CPM is pleased to announce Brighter Skies, a group exhibition bringing together painting, sculpture, and works on paper by seven artists currently living and working in Baltimore.

As an exhibition title, the expression “Brighter Skies” gestures both towards hope for renewal and ironic hopelessness when considering environmental degradation, social turmoil, or performative politics. Amidst this, the natural world continues to unfold with a rhythm that is at once ancient and immediate.

The artists in this exhibition engage with the symbolic, metaphorical, and spiritual qualities of nature, offering a way to remain in relationship with the world, with ourselves, and with something larger than the systems we can’t control. The works on view express the power of slowly and attentively engaging with earth and sky.

John Ruppert casts a giant shard of tree struck by lightning in iron, monumentalizing a moment of nature’s immensity. Erin Fostel uses charcoal to sensitively render nighttime landscapes of a local park and city street. Charles Mason III creates a suite of mixed media works on paper that use the flower as a vessel for language, emotional transportation, and stand-in for the black body. Dolores Zinny makes meticulous and meditative colored pencil drawings that evoke the skies of Rosario, Argentina, where she was born, and Baltimore, Maryland, the city where she currently lives. Thiang Uk’s paintings envision shifting abstract landscapes as sites for ancestral memory and formal discovery. Zoë Charlton’s mixed-media collage works use imagery of plants, animals, and African masks to construct intricate political allegories addressing race, gender, family, and climate change. Taj Poscé thickly layers, constructs, and burns various materials and ephemera to create densely rich paintings, sometimes referencing the grime and dirt of the burnt earth and other times pointing towards the cosmos and the stars.

The sky does not have a border. The sky is a continuity, shared and inhabited by everyone.