Current Exhibitions

See the first retrospective of John Waters's visual arts career in his hometown of Baltimore.

Commissioned by the BMA, the New York-based collective, DIS, debuts a video series on the wide-reaching impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

Get Your Life! (GYL!) is a youth-led production company that creates collaborative video projects between middle school students, practicing artists, and institutions. This exhibition gathers works from across GYL!’s practice, presenting video series, costumes, props, and documents.

More than 40 rarely shown color and black-and-white photographs delve into various concepts of time, from a reflection on a legend or historical event, to a memory, missed moment, or a future imagined and anticipated.

This exhibition features approximately two dozen works from sub-Saharan African’s colonial period (c.1880-c. 1960) that are accumulative, composite, crude, counterintuitive, and disproportionate. More importantly still, it explores the reasons why artists working during this turbulent period in the continent’s history turned against beauty in order to express the meaning and vitality of their day-to-day existence.

For more than four decades, New York-based artist Maren Hassinger has explored relationships between the industrial and natural worlds in a practice that is both meditative and critical. This exhibition represents a broad range of her work with abstract compositions, videos, and documentary photographs.

Experience the frenzied, social media-inspired films and sculptural theaters of influential collaborators Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin.

Ryan Trecartin, Permission Streak, 2016 (HD Video, duration 21:17). Courtesy of Ryan Trecartin; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Sprüth Magers.

"Get lost in immersive, iridescent works that evoke giant bubbles, spider webs, and clouds in a clash of beauty and strength." —Baltimore Magazine

This exhibition of dazzling Kuba textiles presented in the BMA’s Cone Collection galleries reveals how a central African kingdom independently developed a form of modernist abstraction in the 20th century.

Originally presented at the U.S. Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Mark Bradford’s Tomorrow Is Another Day was born out of his ongoing interest in the inherently social nature of the material world we inhabit. Bradford (American, b. 1961) recycles ordinary materials in an homage to a shared American experience, recalling memories of his mother’s hair salon or the streets of Los Angeles. In its U.S. debut, this exhibition takes on new meaning within the context of the Baltimore community and speaks to the artist’s belief in art as a platform to examine contradictory histories and effect positive change.

Ebony G. Patterson's immersive installation in the Berman Textile gallery memorializes children killed in violent crimes, while asking what it means that society treats some bodies as valuable and others as expendable.

In the fall of 2018, the BMA’s oldest friends group, the Print, Drawing & Photograph Society (PDPS), will celebrate its 50th anniversary by sponsoring an exhibition to highlight a selection of late 19th-century, modern, and contemporary works on paper that PDPS has helped the BMA acquire over the years.

Spencer Finch’s impressive light installation Moon Dust (Apollo 17), first presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale, will illuminate the BMA’s majestic Fox Court for the next seven years.

Moon Dust (Apollo 17) is on extended loan from the collection of Joanne Gold and Andrew Stern, who are generously sponsoring its presentation at the BMA.