This Week: Reception + artist talk with Artemis Herber at Rosenberg Gallery, Kelley Bell presentation at UMBC, panel discussion on gender-based violence in art at The Walters, JCC talk with Sam Pollard at the BMA, book talk with Clara Bingham and Lisa Snowden-McCray at Pratt Library Central Branch, Trembling Grounds opening reception + live performance art at Area 405, Melissa Foss exhibition opening at Creative Alliance, opening at Raoul Middleman Studio Museum, and BREATHE performance at 2640 Space — PLUS 2 calls from Creative Capital 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!
Gaia Rise: Earthbound Offerings | Reception + Artist Talk
Tuesday, March 11 :: 6-8pm
@ Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College
Exhibition Dates: February 13 to March 22, 2025. This exhibit, which is free, open to the public, and accessible to all, can be viewed Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Reception and Artist Talk: Tuesday, March 11, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Rosenberg Gallery. Email liz.faust@goucher.edu for more information.
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
In Gaia Rise: Earthbound Offerings, the ancient and the contemporary converge, inviting reflection on humanity’s relationship with the land, time, and myth. This exhibition presents Artemis Herber’s Gaia Cycle alongside the Lekythos series, bringing together sculptural and painterly forms that explore the fragility of the Earth and the ways in which we memorialize and honor it.
Herber’s monumental Gaia Cycle accumulates and integrates industrial and organic materials, transforming landscapes into precarious, reformed mythical landscapes. These works, shaped by the forces of erosion, extraction, and renewal, embody the cyclical tension between creation and collapse.
The Lekythos series, with its references to ancient burial rites, underscores the act of remembrance as a necessary ritual in the face of environmental degradation. Drawing from ancient funerary practices and the mythological resonance of lekythoi—ceramic vessels used in Greek rituals of remembrance—the exhibition considers vessels not only as containers of memory but as symbolic offerings to Gaia, the primordial mother of all life. These forms evoke a deep-time perspective, connecting the Anthropocene to histories of ecological reverence and destruction.
Together, these works ask us to consider what we leave behind—not just in artifacts, but in the landscapes we shape, alter, and abandon. Gaia Rise: Earthbound Offerings is an invocation, a call to reimagine our stewardship of the land, and an elegy for the disappearing traces of our shared world.
Visitors are encouraged to explore to learn more about the artist’s practice through her website, https://artemisherber.com/
Kelley Bell: Projections, Inflatables, and Artistic Spectacles
Wednesday, March 12 :: 12-1pm
@ UMBC CIRCA
Kelley Bell is an artist/designer/educator celebrated for creating vibrant projection mapping works on a grand scale and gallery installations that emphasize joy, community, and human connection. In this presentation, she will take us on a tour of her best, worst and wildest art adventures and discover how delight and imagination can lead to contemplation and meaningful interpersonal connection, and how art doesn’t have to be big or in the public eye to be spectacular.
Kelley Bell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UMBC. Blending mid-century design stylings, lively rhythms, and penny-arcade antics, her work radiates a distinctively playful energy that aspires to unlock deeper social potentialities. Bell’s large-scale projection mapping works and public installations have been featured in national and international festivals for almost two decades. Her experiences working behind the scenes while other folks are having fun inform the philosophy central to her artistic practice: that enjoyment and delight are essential aspects of human experience and growth. While many high-profile art spectaculars are often co-opted as fodder for social media, they are also potential opportunities for audiences to connect with themselves, with one another, and with the world in ways that are hopeful, meaningful, and enduring.
Bell’s career includes numerous prominent exhibitions and festivals across the globe. Highlights include: the MOMENTUM Festival in Toledo, OH (2019); Digital Graffiti in Alys Beach, FL (2024/2018); the Dlectricty festival in Detroit, MI (2017) and the Animafest International Animation Festival in Zagreb, Croatia (2017 and 2016). She has been a regular contributor to the MoCA Lights international light art festival in Patchogue, NY and the Artscape festival in Baltimore MD. In 2019, she studied under master woodworker and automata craftsman Matthew Smith in Falmouth, UK. In 2024, she was awarded the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance’s Baker Artist Award in Interdisciplinary Arts and her work will be featured in the Baker Award exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art April – July, 2025. Professor Bell earned an MFA degree from the Intermedia and Digital Arts program at UMBC and a BFA in Graphic Design from Pratt Institute.
