September 22, 2025
The BMA Celebrates Art, Education, and Inspiration at 2025 Ball and After Party on Saturday, November 22
Wangechi Mutu and Amy Sherald will receive the Artist Who Inspires Awards and The Sherman Family Foundation will receive the Changemaker Who Inspires Award during sold-out event
BALTIMORE, MD (September 22, 2025)—The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) today announced that the highly anticipated annual BMA Ball and After Party will take place on Saturday, November 22. Last year, the BMA drew more than 600 attendees to the celebratory event, raising a record-setting $1 million in support of groundbreaking exhibitions, transformative education programs, and community partnerships that continue to shape the cultural landscape of Baltimore and beyond. While the 2025 BMA Ball is sold out, After Party tickets are still available online for $125 before October 17, and $180 after.
The highlight of this year’s event is the presentation of the Artist Who Inspires Awards to Wangechi Mutu and Amy Sherald and the Changemaker Who Inspires Award to The Sherman Family Foundation, in honor of the late George Sherman.
The BMA’s honorees each exemplify brilliance, audacity, and the power to inspire change. Wangechi Mutu and Amy Sherald are internationally renowned artists whose boundary-breaking works challenge conventions and redefine beauty and power.
The Sherman Family Foundation is recognized for its decades-long impact on early childhood development, education, and the arts throughout Baltimore City and across Maryland.
“The BMA Ball has become one of the most anticipated events of the year. The museum’s program to honor artists, advocates, and philanthropists with local and global ties has galvanized our supporters—from the record-breaking fundraising last year to the incredible outpouring we’ve already received this year,” said James D. Thornton, Chair, BMA Board of Trustees, and Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “As the largest art museum in the state, and an important voice in the national contemporary art scene, we are celebrating the groundbreaking achievements of our honorees, as well as the unique ways art and art education at the BMA empower our communities.”
The evening begins at 6 p.m. with cocktails in the BMA’s Fox Court, followed by the awards program and a seated dinner surrounded by the BMA’s world-class collection. BMA Ball attendees also have access to Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the artist’s acclaimed mid-career retrospective, which is on view November 2, 2025, through April 5, 2026. At 9 p.m., the doors open for the After Party, a high-voltage celebration featuring music from DJ Ty Alexander, dancing, late-night bites, and an open bar.
Honorary co-chairs for the BMA Ball are Maryland Governor Wes Moore and First Lady Dawn Moore. The BMA Ball Committee is co-chaired by BMA Trustee George Petrocheilos with Diamantis Xylas and Michael Arougheti. Committee members are BMA Board Chair James D. Thornton, BMA Board Vice President Elizabeth Hurwitz, and BMA Trustees Derrick Adams, Kwame Webb, Amanda Kimbers Mfume, Divesh Gupta, and Richard Bennett, as well as Andy Frake. The After Party co-chairs are BMA Trustees Darius Graham and Amanda Kimbers Mfume with committee members Estee Fader, Clarence J. Fluker, Darien Nolin, Kendra Parlock, Jeremy Rosendale, and Ashley Smith.
Lead sponsors for the 2025 BMA Ball are Michael Arougheti, Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, Patricia and Mark Joseph Foundation, Heather and Bill Miller, George Petrocheilos and Diamantis Xylas, George Roche and Susan Flanigan, David Rubenstein, Whiting-Turner, The Hackerman Foundation, Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, The Sherman Family Foundation, and Michele Speaks and David Warnock.
Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya) is constantly tearing, repairing, and testing ideas, images, histories, materials, recollections and methods of representation, particularly of the female form. Employing art as a salve, an archive, an archeology, and a social critique, her multi-media lexicon encompasses a variety of techniques and mediums, including sculpture, film, installation, collage-painting and performance. She received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in New York and an M.F.A. from Yale University in Connecticut and has participated in several major solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, most recently Wangechi Mutu: Black Soil Poems at Galleria Borghese in Rome, Italy and Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined at both the New Museum in New York and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Additional solo exhibitions include Wangechi Mutu at Storm King Art Center in New York; The Façade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, The NewOnes, will free Us at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? at the Legion of Honor Museum at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Mutu’s work was also featured in the 56th International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Venice Biennale (2015) in addition to many other group exhibitions.
Amy Sherald
Born in Columbus, Georgia, and now based in the New York City area, Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture, inviting viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and to situate Black life in American art. Sherald received her M.F.A. in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and her B.A. in painting from Clark-Atlanta University. Sherald was the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2018, she was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The same year, she was also awarded the Pollock Prize for Creativity by Pollock-Krasner Foundation, as well as the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art. Sherald’s work is held in public collections such as Baltimore Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, N.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The Sherman Family Foundation
Founded in 1995 in honor of the late George Sherman, the Sherman Family Foundation works to improve the lives of young people and families in Baltimore by prioritizing investments in early childhood and promoting supports for children, youth, and families. The Shermans’ profound belief in the power of education to create better opportunities, better communities, and stronger families is at the heart of this work. They established their foundation to make long-term, strategic investments in programs that are scalable and have compelling evidence of helping vulnerable, economically disadvantaged children and their families achieve better outcomes in all aspects of their lives. The foundation maintains a focus on K–12 education, prioritizing math education as well as educator pipelines.
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.
Press Contacts
For media in Baltimore:
Anne Brown
Baltimore Museum of Art
Senior Director of Communications
abrown@artbma.org
410-274-9907
Sarah Pedroni
Baltimore Museum of Art
Communications Manager
spedroni@artbma.org
410-428-4668
Alina Sumajin
PAVE Communications
alina@paveconsult.com
646-369-2050