BmoreArt’s Picks presents the best weekly art openings, events, and performances happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas.
For a more comprehensive perspective, check the BmoreArt Calendar page, which includes ongoing exhibits and performances, and is updated on a daily basis.
To submit your calendar event, email us at events@bmoreart.com!
Legacies: Maurice Berger and Fred Wilson
Tuesday, April 19 • 6:30pm
@ UMBC CIRCA + streaming
This event is a celebration of the life and work of Maurice Berger (1956 – 2020) upon the 20th anniversary of his curation of the exhibition Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979 – 2000, and the 30th anniversary of his appointment as curator of the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The program also celebrates the 30th anniversary of Fred Wilson’s groundbreaking installation Mining the Museum with The Contemporary and the Maryland Historical Society, as well as Wilson’s sculpture Artemis/Bast, which is currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Curator George Ciscle will moderate an intergenerational panel with Fred Wilson, Lee Boot, Symmes Gardner, and two Baltimore-based artists who see the work of Berger and Wilson as touchstones for theirs, Ashley Minner and Christopher Kojzar.
The Soul Selects: Louise Fishman and Her Heroes, Martin, Mitchell and Hesse | Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 20 • 6-8pm | Ongoing through June 30
@ Goya Contemporary
Form and Gesture: Impressions of Movement | Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 20 • 6-9pm | Ongoing through July 2
@ Silber Gallery
Form and Gesture: Impressions of Movement
Artists: Meghan Brady, Carolyn Case, Matias Cuevas, E. Saffronia Downing, Anna Hepler, Ashley Page, Kim Rice and Renee Van Der Stelt
Curated by Alexis Iammarino and Alex Ebstein
Goucher College’s Silber Gallery
April 20 – July 2, 2022
Form and Gesture: Impressions of Movement couples the vocabularies of movement analysis with the formal analysis of visual arts. The pieces included are artifacts of their own production, documents that describe their own making. The aesthetics and forms are a direct result of physically rigorous or improvisatory studio processes performed by the artists. The show is an invitation to imagine and discuss how the artists’ movement contributes to their techniques. It also informs a deeper appreciation for and expression of their art practices across geographies, generations, and cultural identities.
Artist Curators Iammarino and Ebstein gather works in which the visual form, structure, and physicality articulated in the making prompts discourse between the divergent approaches to material use and craft explored by each artist. Similarly, they consider the creative communities of feedback and support as well as the geographies that contribute to these distinct, visual voices. Within the gallery, “movement” is unpacked into the paths of individual action and stillness, group momentum, formations of community, restrictions and tensions, and the suggestion of future trajectory Giving attention to the physical effort evident in their studio practices and the ways they choose to articulate their identities within the works, artists in this show move, labor, perform, and directly collaborate with their materials to forge the meaning of their work. The resulting objects convey personal and political narratives located within the corporeal actions, emotive presence, and conceptual interests that individuate and braid together conversations between artists. Here the curators consider the bodies of the artists’ as conceptually fluid entities, each positioned to represent self between the physical, the social and/or a situated body politic.
Dance and restorative practices anchor Iammarino’s studio practice in the visual arts and community-based collaborations; including her work as a muralist, cinematographer, director/curator of public history publication platforms and exhibitions. Ebstein’s visual arts curation is informed by her commitment to community and occupying and sharing creative space in Baltimore, in both co-founded galleries and existing, artist live/work warehouses. Her studio practice finds commonality with and inspiration from the artists she works with in both her curatorial and professorial roles.Pairing these overlapping interests with different focuses examines how artists build both a visual language and physical practice –in the studio and as part of a larger conversation about how abstraction and formal language interact. By examining echoes of similar forms, spatial relationships, material transformations, and tactile objects, the works challenge the expectation that like forms convey like ideas.
