Upcoming 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.

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.

Curated by Leslie Cozzi, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, and Cecilia Wichmann, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

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.

Co-curated by Asma Naeem, BMA Eddie Brown and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator and Leslie Cozzi, BMA Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs

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.

Curated by Leslie Cozzi, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs

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.

Curated by Leslie Cozzi, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs

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.”

Curated by Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Curator and Stony Brook University Thaw Chair of Modern Art

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.

Curated by Kristen Hileman, Independent Curator

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.

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.

Curated by Asma Naeem, The Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator

This exhibition is generously sponsored by The Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Exhibition Endowment Fund and The Hardiman Family Endowment Fund.

This retrospective will explore the full arc of Joan Mitchell’s artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings in the early 1950s to the majestic, large-scale multi-panel works made in France later in her career. Co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition features rarely shown paintings and works on paper from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe. The exhibition moves through focused suites of work, following Mitchell's cyclical way of working, in which subjects and gestures appear and resurface years later. A selection of projects created with and for writers like Frank O’Hara and Jacques Dupin will underscore the role of poetry in her life and work; others signal themes including her relationships with music and the artists of the 19th century. Additionally, the exhibition will feature transitional works that unfold her process and emphasize the role of Mitchell’s exquisite small paintings, pastels, and works on paper. An accompanying catalog will provide a sweeping scholarly account of the artist’s career.