Current Exhibitions

Baltimore unfolds across three videos as a narrative of two people, filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles and an Afro-Cyborg woman embodied by Vanessa Myrie, making their way through significant cultural sites of the city. The pair traverses the Walters Art Museum, the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, and the George Peabody Library. Each institution lays a different claim to history—whether the over 5,000 years of art held at the Walters; diverse figures of black historical personalities, from Egyptian queens to formerly enslaved people, all rendered in wax; or the holdings of the Peabody, a library that supports the first research university in the U.S. The work explores the many ways that history is made, documented, silenced, or foretold, and indicates the artist’s deep concern for the construction of an archive. Julien seeks to create a “third dimension,” a space that draws from Afro-futurism and the past, present, and future of black culture in the U.S.

Every Day: Selections from the Collection is the BMA’s first reinstallation of its contemporary collection centered on black artistic imagination. Nearly 50 works of painting, sculpture, video, printmaking, and photography from the BMA’s permanent collection, alongside a select group of loans primarily from the celebrated Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection, foreground the critical contributions black artists have made to postwar visual art.

This exhibition is generously supported by Anne L. Stone, PNC Foundation, Lois B. Feinblatt, Patricia Lasher and Richard Jacobs, Mary and James Miller, and Mr. and Mrs. James D. Thornton.

Projected lights, sounds, and reflective surfaces convey a sense of flowing water in Oletha DeVane’s installation, Traces of the Spirit, presented inside the BMA’s Spring House. The exhibition references the building’s past as a dairy and place where enslaved people were forced to labor and creates an altar-like location for a selection of the artist’s spirit sculptures. For these totem-like objects, DeVane (American, b. 1950) adorns hollow glass vessels with pieces from her collection of found objects such as beads, wood, mirrors, plastic figurines, sequins, fabric, and even bullet casings. These elements are applied in conjunction, at times, with small, expressive clay heads shaped by the artist, giving voice and life to the sculptures. DeVane draws upon spiritual and African diasporic traditions to reference stories, prayers, and myths. Snakes, birds, saints, and mermaids populate the dense surfaces. The resulting works evoke the possibilities of spiritual communication and transformation.

Please note: The Spring House closes during inclement weather. Call 443-573-1700 on the day of your visit for more information.

For more than 30 years, New Orleans-natives Keith Calhoun (b. 1955) and Chandra McCormick (b. 1957) have been documenting life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Known as “The Farm,” the prison was founded on the consolidated land of several cotton and sugarcane plantations. Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex includes poignant photographs and videos that record the exploitation of men incarcerated in the maximum-security prison farm while also showcasing their humanity and individual narratives. The exhibition sheds light on the cracks within our country’s criminal justice system and restores visibility to a population often forgotten by the public at large. The artists’ intimate understanding of prison culture and the importance of intervention before incarceration has prompted them to advocate on behalf of individuals directly involved with correctional facilities as well as in their own New Orleans community, where they teach photography to at-risk youth.

Join us on September 5 for a panel discussion on mass incarceration with the artists and prison reform advocates.

MacArthur award-winning artist and Baltimore icon Joyce J. Scott’s earliest art lessons were at the knee of her mother, the renowned fiber artist Elizabeth Talford Scott. The eldest Scott passed down to her daughter knowledge inherited from generations of craftspeople in their family who had honed their expertise and persisted in their artistry through the extreme deprivations of slavery and its aftermath in sharecropping, migration, and segregation. “They couldn’t buy things,” Joyce J. Scott recounts, “so they made things. And they wouldn’t just make something, they’d make something beautiful.”

This exhibition is generously sponsored by John Meyerhoff, M.D., and Lenel Srochi-Meyerhoff, Clair Zamoiski Segal, the Estate of Margaret Hammond Cooke, and the Jean and Allan Berman Textile Endowment Fund. Special thanks to Joyce J. Scott and Goya Contemporary, Baltimore.

From a charcoal drawing and spare and subtle watercolors to thickly painted bold explorations of color and form on canvas, this exhibition explores how a selection of European and American artists from the BMA’s collection depicted nature in the early 20th century.

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.

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