Tschabalala Self. Two Women. 2019. Rubell Museum. © Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self. Two Women. 2019. Rubell Museum. © Tschabalala Self
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BALTIMORE, MD (February 1, 2021)—The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) today announced details for three solo exhibitions opening in its Contemporary Wing on March 28, 2021. Sharon Lockhart: Perilous Life; Tschabalala Self: By My Self; and Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness present key works by each artist that explore central and recurrent themes in their art. The exhibitions are part of the BMA’s 2020 Vision, an initiative to provide greater recognition for female-identifying artists and leaders that has been extended into 2021 following pandemic-related closures last year. The presentations are slated to remain on view through September 19, 2021. Katharina Grosse’s immersive site-related environment, Is It You? (2020), which opened in March 2020, will remain on view in the central gallery of the Contemporary Wing through that date as well.

The museum also announced today a change in the tour schedule for the much-anticipated Joan Mitchell retrospective. The exhibition, which was slated to open at the BMA in March 2021, will now premiere at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on September 4, 2021 and remain on view there until January 17, 2022. It will then travel to the BMA, where it will be on view from March 6 through August 14, 2022. A version of the exhibition will also open at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in fall 2022.

The 2020 Vision Contemporary Wing exhibitions are generously sponsored by BGE, Constellation, and Exelon. Admission is free for each of the exhibitions.

Sharon Lockhart: Perilous Life, March 28 – September 19, 2021

This exhibition features film, photography, and sculpture that bookend American artist Sharon Lockhart’s 10-year engagement with a group of children in Poland. The film Pódworka (2009) marks Lockhart’s first encounter with the Polish landscape and the children who inhabit it. A series of fleeting interludes within city life in Łódź, Pódworka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of children’s resourcefulness. Among the children Lockhart met was a young girl, Milena, who became a friend and collaborator over the next decade. It was through Milena’s desire to tell her own story that Lockhart began working with a group of young women in the Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko, where she created a series of workshops and projects empowering them to find their own voices. As Milena moved from adolescence to adulthood, she remained close with the artist. Made a decade after the two first met in the courtyards of Łódź, the elegiac photographic still life portrait Milena (2020) and the bronze sculpture Untitled (Siblings) (2020) pay homage to Milena in the wake of her passing, denoting both the passage and the fixing of time. Perilous Life captures the enduring power of love and the fragility of life.

This exhibition is curated by Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Research & Programming Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University.

Sharon Lockhart (born 1964, Norwood, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2017, Lockhart represented Poland at the 57th Venice Biennale with her multidisciplinary project, Little Review, organized with National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania (2019), Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (2019) Fonzadione Fotografia Modena, Italy (2018); Museu Colecção Berardo,

Lisbon, Portugal (2017); Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2016); and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2015). Lockhart’s films have been presented in the New York Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and Sundance Film Festival. She holds an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Tschabalala Self: By My Self, March 28 – September 19, 2021

Over the past five years, Tschabalala Self has emerged as one of the most significant artists reinventing figurative painting. In By My Self, the BMA presents 13 paintings, from 2016 to the present, alongside two related sculptures that capture the depth, intricacy, and singularity of Self’s formal strategy and techniques for investigating the iconographic significance of the Black female form in contemporary culture. Among the featured works are a new suite of three paintings of a female couple created in response to Henri Matisse’s sculpture Two Women (1907–08; originally titled Two Negresses) in the BMA’s collection. Self uses a variety of reproductive techniques, including stencils, tracings, prints, casts, and mechanically stitched lines of thread, to produce her singular and complex works. The exhibition explores how the compositional process generates meaning in Self’s work, and the ways in which it also reflects her theory of selfhood as a consciousness that is at once produced by external images and by an ongoing reworking and evolving of forms into a new whole.

This exhibition is curated by Cecilia Wichmann, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

Tschabalala Self (born 1990, Harlem, NY) lives and works in New York City and New Haven, CT. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2020); Art Omi, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (2017); and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, UK (2017); as well as numerous group exhibitions around the world. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BA from Bard College, Anandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, March 28 – September 19, 2021

Co-organized with the Aspen Art Museum, this exhibition brings together more than 15 paintings that show American artist Lisa Yuskavage’s expansive treatment of landscape through lush and dexterously crafted compositions that tantalize the eye and beguile the mind. Over a career now spanning 35 years, Yuskavage has produced paintings that are ebulliently colorful, unabashedly explicit, and epic in ambition. Since roughly 2007, the vastness of nature has played a significant role in her most ambitious large-scale paintings. Rather than simply depicting with landscape elements, her expansive canvases blur the line between the fantastical and the familiar, melding abstraction with realism to imagine entire worlds that are both highly detailed and vague in implication, inviting viewers to consider the mysterious societies she has conjured.

A catalogue published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. in conjunction with the exhibition includes color reproductions of Yuskavage’s paintings and watercolors from the early 1990s to the present, an interview between Yuskavage and fellow artist Mary Weatherford, and essays by Heidi Zuckerman, former director of the Aspen Art Museum, now director of the Orange County Museum; Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director; and independent curator Helen Molesworth.

Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness is curated in Baltimore by Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director.

Based in New York City, Yuskavage (born 1962, Philadelphia, PA) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2016); Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2015); The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2011; organized as part of Dublin Contemporary 2011). Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001); and Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2000).

About the Baltimore Museum of Art

Founded in 1914, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) inspires people of all ages and backgrounds through exhibitions, programs, and collections that tell an expansive story of art—challenging long-held narratives and embracing new voices. Our outstanding collection of more than 97,000 objects spans many eras and cultures and includes the world’s largest public holding of works by Henri Matisse; one of the nation’s finest collections of prints, drawings, and photographs; and a rapidly growing number of works by contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds. The museum is also distinguished by a neoclassical building designed by American architect John Russell Pope and two beautifully landscaped gardens featuring an array of modern and contemporary sculpture. The BMA is located three miles north of the Inner Harbor, adjacent to the main campus of Johns Hopkins University, and has a community branch at Lexington Market. General admission is free so that everyone can enjoy the power of art.

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