Depths of History: Gender-Based Violence in Art
Thursday, March 13 :: 6-7:30pm
@ The Walters Art Museum
Location: Graham Auditorium
Registration is required.
Works of art created by artists with reputations for sexual misconduct or reflecting gender-based violence have challenged museums to confront questions about display, context, and transparency. Should the bad behavior of artists such as Pablo Picasso be separated from their art? What role should institutions have in communicating about abuse perpetrated by artists, and how can they best prepare visitors to view art that depicts gender-based violence? How should museums consider the perspective of survivors in the display of potentially triggering works? Join guest speakers Hannah Brancato, artist, activist, and co-founder of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture; Ella Gonzalez, co-editor of Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer: An Intervention; and Keonna Hendrick, Deputy Director of Learning and Social Impact at the Brooklyn Museum, in a conversation about these questions and more, moderated by journalist Christina Cauterucci.
6 p.m.: Introductions
6:10 p.m.: Moderated Conversation
7 p.m.: Q&A Session
7:30 p.m.: Program ends
Depths of History is a program series that investigates and interrogates the problematic histories of museums and other institutions. This series reflects the Walters Art Museum’s commitment to making accessible the histories of its origins and the art that it stewards to ensure an environment of anti-racism, inclusivity, collaboration, and welcome for visitors, volunteers, and staff.
Available resources: Accessible Seating, Assistive Listening Devices, Sensory Kits
Accessibility resources and accommodations are available for programs and events. Please email accessibility@thewalters.org with questions and requests. We will make every effort to provide accommodations. Visit our accessibility web page for more information.
Photo credit (clockwise from top left): Ella Gonzalez; Hannah Brancato; Les Talusan; Danny Perez for Brooklyn Museum, 2023.
About the Guest Speakers
Hannah Brancato, MFA, is an artist and educator based in Baltimore. Hannah’s art practice is grounded in collective storytelling and creating public rituals to bring people’s stories together. She is co-founder of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an art/organizing collective that produced creative interventions to create a culture of consent. FORCE is best known for the Monument Quilt, a collection of 3,000 stories from survivors of sexual violence on quilt squares which toured the United States and Mexico in 50 public displays between 2013-2019, which culminated in a large-scale installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Brancato lectures and holds workshops related to her art practice and research about trauma-informed pedagogy. A professor of art since 2011, Brancato is a doctoral student in American Studies, where she is researching the role of art and material culture in anti-sexual violence movements, with a theoretical grounding in Indigenous Studies, Women of Color Feminisms, and Disability Studies.
Christina Cauterucci is a senior writer at Slate, where she covers politics and culture. She hosted Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs, season nine of Slate’s award-winning narrative history podcast, about a major California gay-rights battle in 1978. She also hosts Outward, a Slate podcast about queer life. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, and NPR. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Ella Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in History of Art at Johns Hopkins University where she is currently writing a dissertation on caryatids, or female architectural supports, in ancient Greece through a feminist lens. Ella was a 2023–2024 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. Additionally, she recently co-edited a volume titled Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer: An Intervention (Pennsylvania State Press, 2024) with Cynthia S. Colburn and Ellen C. Caldwell.
Keonna Hendrick (she/her/they/them) is a cultural strategist, educator and author specializing in promoting inclusive and culturally responsive practices in art education. Hendrick’s writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Journal of Museum Education (2017), Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (2014), and the Journal of Folklore and Education (2016). Keonna serves as Deputy Director of Learning and Social Impact at the Brooklyn Museum where she oversees the museum’s public programs, education, and community engagement initiatives. She is the recipient of the National Museum Education Art Educator Award from the National Art Education Association in 2019 for her dedication to equity-centered approaches to community engagement and institutional practices. She holds a BA in History and Studio Art from Wake Forest University and a MA in Arts Policy and Administration from the Ohio State University.
Read more of this week’s picks at BmoreArt.
