BMA Ball 2025

Internationally renowned for her practice, Wangechi Mutu creates work that is constantly tearing, repairing, and testing ideas, images, histories, materials, recollections,and methods of representation, particularly of the female form. Her techniques unbind rules of figuration and representation through a consistent and well-honed practice of experimentation. Employing art as a salve, an archive, an archaeology, and a social critique, Mutu relies on a masterful use of her multi-media lexicon—one that encompasses a variety of techniques and mediums including sculpture, film, installation, collage-painting, and performance. Mutu uses her exceptional skill to describe and distinguish our shared impulse to recollect, to rebel, to remark, and to react, and she has participated in several major solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, most recently Wangechi Mutu: Black Soil Poems at Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. She engages with the history of photography and portraiture, inviting viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation and to situate Black life in American art. She received her MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her BA in painting from Clark Atlanta University. She was the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for that institution. Her work is held in major public collections throughout the U.S.

Founded in 1995, the Sherman Family Foundation works to improve the lives of young people and families in Baltimore by prioritizing investments in early childhood and promoting supports for children, youth, and families. The Shermans’ profound belief in the power of education to create better opportunities, better communities, and stronger families is at the heart of this work. They established their foundation to make long-term, strategic investments in programs that are scalable and have compelling evidence of helping vulnerable, economically disadvantaged children and their families achieve better outcomes in all aspects of their lives. The foundation maintains a focus on K–12 education, prioritizing math education as well as educator pipelines.