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 events@bmoreart.com!
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Perennials: Artist Lecture and Opening Reception
Thursday, February 8: 5-8 PM
The King Street Gallery presents Perennials from February 5 – March 10, 2018. Perennials is an exhibition from a collective of six artists working across media to address ideas of growth, impermanence, and survival of plants within the changing American landscape.
The contrast between cared for and forgotten plants interests the collective of six artists: Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, Suzy Kopf, Emmaline Payette, Anne Percoco, and Valerie Wiseman. With humor, science and the extended study of art practice, the artists of Perennials engage their audience with the plant world. A perennial is broadly defined as a plant that lives for more than two years, but many perennials live much longer. They are the survivors of the plant world, spreading out and taking hold wherever they can. Perennials fight to survive, season after season, year after year in a world that might not want them.
About the Artists:
Ellie Irons and Anne Percoco’s (Brooklyn, NY) collaborative project, Next Epoch Seed Library is focused on preserving weedy species most likely to survive and thrive in a landscape dominated by human excess. Iterations of Irons and Percoco’s mobile library display gathered seeds, plants in growth and include instructions on how to properly expand the collection.Christopher Kennedy’s (Brooklyn, NY) work considers marginal areas such as highway underpasses and abandoned sidewalk planters. With his background as an environmental engineer, Christopher approaches the urban landscape as a field scientist, presenting his collected samples as art specimen, his findings as art ‘zines.
Suzy Kopf (Baltimore, MD) uses wallpaper combines found imagery of popular nonnative houseplants. Kopf is interested in the import and domestication of plants not originally from North America to become part of the American aesthetic.
Emmaline Payette’s (Brooklyn, NY) work utilizes post-consumer materials to engage her audience in questions of ecology. Her rocks and boulders made from single-use plastic bags, contrasted with ‘real’ natural elements such as live plants and twigs blur the line between reality and parody.
Valerie Wiseman (Washington, DC) looks for the humor in the recent elevation of certain plants to cult status documenting indoor and outdoor plant in her mugshot series. The roughness of Valerie’s polaroids evokes a 1990’s American Apparel aesthetic that speaks to the dated aesthetic of trends.
<><><><><><><>Baltimore Dance Project at UMBC
Thursday, February 8th – Saturday, February 10th
Proscenium Theatre
UMBC Performing Arts + Humanities Building, 21250
Baltimore Dance Project presents a blend of new, recent, and repertory works at UMBC, featuring the company premiere of Unravel, choreographed in 1995 by the late Eric Hampton and reconstructed by Alison Crosby, and an excerpt from Framework, one of the company’s earliest works, choreographed by the late Elizabeth Walton, the company’s founding artistic director. New works include a solo by Sandra Lacy and Tipping Point by Ryan Bailey.
The program also includes Doug Hamby’s Square Breath, a tour de force of intensity and desperation, and Carol Hess’ LightForest, a venture through breathtaking images of nature, featuring five dancers, colorful projections, and score by Timothy Nohe via wearable sound devices.
Known for its edgy, artistic collaborations between choreographers, composers, sound artists, visual artists, engineers, and technologists, Baltimore Dance Project infuses visual media, sound, light, and technology into dance performance.
Tickets: $20 general admission, $10 students and seniors, $7 UMBC students. Tickets are available online and can also be purchased at the box office one hour before showtime.
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Friday, February 9th – 18th
Arena Players
801 McCulloh Street, Baltimore, 21201
Arena Players present two short rock operas of the African-American experience. Both presented in one night as a co-production of Arena Players & Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS).
Arena Players, Baltimore’s historic African-American community theater, and Baltimore Rock Opera Society are partnering on an epic night of entertainment.
Determination of Azimuth traces the work and career of Katherine Johnson, a black female mathematician who rose within the ranks at NASA to become the chief mathematician responsible for computing paths for manned rocketry on the Apollo program. Katherine’s words and formulas become the elements of a powerful journey. “Putting rockets into space is the easy part – getting them back home is where it gets hard.”
The Battle of Blue Apple Crossing is a blues musical storm where religious deities battle for the soul of a human musician in a fight for the ages. The music follows American history from gospel, field spirituals & blues to early rock and roll & garage rock.
Both shows will be fully produced musical spectacles with a live band. The 90-minute presentation will take place at Arena Players intimate space in West Baltimore and is described as a “historic collaboration” between two of Baltimore’s community performance groups.
Read more at Bmoreart
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