BmoreArt’s Picks: October 12-18
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 and some that you can safely leave the house for, 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!
Fire & Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Bethlehem Steel
@ Baltimore Museum of Industry
The Baltimore Museum of Industry’s new exhibition, Fire & Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Bethlehem Steel, opened on Friday, September 24, and explores the company’s complicated history and tragic legacy.
Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point mill was once the world’s largest producer of the world’s most important product. The well-paying union jobs—and the hundreds of smaller companies the mill sustained—supported countless Baltimoreans and nourished close-knit communities.
And then it was gone. When the company went bankrupt in 2002, thousands of retirees saw their pensions cut and their healthcare benefits stripped away. When the mill shut for good in 2012, thousands more lost their jobs. Beyond the economic devastation were psychological and even spiritual wounds.
The long-term exhibition is the capstone of the Bethlehem Steel Legacy Project, a multi-year initiative to document and preserve the history of the company and its workers via projects including an award-winning podcast, an outdoor exhibition, a blog series, a legacy garden, and more. The project is made possible by the Davis Family Foundation and Tradepoint Atlantic, a 3,250-acre global logistics center located at the site of the former steel mill.
Fire & Shadow features both historic and contemporary photographs, artifacts ranging from workplace IDs to flame-resistant clothing worn in the mill’s furnaces, and first-person narratives of workers themselves. The exhibition provides a look at the history of the steel giant and the devastation left in the wake of its loss.
“This exhibition was made possible by Baltimore’s steel community, whose members graciously donated artifacts, shared stories, and helped fill in the human aspect to this story of industrial might,” says Anita Kassof, the museum’s executive director.
The museum is currently open Fridays and Saturdays from 9:00am – 3:00pm. A limited number of tickets are available each day, and may be purchased online or at the museum on a first-come first-served basis.
We are grateful to project sponsors the Davis Family Foundation, Tradepoint Atlantic, Balti Virtual, Direct Dimensions, Residential Title and Escrow Company, Titan Steel, and Venable, LLP.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Mayan Community Language
Tuesday, October 12 • 5:30-6:30pm
presented by The Walters Art Museum
Mayan languages have survived colonialism and systemic erasure, and many are spoken in the Baltimore region today. Maria Polinsky, Director of University of Maryland (UMD) Guatemala Field Station, and Pedro Mateo Pedro, Executive Director of UMD Guatemala Field Station, join Ellen Hoobler, William B. Ziff, Jr. Associate Curator of the Art of the Americas, to discuss their long-term collaboration, their approach to engaging and working with Mayan speaking communities, and the ambitious oral history projects Maria undertakes with her students. This digital program is in observance of the United States’ acknowledgement of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the diaspora of indigenous communities in the United States from the Americas.
Please note this event is virtual and is available exclusively on our Facebook and YouTube pages. You don’t need an account on either platform to enjoy the program.
This program is part of a series exploring themes from the Walters Art Museum’s exhibition Translations and Transitions / Traducciones y Transiciones: A Celebration of Mexican and Central American Independence (1821–2021), on view through November 7.
About the Speakers:
Maria Polinsky received her doctorate in Linguistics in 1986. She has taught at the University of Southern California, the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. She specializes in linguistic theory and has done extensive work on endangered languages in different locations around the world. Polinsky’s research is situated at the intersection of theoretical syntax and cross-linguistic variation in sentence structure, with a focus on long-distance dependencies, control and raising constructions, and ergativity. In theoretical syntax, Polinsky’s work spans a wide array of languages including Austronesian and Mayan languages, as well as languages of the Caucasus. She is a pioneer in bringing both the tools and the research questions of lab-based psycholinguistics to speakers of under-studied languages.
Pedro Mateo Pedro is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto and the Executive Director of the Guatemala Field Station at the University of Maryland. A native speaker of Q’anjob’al, a Mayan language of Guatemala, Mateo Pedro’s research focuses on the documentation and description of Mayan languages, specifically language acquisition, Mayan languages in contact and dialectal variation. His documentation projects on Mayan languages have been a collaborative effort with mentors and colleagues from different universities, such as the University of Kansas, University of Maryland, McGill University, and Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. Mateo Pedro received his PhD in linguistics at the University of Kansas in 2010 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Mateo Pedro has taught at universities in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States and was recently a visiting scholar at the Facultad de Lenguas y Letras of the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, México. He has also taught courses on Mayan linguistics in different Mayan communities in Guatemala.
