Current Exhibitions

The 2017 and 2018 winners of the $10,000 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize present arresting and poignant examples of their works—diverse in subject matter and media.

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.

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.

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.

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 1939, the BMA presented one of the first major exhibitions in the U.S. to feature African American artists. Contemporary Negro Art, served “as a declaration of principles as to what art should be in a democracy and as a gauge of how far in this particular province we have gone and may need to go…,” wrote renowned African American philosopher and art critic Alain Locke in the exhibition brochure. Nearly 80 years later, the BMA pays tribute to this landmark exhibition with 14 prints and drawings by African American artists who were included in the 1939 show.

Ann Veronica Janssens’s installation transforms the interior of the Spring House on the Museum’s west lawn, drawing visitors into the neoclassical building with a hazy glow of brilliantly hued light.

Meleko Mokgosi produces large-scale figurative paintings that rethink the tradition of historical European compositions. He appropriates the polyptych formats and shapes of altarpieces and paintings used for the decoration of churches and other grand interiors and deploys paintings to present historical narratives and allegories. However, Mokgosi’s subjects come from African history, representing people and historical moments that do not appear within the canon of Western art history.

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.

The third iteration of the Commons Collaboration kicks off with an exciting project from Baltimore-based artist Phaan Howng in collaboration with Blue Water Baltimore. For this project, Howng creates an immersive environment with intense, unnatural colors inspired by toxic waste.

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

The inaugural exhibition for the BMA’s new Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center brings together more than 30 works from across the BMA’s collection to explore the universal theme of home.

Visitors will discover paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, textiles, and works on paper from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, as well as four miniature rooms, plus a variety of interactive features presented in three thematic areas.