Latest news with #BaltimoreMuseumofArt
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Joyce J. Scott, Dawn Moore to speak at University of Baltimore commencement
Baltimore native Joyce J. Scott, a MacArthur Fellow and a critically-acclaimed multimedia artist, and Maryland first lady Dawn Moore will deliver keynote addresses at the University of Baltimore's commencement ceremonies May 21 at The Lyric. Following her speech at the undergraduate ceremony, Scott will be presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Baltimore President and former mayor Kurt L. Schmoke. Scott's art has been exhibited in museums worldwide and included in major public collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Corning Museum of Glass, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Mint Museum of Art, among others. In 2024, Scott opened a 50-year traveling museum retrospective, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum. Moore has more than two decades of leadership in state government, nonprofit management, campaign strategy, fundraising and community engagement. She held government roles in the administrations of former Govs. Parris Glendening and Martin O'Malley, and former Maryland Lt. Govs. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Anthony Brown. In addition to speeches by Scott and Moore, the ceremonies will feature two student speakers who will deliver remarks as representatives of their respective classes. The University System of Maryland Board of Regents will be represented by Regent Yvette Lewis, who will offer greetings during both ceremonies. Have a news tip? Contact Todd Karpovich at tkarpovich@ or on X as @ToddKarpovich.
New York Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Baltimore, Confronting Chaos Through Contemporary Art
'What is your wildest dream for our future?' That is the question written boldly on the 16-by-11-foot blue wall that is featured in 'Dreamseeds,' an interactive art and sound installation. Here are two of the answers, written on pieces of handmade, recycled paper: 'Energy, food, love, sufficient for everyone.' 'That we can be loved for who we are.' And because 'Dreamseeds' is part of an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, one young visitor had a very specific wish: 'I want to be an Orioles player — the first girl.' The notes hang on metal pegs lined up in neat rows below the question. Speakers behind the wall emit a soundscape of voices and music that were gathered by the artists during workshops they conducted and then woven into a sound tapestry. 'Dreaming in a time of chaos is absolutely revolutionary,' said Sanahara Ama Chandra Brown, who created 'Dreamseeds' with Hannah Brancato, both Baltimore artists. 'It is revolutionary for someone to say, 'I will still have hope. I will still have desire.'' The installation is one of 66 works in the show 'Crosscurrents.' Most of them are from the museum's collection, and 28 are on exhibit for the first time. There is no official closing date, but a selection of works will rotate about every six months. The exhibition explores how, over the past 60 years, artists have imagined their relationships to the earth, environmental justice, grief and restoration, as well as how they have found light during dark times. One of three solo presentations in the show, 'Lay Me Down in Praise,' uses powerful imagery and sound to bring viewers 'to the center of how beautiful, but how devastating, our planet can be,' said Justen Leroy, the artist behind the piece, who lives in Los Angeles. In a small theater, the three-channel video installation shows slow-moving rivers of fiery lava, surging oceans and calving glaciers alongside close-ups of people staring at the camera, hugging and moving gracefully. It is the first artwork Leroy created, and he directed it with the visual artist Kordae Jatafa Henry. The performers are Leroy's family and friends, and the images, he said, put 'Black people next to geographies that we typically don't have access to.' 'We don't think about going to Iceland or different terrains — that world isn't necessarily open to us,' he said. 'I'm trying to help them crack open their imagination for the world and for themselves.' The music — composed by Leroy and the multidisciplinary artist Alexander Hadyn — is very much in the Black soul tradition of vocal riffs, runs and melismas, which are 'the connecting of notes that aren't necessarily a word but they are packed with emotion,' Leroy said. 'I began thinking, 'What is the soundtrack of our planet and what does the floor of the Atlantic sound like? What does that cry sound like?'' he said. The essence of gospel style, he noted, has been described as 'the wordless moan.' The piece was shown as part of the 2023 Biennial of the Americas in Denver, then as part of the 2024 Dak'Art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal. The Baltimore museum has acquired it. Another solo presentation — but a very different way of imagining nature and resilience — sits in the first of 11 galleries that make up the exhibition. Titled 'Under Other Skies,' this is the only work commissioned specifically for the show. Visitors can walk among 10 metal sculptures by Abigail Lucien, ranging from an 11-foot-tall bird cage with a swing inside to a delicate six-inch black-eyed Susan, Maryland's state flower. On the walls are trellis-like sculptures with animals such as cats and rabbits scampering in and out of the bars. All are made of recycled iron or a metal alloy that includes iron. For Lucien, who lived in Baltimore before moving to New York and uses they/them pronouns, iron is a key element of their work. It is vital to the life of the earth — whose core is made almost entirely of iron and nickel — but also to each individual's existence, they said. Human bodies contain a small amount of iron, and a lack of iron can lead to learning and memory deficits. 'There's something really poetic to me about this idea of thinking about this material of capturing or holding memory,' Lucien said, adding that it took about a year to make all 10 pieces. This is their first solo presentation in a museum. Originally a printmaker, Lucien, an assistant professor at Hunter College in New York City, turned toward metalwork in 2020 when the world seemed suffused in grief. Lucien's father in Haiti died of Covid in the same week that George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis police. 'I didn't know what to do anymore, and I found solace in slowing down in the metal studio,' they said. 