BmoreArt’s Picks presents the best weekly art openings, events, and performances happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas.
This Week: We are featuring online events that you can participate in from the comfort of your own couch or safely see in person, plus a few calls for entry to get involved locally and nationally. Stay home, stay healthy, stay engaged in the arts.
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!
a recollection of dreams
Ongoing through June 12
@ Springsteen Gallery
“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.”
– Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Springsteen Gallery and guest curator Zion Douglass are excited to present a recollection of dreams, an experimental exhibition that stages a conversation between artists Amina Ross and dana washington-queen. The exhibition explores dreaming as a sensory experience that can articulate freedom sourced from the ancestral and autobiographical. Through the use of sculpture, video installation, and sound, the artists construct speculative worlds that are rooted in Black queer modalities of healing.
Amina Ross’ sculptural experience Etheric Bridge (Spring’s Sutures) merges a 4-channel video with machine made and natural materials. Composed of steel, cups from friends and family, rain water, tap water, and reclaimed cedar wood from New York City water tanks, this newly commissioned work conjures an architecture that extends the artist’s physical and material interest in collaboration. Together with Jared Brown and an ephemeral group of hand embroiderers — Samantha Kerr, Savannah Wood, Sienna Kwami, Savannah Imani Wade — Ross’ practice invites us to seek beauty in the undoing of anti-Black capitalist labor systems.
dana washington-queen’s two-channel video installation, Circular Metafictions: what remains unbound is gathered, is the first presentation of an in-progress hybrid documentary that excavates personal historiography and colonial fragmentation. The three-part film journeys from a speculative origin story through the ancestral and into the present, providing a nuanced constellation of Black life that uses sensory elements to exceed the limits of representation as a visual strategy. The film introduces “Black Noetic Theory” (BNt), an audiovisual method in development by washington-queen. BNt “seeks to push against the bounds of genre and production strategies, collapsing distinctions between documentary, cinema, video, and performance, echoing the incoherencies of Black life, history, and memory.”1
Amina Ross and dana washington-queen pivot between spiritual, digital and physical realms; between the embodied and the emotional; jostling us towards habitable dreamscapes where fragmentation evolves into a holistic process of knowing, feeling, and breathing into liberatory possibilities.
a recollection of dreams is curated by Zion Douglass, an MFA candidate in Curatorial Practice program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The exhibition has been generously supported by MICA’s MFA in Curatorial Practice and Springsteen Gallery. For more information, please contact Springsteen Gallery at info@springsteengallery.com.
Sondheim Artscape Prize Finalist Artist Talk: Jonathan Monaghan
Tuesday, May 25 • 5:30-6pm
presented by The Walters Art Museum
Join the 2021 Sondheim Artscape Prize Finalist Jonathan Monaghan in conversation with Dany Chan, co-curator of the Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition and Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Walters. For five programs through the months of May to July, each artist finalist will be featured in a program exploring the artist’s individual journey as a creative, their evolving voice, and what the opportunity of the Sondheim Prize and its visibility means to their art practice.
The 2021 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Finalists are Jonathan Monaghan, Lavar Munroe, Hoesy Corona, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Hae Won Sohn. The prestigious $25,000 Sondheim Prize is awarded to assist in furthering the career of a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Greater Baltimore region. The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition is on view at the Walters Art Museum from Thursday, May 27, through Sunday, July 18, 2021.
About the Artist
Jonathan Monaghan is an artist working across a range of media, including prints, sculpture, and video installation, to produce otherworldly objects and narratives. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, such as historical artworks and science fiction, his fantastical pieces examine anxieties associated with digital technology and consumerism. Past exhibitions include The Sundance Film Festival, The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and The Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has been featured in several media outlets including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and The Village Voice. His work sits in numerous public and private collections including The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Washington D.C. Art Bank Collection.
The 16th annual Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize is produced by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts in partnership with the Walters Art Museum.
