Tangential Realities | Opening Reception

Featuring Rashida Bumbray, Red Rae, Marnie Ellen Hertzler, and Ada Pinkston, Tangential Realities unites four artists who root their practices in recognizable reality before venturing into the speculative, the utopian, and the unknown. Organized with Alex Ebstein, the exhibition highlights recipients of the Rubys Artist Grant — a program dedicated to nurturing innovative new work in the Baltimore region — whose practices take the everyday as a point of departure and transform it into the unexpected, mapping the terrain between what is and what could be.

Bumbray’s multidisciplinary practice channels family history and traditions into meditations on community, memory, and the ritual dimensions of movement. Red Rae, a multimedia artist and performer, imbues their projects with hopeful prompts while examining ideas of perception and transformation through the lens of trans futurity. Hertzler creates hybrid documentary films shaped by her background in psychology, fine arts, and the American South, exploring interpersonal relationships, isolated landscapes, and the symptoms of the climate crisis — works that collapse real and imagined time into a single, haunted frame. Pinkston’s practice explores the intersection of imagined histories and sociopolitical realities on our bodies, using performance, digital media, and mixed-media installations to conjure spaces where architecture, memory, and identity are inseparable. Alex Ebstein is an artist, curator, and the Senior Program Manager of the Rubys Artist Grants.