This Week: Mount Vernon + Bromo District First Thursdays, Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, Vision & Spirit | African American Art: Works from the Bank of America exhibition opens at the Lewis Museum, opening reception for Jacob Henry, Fanni Somogyi and Elena Volkova at Alchemy of Art, Christine Duckworth in conversation at The Walters, Doors Open Baltimore launch, Highlandtown First Friday Art Walk, 2023 BJC Symposium, Essential Tremors podcast with Will Oldham at Design Distillery, and Indigenous People’s Day celebrated at Baltimore Center Stage — PLUS The Gutierrez Memorial Fund Legacy Grant 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!
Mount Vernon + Bromo District First Thursdays
Thursday, October 5 :: Galleries Open until 8pm
On Thursday October 5 2023, art galleries in the Bromo Arts District and in Mount Vernon will remain open until 8pm. First Thursdays was a staple of the Mt Vernon art circuit for many years and since May of this year, arts spaces have been looking to re-energize audiences and patrons. Galleries participating in this evening time event in October include Current Space, First & Franklin Church, Cotyledon Arts, The Walters Art Museum, Unit B, Gallery Blue Door, and Maryland Art Place @ Hotel Indigo. Check each gallery’s website for current exhibitions, shows, talks, events and how to access their spaces. Galleries participating are all less than a square mile from each other and are under a twenty minute stroll from one end to the other.
Join Maryland Art Place at Hotel Indigo located at 24 West Franklin Street for Grace Doyles reception from 5 to 7pm. Grace Doyle (b. 1988) lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Through paint, Grace Doyle explores her friends and family in quiet, introspective moments and her compositions reveal a vulnerable side of the human experience.
To learn more about galleries and other art venues in these neighborhoods:
https://www.cgrimaldisgallery.com/
https://www.gallerybluedoor.com/
http://cotyledonarts.com
https://www.currentspace.com/
https://thewalters.org/
https://nomunomu.org/
https://www.firstfranklin.org
https://theblackgeniusartshow.com/
http://www.bromoseltzertower.com/
https://www.mdartplace.org/home
https://www.blackartistresearchspace.com/
http://www.gallery410.com/
https://www.unitb.net/
https://www.aiabaltimore.org/the-center/
Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival 2023
Thursday, October 5 – Sunday, October 8
Toon In, Baltimore! Sweaty Eyeballs returns for the 5th Annual international festival of animated short films.
The 5th Annual Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival offers in-person screenings at the MICA Falvey Hall Theatre, the Charles Theatre, and TU Van Bokkelen Hall Theatre with individual screenings ($12/ea) showing from October 5-8, 2023. Along with individual tickets there is an all-access festival pass option ($80) that allows access to all of the screenings and events of the festival. As always, the festival will focus on independently produced short animations from across the globe, with a lean towards the quirky and boundary-pushing.
“I am always amazed at the vibrant animation scene right here in Baltimore,” says Phil Davis, the festival’s founder and creative director and professor of animation at Towson University. “We Strive to highlight animated short films that are wacky, thought-provoking, unique and can’t be seen on your normal streaming platforms.”
Since 2012, Davis and his “Sweaty Eyeballs” moniker have been carrying the torch of the animation scene in the Mid-Atlantic with original, one-night-only, animation programming and live performances in Baltimore. Many of the series’ veteran artists have gone on to earn critical acclaim at large festivals like Sundance and the Academy Awards. Now in its 12th year, the beloved series partners with nonprofit, Central Baltimore Partnership to launch a multi-day festival of animation in theaters around Baltimore city and in Towson, with programming supported by area universities, arts organizations and businesses.
Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival’s 9 Program Blocks include 82 animated short films in total, hailing from 25 countries and 4 continents. The festival’s opening night, however, will showcase local talent, with a juried showcase of work created exclusively byBaltimore area artists. A family-friendly “Young Audiences” showcase returns this year, along with 4 blocks of international juried programming, two FREE visiting artist talks by Isaac King (Toronto, ON) and Paul Harrod (Portland, OR), and the feature animation “Eyeballs in the Darkness” by Baltimore director Albert Birney. The festival also includes Sweaty Eyeballs: Outside the Frame, a corresponding exhibition of animator process work and expanded animation at the Current Space gallery. The festival concludes each night with after parties, free screenings and DJs at the Current Space outdoor garden bar.
For more information on Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, visit: www.sweatyeyeballs.com
Vision & Spirit | African American Art: Works from the Bank of America Collection
Thursday, October 5 | Ongoing through January 15
@ The Reginald F. Lewis Museum
Vision & Spirit | African American Art: Works from the Bank of America is composed of more than 100 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and mixed-media works by 48 artists born in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibition highlights key aspects of these artists’ lives, as well as the important objects they created. Vision & Spirit focuses on these talented individuals’ strength and spirit as creative forces whose work continues to shape our understanding of the world.
The wide variety of artists represented in the exhibition look forward, contribute to progress and guide the visitor toward greater equity and understanding. The theme of Vision & Spirit is resilience and demonstrates how African American artists have embodied this quality in their work. The exhibition explores the meaning of resilience: Is it perseverance? Is it staying power, or is it something much deeper? Resilience embodies strength and humanity.
Artists in the exhibition include Henry Clay Anderson, Chelle Barbour, Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Willie Cole, Murry DePillars, Jacob Lawrence, Whitfield Lovell, Gordon Parks, Faith Ringgold, Jamel Shabazz, and James VanDerZee.
Artists have always mattered. Whether it’s Lorna Simpson, whose work challenges narrow, conventional views of identity, history and memory using the African American woman as a visual point of departure, or Dewey Crumpler, whose examinations of the lure of contemporary pop culture in his mixed-media works explore global consumer capitalism, they inspire other artists to push forward and develop new ideas.
Vision & Spirit inspires viewers to go on a journey of revelation and discovery. Passion, ingenuity, and beauty are brought forth by the creative geniuses in this exhibition. Art is a two-way conversation; viewing art is not a passive act. The artist speaks through their work, and, by way of their experience, the viewer has the opportunity and privilege to listen, reflect and to be transformed.
Read more of this week’s picks at BmoreArt.
