintings and unique watercolor monotypes, with some rendered painstakingly realistic and others drifting towards the abstract, delivers her characters as archetypes of women as domestic partners. Featured in Cox’s solo show is new installation work, which moves beyond the plane of the canvas and into a three dimensional consideration of motherhood in same sex couples.
