Current Exhibitions

Based on the attire of women activists, warriors, and cultural figures, Ellen Lesperance creates gouache paintings rendered in the universal shorthand of knitting patterns. This exhibition features seven works from her ongoing Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp series. The works in the series are inspired by protest garments made and worn by separatist feminists while demonstrating against U.S. nuclear weapons storage in Berkshire, England, from 1981 to 2000. For Lesperance’s ongoing participatory project, Congratulations and Celebrations, anyone who wishes to, may borrow the artist’s hand-knit sweater featuring a labrys battle axe—a symbol of feminist and lesbian strength—to wear while performing an act of courage.  For a chance to be selected, register here.

Mickalene Thomas’ immersive two-story installation will transform the BMA’s East Lobby into a living room for Baltimore. The experience will extend onto an enclosed terrace where the BMA will host a series of events, such as film screenings, artist talks, performances, workshops, book clubs, and self-care seminars. Influenced by the 1970s and 1980s, Thomas’ signature aesthetic incorporates geometric patterns, prints, textures, wood paneling, and shag carpeting, among other nostalgic motifs.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, a strict gendered division of artistic labor existed throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Men worked in wood and metal, carving and casting works that glorified leaders and paid homage to deities, while women created works in clay, cloth, and beads, stitching and firing the art of everyday life. This exhibition brings together two dozen works from the BMA's collection to demonstrate the critical role of women in shaping and maintaining social identities across 20th-century Africa.

This exhibition presents a selection of embroidery, ceramics, and jewelry by innovative mid-century American artists who shifted away from the functional aspect of craft towards an avant-garde engagement with abstraction and expression. Objects featured include works by textile artist Mariska Karasz, a Hungarian immigrant to the U.S. who moved away from her established business as a women’s clothing designer to focus on embroidery as an artistic practice; Baltimore-area designer and embroiderer Gloria Balder Katzenberg, who was influenced by Karasz’s philosophy and produced works that evoke gardens, ponds, fireworks, or celestial scenes with unconventional materials; ceramic artists Gertrud and Otto Natzler, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria and founded their own workshop in Los Angeles, California, in 1938; and metalsmith and jewelry maker Betty Cooke, a nationally acclaimed Baltimore native and an alumnus of the Maryland Institute College of Art who began her career in the mid-1940s and is still making work today.

This exhibition of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts celebrates the contributions women artists have made to the development of American modernism. The show includes works by well-known artists, including Elizabeth Catlett and Georgia O'Keeffe, among others, as well as works by those who were often under-recognized, such as Maria Martinez and Marguerite Zorach. The selection of works showcases these artists’ innovative engagements with the 20th century’s major art movements, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism. Several of these accomplished artists—including Simone Brangier Boas, Grace Hartigan, Elsa Hutzler, Helen Jacobson, Amalie Rothschild, and Grace Turnbull—were based in Baltimore during their careers.

In 1921, a young Henry Moore (British, 1898-1986) walked through the doors of the British Museum and encountered the stone carvings of ancient America for the first time. Moore was attracted to what he called the “stoniness” of the artworks, their “truth to material,” and sought to emulate this in his own work. As an art student in the early 1920s, he obsessively sketched hundreds of these works to learn how to approach three-dimensional form.

Installation View, Henry Moore and the Pre-Columbian Past. Henry Moore. _The Three Rings_. 1966. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of Ryda and Robert H. Levi, Baltimore, BMA 1987.225. © The Henry Moore Foundation. All Rights Reserved, DACS /www.henry-moore.org