This Week: Making Their Mark at NMWA, AWP Conference & Bookfair, Carole Boston Weatherford tribute reading at CCCC, BCAA Public Convening at MICA, BSA’s Expressions ’26, panel discussion on Baltimore’s Confederate monuments at The Walters, Highlandtown First Friday Art Walk, opening reception for Deborah Brown English at Creative Alliance, Roberto Lugo and Sarah McCann in conversation at SBM Gallery, and Hard Times Require Furious Dancing at 2640 Space — PLUS apply for the Creative Capital Awards 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!
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection
Ongoing though July 26
@ National Museum of Women in the Arts
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection brings together approximately 80 works by nearly 70 of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Cecily Brown, Sheila Hicks, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, Faith Ringgold, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sillman, Lorna Simpson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Pat Steir, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, and Zarina. Featuring a wide variety of artworks from the past eight decades, including painting, sculpture, installation, textile, beadwork, and ceramics, the exhibition emphasizes connections between intergenerational and international artists who circumvent and upend conventions in art-making, embracing craft techniques, inventive methods, and alternative materials.
The exhibition is organized within seven sections that illustrate key thematic threads: Gestural Abstraction, Luminous Abstraction, Pixelated Abstraction, Disobedient Bodies, Of Selves and Spirits, The Power of Form, and Craft is Art. Each section juxtaposes works by emerging artists with the pathbreaking contributions of their predecessors, demonstrating how earlier generations anticipated contemporary perspectives on representation, identity, and power. Making Their Mark envisions art history as an interconnected web of influences and affinities among artists who subvert traditional narratives and hierarchies in a historically patriarchal field.
Many of the works on view question rigid and gendered distinctions between art and craft, eroding arbitrary and increasingly obsolete categories and value systems. Making Their Mark assembles significant works by artists whose innovative explorations demonstrate expansive vocabularies of art-making, highlighting the importance of prioritizing diverse perspectives to change the way art histories are told.
Wednesday, March 4 – Saturday, March 7
@ Baltimore Convention Center
The AWP Conference & Bookfair is the essential gathering for writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers. Join thousands of attendees, explore hundreds of events and exhibitors, and immerse in four days of vital literary community and celebration in Baltimore!
:: Related Event ::
Read the Room: Celebrating Literary Baltimore – AWP End-of-Conference Party
Saturday, March 7 :: 5:30-10:30pm
@ 2640 Space
Wednesday, March 4 :: 6-8pm
@ Charm City Cultural Cultivation
The daughter of a printer, Carole Boston Weatherford was practically born with ink in her blood. She began writing at age 6 and soon after saw her poems in print. Her 80-plus books have garnered 2 NAACP Image Awards and 18 American Library Association Youth Media Awards, including a Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Award and 4 Caldecott Honors. Her career achievements have been recognized with the ALA Children’s Literature Legacy Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Nonfiction Award from the Children’s Book Guild. The 2024 Young People’s Poet Laureate and a retired HBCU professor, she lives in Baltimore.
Zora’s Den is a program of Charm City Cultural Cultivation (CharmCCC), a non-profit foundation whose primary function is to build opportunities for cultural growth in Baltimore’s inner city by introducing and supporting initiatives for public programs in the arts, social engagements, leisurely activities and educational advancement through informal gatherings.
We are dedicated to empowering the lives of Black women writers, by offering a platform for their authentic stories and unique voices.
Thank you to the @PoetryFoundation for your support of this program. #AWP #AWP26
Read more of this week’s picks at BmoreArt.