'I felt that was a place that I had agency, that I could actually bend something to my will.' The sculptures embrace contradiction: A ribbon or a spider web in the real world is made of fragile material, but in the exhibit they are composed of solid steel. As a biracial person who grew up both in Haiti and the United States, Lucien has always been drawn to spaces or things 'that feel like they are able to flourish in an in-between world.' 'How do we create space where things are not easily defined,' they continued, 'where they can become something that's embraced or can become connecting points, rather than are outcast or feared.' Tools of connection appear in 'Tightrope — Familiar Yet Complex 4,' a 6-by-10-foot artwork that looks as if it could be a painting or a collage of green-brown water or land but is actually made entirely of fiberboards. The Ethiopian artist Elias Sime 'goes to a massive open-air market in Addis Ababa where scrap like this is traded and collected over years and years,' said Cecilia Wichmann, curator and head of the museum's contemporary art department. He also collects and makes art out of other telecommunications detritus, including motherboards, keyboards and coaxial cables. Through his work, Sime raises the question of what it means 'to be so intensively interconnected and at what cost,' Wichmann said, adding, 'And how does the extraction of the materials used to make these systems impact the earth that we need to sustain our lives and our interpersonal relationships?' Another exhibition standout is 'Peace Keeper' by Nari Ward. It was originally shown at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, dismantled and recreated for the New Museum in New York City, then acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art. A black full-size hearse covered in peacock feathers and what looks like thick tar — but is actually petroleum jelly mixed with black pigmentation — sits enclosed by metal bars with mufflers hanging above it. It is, in its essence, caged death. Ward told The Art Newspaper that the new iteration of 'Peace Keeper' is 'still about man's inhumanity to man, because there's something very violent in the piece.' 'Peace Keeper' is in dialogue with a nearby painting, Robert Motherwell's 'Elegy to the Spanish Republic CII' from 1965. It is from a series of more than 100 Elegies to the Spanish Republic that Motherwell painted over about two decades as a lamentation and a meditation on life and death. In creating 'Crosscurrents,' the curators and all others involved were thinking 'about this idea of mourning and grief in a cross-generational, collective way,' Wichmann said. Particularly after the impact of the Covid pandemic, 'how do we respond to those losses in a way that has some expression of the potential to keep going?'
Forbes
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Amy Sherald: American Sublime' At The Whitney Re-imagines American Realism With Singular Visual Narratives
Installation view of Amy Sherald: American Sublime (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April ... More 9-August 10, 2025). From left to right: Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizions), 2024; Trans Forming Liberty, 2024. Two figures – one in a breezy, colorful striped sundress and a white hair band, another with cropped hair in a white t-shirt and denim miniskirt – hold hands. The woman in the dress gazes back at the viewer, while the other woman stares intently at a powerful stream of hot, expanding gases that escape through the nozzle of a rocket that's just launched. The horizon is low and the pale blue sky occupies most of the monumental canvas. The nearly life-size women own the scene, they own the experience, and our role is only to observe. Planes, rockets, and the spaces in between (2018) – at the time, the largest painting executed by Amy Sherald – was some three years in the making after the master painter and storyteller of the contemporary African American experience in the United States stretched the massive canvas. The Columbus, Georgia-born, New York City area-based artist reclaims the quintessentially American experience of gathering to watch a rocket launch, from the white men who rule the U.S. space program. Only 18 of the 360 astronauts enlisted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have been Black, with Guion Bluford becoming the first African American in space in 1983. Amy Sherald, Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between, 2018. Oil on canvas, 100 x 67 x 2 1/2 in. ... More (254 x 170.1 x 6.35 cm). Baltimore Museum of Art, Purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2018.80. Sherald met the two women (a teacher and a recent graduate) who served as her models at the Baltimore Renaissance Academy High School, while raising money to send students to see Black Panther, the superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. At grand scale, an everyday experience became an exceptional painting. On loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art – which purchased it with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. – the oil on canvas is among 50 stunning paintings from 2007 to the present on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through August 10. Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the trailblazing artist's first major museum survey is another must-see blockbuster exhibition at the Whitney, which has made tremendous gains in drawing crowds to recent blockbuster exhibitions – Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night (on view through July 6) and Edges Of Ailey – that make the art itself accessible to a broader audience. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Publicity Image Sheet Amy Sherald, Breonna Taylor, 2020. Oil on linen, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. The Speed ... More Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, Museum, purchase made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, purchase made possible by a gift from Kate Capshaw It's impossible not to shudder while admiring Sherald's elegant portrait of Breonna Taylor or to long for less oppressive times when examining her regal portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, both exemplifying the notion of American Sublime. The title is borrowed from Elizabeth Alexander's fourth collection persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica which examines the Black experience through the lens of the slave rebellion on the Amistad and nineteenth-century American art. Sherald's work is imbued with witty literary references (Jane Austen, Octavia E. Butler, Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison) and clever art historical homage. Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018. Oil on linen, 72 1/8 × 60 1/8 × 2 3/4 in. ... More (183.1 × 152.7 × 7 cm). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. Sherald rocketed to national prominence when Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2014) became the first woman and the first African American to win the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. A girl in a v-neck sheath dress, one half solid with white piping the other half adorned in polka dots, looks directly at the viewer, her intense gaze commanding attention under a bold crimson beret. Donning white gloves, she holds an oversize teacup over a saucer, as if she's written into Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, A Mad Tea Party. Surrealism comes into play in several works, never drawing us away from the real circumstances of Sherald's subjects. Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014. Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. ... More (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm). Private Collection. Sherald subverts U.S. history by meticulously posing a gay Black couple in place of an unidentified uniformed sailor and a uniformed nurse (a 2012 book identified them as George Mendonsa and Greta Friedman) in a famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt published in Life magazine and became one of the most famous images of the 20th century. The photograph from August 14, 1945, commemorating V-J Day, the day Japan ceased fighting in World War II, is an iconic symbol of emotion and victory, and Sherald extends that raw energy to Black soldiers who returned from the war to a still-segregated nation, and re-imagines masculine identities. Amy Sherald, For Love, and for Country, 2022. Oil on linen, 123 1/4 × 93 1/8 × 2 1/2 in. (313 × ... More 236.5 × 6.4 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Helen and Charles Schwab. Look closely at the faces, gazes, poses, and hand positions of each of Sherald's subjects, and how some interact with landscapes and play with scale and perception. The stories are original, profound, multifaceted, and focused, and each complex visual narrative underscores Sherald's commitment to sharing her world view, her America. Sherald's oeuvre so far is singular in its advancement of the American Realist tradition of artists such as Edward Hopper, who were foundational to the Whitney's founding in 1930, by presenting a new tradition that emerged from art departments and galleries of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), where she first trained as an artist. Amy Sherald: American Sublime is organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curated by Sarah Roberts, former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. The Whitney presentation is organized by Arnhold Associate Curator Rujeko Hockley with curatorial assistant David Lisbon.
CBS News
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Baltimore cultural center celebrates the late Tom Miller's bold and colorful artwork
You may have driven past Tom Miller's colorful murals on North Avenue and Harford Road in Baltimore. But this week, three institutions are honoring the late Baltimore artist, and you can learn more about his legacy. Miller was one of the first Black Baltimore artists to have a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Eubie Blake Cultural Center is showcasing Miller's art and explains how it brings vibrancy wherever it resides. Miller's unforgettable artwork has bold colors with an homage to Baltimore. "If you choose to go deeper, you'll see what Tom Miller is actually talking about," said Deyane Moses, the curator and founder of Tom Miller Week. The Eubie Blake Cultural Center is participating in Tom Miller Week to keep the breath of his work alive. "It's simply a reflection of some of the beautiful things in Baltimore," said Derek Price, the executive director of the Eubie Blake Cultural Center. Tom Miller's legacy The cultural center will display 70 works of Miller's art and artifacts of his life. This will give people a chance to bond and explore the past of the local artist who died from AIDS in 2000. In the center, Moses points out an art piece that Chase Brexton Health Care commissioned. Miller was in hospice care at that medical facility after he was diagnosed with HIV in the late 1980s. "He did this piece while he was sick and what also happened is he started a scholarship for people who had HIV and AIDS," Moses said. "And so that's just the type of man Tom Miller was. He was loving. He was caring. And he always wanted to give back to his community and people who were just like him." Fighting for social justice Price said Miller had a strong relationship with the Eubie Blake Cultural Center and one day they found a couple of Miller's art pieces in their basement. They now plan to have them in their archival program. "It was unexpected," Price said. "We didn't expect to come across them. But it was exhilarating to see." His murals, lively screen prints, and unique furniture captivate people's attention as Miller did not shy away from tackling social justice issues. "Seeing alligator teeth and an alligator painted on a child's chair, he's really talking about children being used as alligator bait," Moses said. Auctioning Miller's work This year, one of his screen prints will be auctioned online and it's a piece no one has ever seen before. Moses said an art collector found it while reviewing their collection. "You think these artists have passed on, but they're not," Moses said. The proceeds from the auction will then go to Moses' mission to preserve Miller's legacy. "Right now, those murals on Harford Road and North Avenue are crumbling down," she said. "One of them has also been defaced. So, my goal for next year and for the future is to start the Friends for Tom Miller group. And I want us to preserve his legacy together and restore those murals." Tom Miller Week This will be the fifth year celebrating Tom Miller Week. Tom Miller Day is on Tuesday, Feb 18. The Baltimore mayor declared this day back in 1995. The cultural center will host a celebration open to the public from 5 pm to 9 pm. There will be music and testimonials from Miller's family and friends.
