Bmoreart’s Picks: Baltimore Art Openings, Galleries, and Events April 24 – May 1

On certain floors
certain wonders.
Pale dirty light,
some captured iceberg
being prevented from melting.
See the mechanical moons,
sick, being made
to wax and wane
at somebody’s instigation.

— Elizabeth Bishop, Varick Street

C. Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present On Certain Floors, Certain Wonders, an exhibition of recent paintings by Nora Sturges which depict an imagined world of arctic ruin.

Strange scenes of a desolate land are occupied by man-made objects and structures – a tarmac, satellite dish, stanchions and wood planks. Vacant rooms and hallways of industrial banality suggest a subterranean facility where life has retreated indoors. The sparseness and specificity of these ordinary subjects, added to the intimate scale and detailed brushwork of Sturges’s paintings, inspire a complex narrative of life on a distant frontier. Although devoid of any human figure, these works signal a lingering presence of some unknown inhabitant, recently departed.

Nora Sturges received her BA in studio art from Bowdoin College and her MFA in painting from Ohio University. She has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and internationally, including recent group exhibitions in Toronto, Berlin and Montreal. She is the recipient of three Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. Sturges currently lives and works in Baltimore, where she is a professor and head of Painting and Drawing at Towson University.

For her solo debut at C. Grimaldis Gallery, Ko creates a site-specific installation entitled Escalante, the newest iteration in the artist’s Force of Nature series. Inspired by the canyons of southern Utah, Ko reconstructs the sandstone landforms with their curvilinear, gradated walls. The towering sculptural relief is created from cascading rolls of paper stacked floor to ceiling and shaped to fit the architecture of the gallery. Utilitarian Kraft paper transforms the gallery walls into undulating surfaces of intertwining light and shadow and immeasurable pages in suspended motion.

Escalante is accompanied by a selection of paper sculptures that trace Ko’s continuous experimentation with the material. She works by laboriously unwinding, and re-spooling miles of adding machine tape and submerging it in ink and graphite powder. As it dries, the paper swells into soft, biomorphic forms saturated with delicate lines. In recent works, rolled paper is shaped and thoroughly coated in glue, resulting in flawlessly engineered spirals that float weightlessly on the surface.

Born in Korea, Jae Ko received her BFA from Wako University, Tokyo in 1988 and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore in 1998. She received the Anonymous Was A Woman grant in 2012 and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2002. Formerly based in D.C. and Virginia, artist now works and lives in Maryland’s Western Shore. Her work is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. and numerous private collections throughout the United States.

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50 Years Since the Assassination of MLK: An Anniversary of Uprising | Exhibition Opening
Friday, April 27th: 6-8pm

Jubilee Arts
1947 Pennsylvania Avenue: 21217

50 Years Since the Assassination of MLK: An Anniversary of Uprising
Exhibition Opening, Friday April 27th 6pm-8pm
Work on view: April 27th-May27th

Art and Stories from

Kibibi Ajanku
Mateo Blu
Elder C. W. Harris
Geneva Johnson
George “Doc” Manning
LaToya Peoples
Ada Pinkston
S. Rasheem
Ernest Shaw
Kaleb Tshamba

This art exhibit and event pairs artists and longtime West Baltimore residents to create work surrounding the 50th anniversary of 1968, centered on the stories and lives of the five residents. The history of the assassination of MLK, of the subsequent Uprising, and of Baltimore itself, will be told through their voices and, and interpreted in many art forms by their artist pairs.

At the opening event, artist/storyteller pairs will speak, expanding upon their process, their lives, and the stories that were most influential in the creation of this work. Closing out the evening, the Todd Marcus Quintet will perform music from their new album On These Streets which offers a musical portrait of Sandtown-Winchester and Upton and includes music reflecting on the unrest of 2015.