This Week: Outdoor Sculpture Invitational at Adkins Arboretum, opening reception for Jennifer McBrien at Hotel Indigo, opening reception for Barbara Alicia Astronomo at Mount Royal Tavern, What They Left Us opening reception at Alchemy of Art, 9th Annual Cherry Hill Arts & Music Waterfront Festival, and Leon Willis opening reception at AYE Gallery — PLUS Black Baltimore Digital Database call for family photographs and more featured opportunities!
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!
Artists in Dialogue with Landscape Outdoor Sculpture Invitational
Ongoing through September 30
@ Adkins Arboretum
In a lively mix of nature and art, artists from the Mid-Atlantic region have created a wide range of site-specific sculptures for Adkins Arboretum’s 12th biennial Outdoor Sculpture Invitational, Artists in Dialogue with Landscape, on view through September 30.
The show begins with a pair of teardrop-shaped palm husks hanging from the limb of a pine outside the Visitor’s Center. One is a natural cinnamon-brown, the other is painted with colorful, abstracted
flowers and leaves. Both are beautiful and eye-catching, raising thoughts about how human-made beauty
compares with nature’s.
Created in collaboration by Ceci Cole McInturff of Alexandria, VA and New York painter Antoinette Wysocki, more of these palm husks dangle and spin among the forest trees. Just down the creekside path is another collaboration, this one by McInturff and Washington artist Chris Combs. Titled “Creature/Machine,” all of its palm husks are natural except for one where a tangle of wires and electronics is tucked inside. A solar-powered simulation of single-cellular life, it’s a tongue-in-cheek musing on whether it’s better to live as a creature or a machine.
In another mischievous look at technology’s relationship with nature, Combs created a solar-powered sculpture that counts units of time with LED lights flashing at intervals from 1 second up to 68 years. In sharp contrast is “Neverneverland (A Sundial)” by Stephanie Garon of Urbana, MD. With
solar-powered technology dating back to ancient Egypt and Babylon, this analemmatic sundial uses the visitor’s own shadow to make the relationship of sun and earth visible.
Playing with changing light and shadow, opacity and transparency,
“Filter,” by Alexandria artist Marcos Smyth, uses pieces of burlap loosely stretched between the branches of young trees like sails or tent caterpillar webs to capture the ever-changing beauty of the forest.
The forest’s beauty and its vulnerability led Melissa Burley of Laurel, MD to create several hollow concrete balls planted with saplings, ferns, and varicolored moss. Like tiny planets or ecosystems, they call to mind the accelerating loss of natural landscapes to development, yet inspired by her memory of a weeping willow sprouting through the cracks in an asphalt parking lot, they also prove the tenacious drive of life to grow even under difficult circumstances.
Arlington artist Isabella Whitfield’s “Ringside” evokes this urge with its thousands of sweetgum balls laboriously collected throughout the forest to fill a ten-foot disk spreading under the trees. While a single seedpod might seem insignificant, the sheer quantity she gathered speaks volumes about the fertility and abundance of life in the forest. Also captivated by these spiny balls, Nada Romanos Abizaid of McLean, VA turned one of the forest’s small wooden bridges into a magical portal by crowning two of its pilings with a pair of ceramic sculptures covered with oversized knobs and spiky protuberances inspired by sweetgum balls.
Likewise fascinated by the potential of seedpods, as well as sprouting plants and flowers, Falls Church, VA artist Marc Robarge created a compelling series of small ceramic sculptures as finely detailed as pine cones or budding flowers. So animated that they almost seem like tiny animals, their ambiguous character blurs the distinction between what is human made and what is natural to the forest.
Both Elizabeth McCue of Yardley, PA and Bridgette Guerzon Mills of Towson, MD focused on the mycorrhizal network, an underground symbiotic network of fungi and plant roots that allows trees to communicate and share resources. The spidery white lines of Mills’s plaster-covered wire interwoven with crocheted thread evoke the mycorrhizal fibers hidden underground throughout the forest. McCue’s colorful web of branches stretching from a large “Mother Tree” to a nearby tree injured long ago by logging or an accident tell of how trees are able to help sustain one another through this network.
Interconnected and interdependent, they are an integral part of the forest’s ecology.
This show is part of Adkins Arboretum’s ongoing exhibition series of work on natural themes by regional artists. It is on view June 1 through September 30 at the Arboretum Visitor’s Center located at 12610 Eveland Road near Tuckahoe State Park in Ridgely.
For gallery hours or more information, contact Adkins Arboretum at 410-634-2847, or visit adkinsarboretum.org.
Jennifer McBrien | Opening Reception
Wednesday, July 2 | 5-7pm
@ Hotel Indigo
Maryland Art Place, in partnership with Hotel Indigo Baltimore is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Maryland-based artist, Jennifer McBrien. The exhibition is on view at Hotel Indigo, located at 24 West Franklin St. from June 11 – August 29, 2025. A public reception will take place Wednesday, July 2 from 5 PM to 7 PM.
About the artist:
Jennifer McBrien is a Baltimore textile artist who uses her sewing machine as a drawing tool to honor her fragile subjects. Her process begins with her ink drawings that are then translated through the eloquence of the stitched line. She uses fabrics to play with patterns, depth, transparency, and narrative.
McBrien studied painting at Towson State University and the Maryland Institute, College of Art, receiving a BS in Fine Arts and an Advanced Teaching Certificate in Art Education for the state of Maryland. She taught in the Baltimore County School system for her last 15 years as Department Head for Parkville High School’s Art department. McBrien attributes her proficiency in drawing to drawing in front of a critical audience while teaching high school art for thirty years.
Please join us on Wednesday, July 2 from 5 PM to 7 PM at Hotel Indigo for the opening reception celebrating the solo exhibition of Jennifer McBrien. Hotel Indigo is free and open to the public. Please visit Hotel Indigo website for hours of operation.
scabbing – Barbara Alicia Astronomo | Opening Reception
Thursday, July 3 :: 5-8pm
@ Mt. Royal Tavern
scabbing, a solo exhibition by Barbara Alicia Astronomo, will be on display at Mount Royal Tavern from July 3 to August 5, 2025. Through interdisciplinary paintings, drawings, and poems, her work bleeds and grinds just like her and her ancestors—making noise in a muzzled world. Astronomo navigates themes of language, ancestry, memory, responsibility, and repair, encouraging her peers to dedicate themselves to self-inquiry, authenticity, and expression.
At the heart of her exhibition is naked art museum—the embodiment of her dreams to create an accessible, autonomous incubator for community repair; a place to create, share, reflect, and revolt. The public is invited to attend open studio sessions at Mount Royal Tavern on July 6, 13, and 20, and again on August 3 for the closing reception.
Barbara Alicia Astronomo is an author, interdisciplinary artist, and arts administrator born and based in Baltimore, MD. Her visual and literary work has been featured in The Black Genius Art Show, Onlē Vibez, MAXgallery, Current Space, Creative Alliance, and Skirting Around Magazine. As an arts administrator, she focuses on art direction, event production, venue management, communications, grant writing, and studio support—bridging the space between underground culture and institutional critique.
Issues of her contemporary arts history zine, vomitmouth, will be available at Mount Royal Tavern, Red Emma’s, Normal’s, Current Space, Creative Alliance, O.K. Natural, and The Forest—check vomitmouth.org to know when to visit their bulletin boards!
Read more of this week’s picks at BmoreArt.
