A new exhibition, “Objects Made Holy,” is now at The Peale Museum, curated by Gina Pierleoni, a Baltimore visual and mixed media artist and professor at Stevenson University.
More than 40 Baltimore residents contributed deeply personal everyday items to the show. The emphasis, however, is on the contributors’ stories that accompany them.
“I create meaning in situations, in objects, in all kinds of things,” Pierleoni told Baltimore Fishbowl. “I have my grandmother’s wooden spoon. I learned to cook with that. I was in my grandmother’s kitchen, you know? …[T]he idea of my little, tiny hands holding that spoon, and the way my mom held on to it and then gifted it to me in a way that was really like, you don’t outstretch both your hands [if] it’s not something important. That’s sort of a sacred thing.”
Pierleoni moved to Baltimore in 1983 and attended Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and has lived here ever since. She calls the exhibition a love letter to Baltimore, emphasizing the reverberations of a large group of sacred objects gathered in one place.
For the show, she reached out to around 40 people – one for each year she has been in the Baltimore area – and the throughline is they are all people with whom she has had some kind of sweetness with. It may have been a conversation, an interaction, or a relationship of decades. One contributor is someone she has known for 40 years, and another is someone she met just three weeks ago. Not all of them are artists, and Pierleoni did not want to reveal the identity of the contributors or the objects in the exhibition, as she hopes part of the experience will be the surprise and delight of discovering the items and learning the stories behind them.
“I think, too, that in these times of division, unpredictability, surprises that we’re bracing for that aren’t necessarily good, these are surprises that I’m offering where it’s like, ‘Oh, really, I would have thought that that was a landfill item!’” Pierleoni said. “‘Oh, my goodness, I am so moved!’ And ‘Actually, I know somebody…’ It’s really all about making connections, valuing making connections with each other. Building humanity up again.”
For Pierleoni, the concept of sacred and holy does not take on a religious context, but a deeply meaningful context in a different sense. These are objects that build community, level the playing field, knock down the hierarchy.
“Hierarchies drive me crazy,” Pierleoni said. “I don’t like leaving people out, and …community building is a part of my life practice, and what I do at school, and just how I’m wired.”
The exhibit is more than 20 years in the making, beginning with an idea Pierleoni had connecting holiness with everyday objects that are passed down through generations, particularly those that involve the transmission of one’s culture and traditions. She approached the Peale in the fall of 2024, and Kim Domanski – chief operations officer at the time – loved the idea. When Domanski, a pillar of the art world in Baltimore and beyond, passed away in March 2025, Pierleoni continued working on the exhibition with Andie Townsend, assistant director of operations and programs at The Peale.
While all the contributors live in Baltimore City and have crossed paths with Pierleoni, the group is otherwise extremely diverse. Age range spans and includes nearly every decade from people in their 30s through those in their 80s. The contributors are racially and religiously diverse and are, as she described, “all over the map in terms of my life.” And while a few of the objects in “Objects Made Holy” are religious items, Pierleoni said that is just because they happen to be what those contributors chose.
“I think an object, even something mass produced, comes holy or sacred through the meaning it has for someone and the deep love they have for that object,” Pierleoni said. “You know, whether the object reminds them of a person or an event or a transformation or whatever…. These are our tethers.”
In addition to envisioning “Objects Made Holy” as a community-building experience in Baltimore, Pierleoni hopes to expand it into a template to be used elsewhere. She is doing an online program where she will answer questions about how she put the exhibition together. At its loftiest, she sees this type of community-created show-and-story-telling as a potential peacemaking tool.
“I wanted to design a project that could go to a community center or a senior center or a library or corporation, or, you know, a kindergarten anywhere on the planet,” she said. “As long as somebody asks the question, ‘What’s important to you?’ ‘What’s really rocking your world these days?’ … then it’s not about, ‘Did you see what somebody did?’ or ‘Can you believe what he said?’ … It’s really just a softening and an exhale and builds connection. Yeah, we need that. We just need connective tissue desperately.”
“Objects Made Holy” opened Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026, with an opening reception featuring many of the contributors on Sunday, Feb. 15 from 1–4 p.m. The reception is free, but an RSVP is required. The exhibition has other programming planned, like a discussion panel, an open mic, and more. “Objects Made Holy” runs through March 29, 2026.
The Peale is located at 225 Holliday Street, Baltimore, MD.
