With the COVID-19 pandemic limiting artists’ ability to make and sell their work, and galleries to display it, the Baltimore Museum of Art today announced three new programs to help the local artists and the community.
The first, BMA Salon, allows 20 galleries to use the museum’s digital platform to curate and display shows. Each gallery will receive a $2,500 organizing fee from the museum to support its staff, as well as all the proceeds from any work sold.
Curators from the BMA will select all the participants. So far, they’ve tapped as they lay, C. Grimaldis Gallery, Catalyst Contemporary, Connect + Collect, Creative Alliance, Current Space, ICA Baltimore, Galerie Myrtis, Goya Contemporary, Resort, St. Charles Projects, sindikit, Springsteen and The Parlour.
Another program, BMA Screening Room, gives 50 Baltimore-based artists a licensing fee ranging from $500 to $750 for a video work to stream online. By sharing the work, the museum hopes to provide funds and increased exposure for artists “during a moment in which there are few exhibition opportunities,” the museum said in a news release.
To date, the BMA has received works from more than 20 artists: Rahne Alexander, Abdu Ali and Karryl Eugene of as they lay, Stephanie Barber, Mollye Bendell, Erick Antonio Benitez, Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown, Emily Eaglin, Markele Cullins, Tanya Garcia, Nia Hampton, Chung-Wei Huang, Nia June, Jaimes Mayhew, Meredith Moore, Devin N. Morris, Clifford Owens, Margaret Rorison, Jules Rosskam, Lendl Tellington, Stephanie J. Williams, Caroline Xia, and Monsieur Zohore.
Lastly, BMA staffers are working to make 1,400 art kits that will be distributed by the Greenmount West Community Center to the Maryland Food Bank; World Central Kitchen, which operates a meal distribution site near the Camden Yards stadium complex; and in the neighborhood.
Instructions and materials inspired by the museum’s Free Family Sundays programming will be included inside the kits.
BMA director Christopher Bedford said in a statement the new programs create more direct collaboration with local artists and residents, something that’s needed as the museum has to remain closed and Baltimoreans are still under a stay-at-home order.
“Baltimore is a city rich in creative innovation and artistic experiences. As part of our mission of civic engagement, we felt it was incumbent upon us to develop new opportunities to support the cultural fabric of our community, especially as artists, art organizations, and the public face different but very real challenges during the coronavirus pandemic,” he said.
Funding for the initiatives comes from a gift left by Suzanne F. Cohen, a longtime museum trustee who died in 2018.
Among other projects, the Cohen Opportunity Fund provided money to start The Necessity of Tomorrow(s) conversation series “on art, race, social justice, and imagining the future(s) we want.”
