Current Exhibitions

Across central Africa’s matrilineal belt, the most important artworks were those that depicted the female body. In these 19th and early 20th century communities, group identity and familial responsibility flowed through the maternal line. Artists responded to this reality by sculpting visual markers of motherhood onto a range of objects associated with status and authority. In these societies, mothers not only created life and nurtured families, but also stood at the center of the moral order, ensuring the continuity of entire communities. From monumental headdresses of elderly mothers to sculptures that represent mythic female ancestors, this exhibition brings together nearly 40 objects from public and private collections to demonstrate how artists have represented the power of African mothers and used maternal imagery to signal moral, cultural, and spiritual authority.

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.

Two evocative multichannel video installations by acclaimed South African-born artist Candice Breitz reflect on privilege, visibility, and shrinking attention spans in an information economy that fetishizes celebrity and thrives on entertainment. Love Story (2016) recounts the experiences of six refugees as told by themselves and by Hollywood actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin. TLDR (2017), conceived and produced in dialogue with the Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce in Cape Town, South Africa, features interviews that examine power disparities and the rights of sex workers in South Africa using alluring visual tactics and the vernacular of the Internet.

Taking the form of a deity-like figure, Shinique Smith’s newest sculpture, Grace stands beside, is a monument to Grace—defined by the artist as “a complex state of being that Black people and others who have endured tragic prejudice have embodied to survive and to rise beyond.” Smith created the sculpture with Baltimore residents’ donated fabric and clothing after reflecting on her layered feelings and memories of sculptures past and present in Baltimore City, where she grew up and attended Maryland Institute College of Art. The sculpture’s title, Grace stands beside, reclaims language from an inscription on the base of a Confederate monument that stood on Mount Royal Avenue until its removal in 2017. The inscription, “Glory stands beside our grief,” referenced the sculpture’s depiction of Glory as an angel holding a dying Confederate soldier while raising a laurel crown, or symbol of Victory.

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Baltimore-born artist SHAN Wallace’s exhibition 410 is, in the photographer’s words, a love letter to the beauty, complexity, and resilience of her hometown. Representing highlights of her evolving, relational practice of the past five years, Wallace will be crafting an immersive environment that engages her newfound interest in collage, the connective possibilities of different museum spaces, and the expressive potential of portrait photography. In conjunction with the artist’s presentation in the Museum’s Contemporary Wing galleries, Wallace will also be engaging Baltimore audiences through portrait sessions and workshops at the BMA’s branch location within Lexington Market. The historic market is a site of sustained interest, investigation, and outreach within the artist’s evolving practice.

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German artist Katharina Grosse’s exuberant large-scale, in-situ paintings explore how and where a painted image can appear in our lives. Often painted directly onto and across architectural structures and objects or into landscapes, her extraordinary, colorful works invite visitors to engage with painting on both a visual and a physical level.

For this exhibition at the BMA, the internationally acclaimed artist will present five recent paintings and create a new site-related environment, Is It You? The expansive installation will transform the central gallery in the Contemporary Wing by partially suspending cloth from the ceiling, creating an enveloping “room” with undulating walls. Grosse will then spray paint onto the fabric, allowing the paint colors and the shape of the fabric to combine to form a vibrant and immersive experience for visitors.

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This one-gallery retrospective celebrates the six-decade career of Baltimore-based printmaker and sculptor Valerie Maynard. The exhibition features a range of works drawn largely from her studio, including the landmark No Apartheid series from the 1980s and 1990s, which embodies her unique ability to combine diverse techniques (assemblage, pochoir, and monotype) into both deeply personal and profoundly political new forms of art on paper. A rarely exhibited selection of Maynard’s early sculpture will also be on view. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the BMA and featuring essays by Bill Gaskins, Edward Spriggs, Nikky Finney, and Alexis DeVeaux.

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Recently acquired by the BMA, Ana Mendieta’s 1975 film, Blood Inside Outside, demonstrates the pioneering feminist artist’s exploration of the multiple layers of meaning ascribed to blood—from death to rebirth. This presentation of the film by the late artist (Cuban, 1948-1985) is accompanied by rare lifetime photographs from the artist’s Body Tracks series as well as her elegant drawings of abstracted outlines of paleolithic goddesses, repeatedly inscribed on a variety of surfaces, from modern paper to an actual leaf to an ancient style of bark cloth.

Zackary Drucker: Icons weaves together two semi-intertwined personal narratives, juxtaposing newly created self-portrait photographs of artist, producer, and activist Zackary Drucker with pictures the artist has taken of mentor and friend Rosalyne Blumenstein, LCSW, who directed the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center’s pioneering Gender Identity Project in the 1990s. Depicting two women of different ages and experiences and the scars that they bear, Drucker’s work interrogates assumptions about transformation, beauty, aging, and mortality. Her searching, meticulous self-portraits expand on the groundbreaking Relationship series Drucker co-created a decade ago. Forming part of Drucker’s ongoing project to record and chronicle the trans community, her images of muse and mentor Blumenstein capture the cinematic flavor of the artist’s timely revision of art historical precedent.

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Howardena Pindell’s influential video Free, White and 21 (1980) voices complex and conflicting perspectives on race and gender. The 12-minute work was created in 1979 after a car accident left the artist with partial memory loss. Eight months later, she set up a video camera in her apartment, focused it on herself, and created a deadpan account of the racism she experienced coming of age as a black woman in America. She told the Walker Art Center that she developed the work out of her need to heal and to vent: “My work in the studio after the accident helped me to reconstruct missing fragments from the past ... In the tape I was bristling at the women’s movement, as well as the art world, and some of the usual offensive encounters that were heaped on top of the racism of my profession.”

Using a poignant language of charged colors and abstract forms, South African-born, Baltimore-based artist Jo Smail conveys the strangeness, vulnerability, and complicated beauty of contemporary life. This exhibition features 50 paintings and works on paper by Smail, as well as collages produced with fellow South African William Kentridge. The earliest works date to the late 1990s and early 2000s when the artist overcame a studio fire that destroyed all her previous paintings and a stroke that inhibited her movement and speech. Since then, Smail has continued experimenting with different media and compositional strategies. Her profound and unique works, accompanied by their poetic and irreverent titles, reflect an irrepressible joy and optimism; at the same time, they never shy away from a world always on the brink of destabilization.

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This meditative four-channel film and art installation reflects on the pursuit of health and well-being at the root of how life, breath, joy, and pain manifest in black experience from cradle to grave. Back and Song considers the labor and care provided by generations of black healers—doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides—and their histories of contribution to and resistance from the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine. Working with archivists from around the world, Moorhead and Young synthesized images of quotidian black family life into a time-based archive of expression. Paired with new footage, archival compilations reflect on how music, movement, sound therapy, dance, rest, and meditation are brought together as a spectrum of individual and communal pursuits.

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. Before COVID-19, Lesperance’s ongoing project, Congratulations and Celebrations, was open to participants who wished to 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. Given the ongoing pandemic, the project cannot be activated again by the BMA. The courage sweater has now returned to the artist in Portland. Lesperance will continue the project at IG@congratulationsandcelebrations when public health conditions allow.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Lesperance published a 100-page catalog, featuring an insightful essay by the artist, over 80 examples of protest knitwear by Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and an illustrated glossary of symbols. Ellen Lesperance Velvet Fist is available to purchase at the BMA Shop and https://shop.artbma.org. Read an excerpt here.

Curated by Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Cecilia Wichmann

This exhibition is supported by the Estate of Margaret Hammond Cooke.

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.

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