BMA Ball 2025
On Saturday, November 22, 2025, the BMA Ball returns.
In 2024, our community came together to raise more than $1 million in support of groundbreaking exhibitions, transformative education programs, and deep community partnerships.
In 2025, the BMA Ball returns by bringing together creativity, community, and dreams for a better tomorrow. Our Artists Who Inspire Awards will be presented to Amy Sherald and Wangechi Mutu, two extraordinary artists whose boundary-breaking work redefines beauty and power. We’re also proud to recognize the Sherman Family Foundation with our Changemaker Who Inspires Award, which celebrates this family’s game-changing impact on education and the arts across Maryland.
Evening Schedule
6 p.m. – Cocktails in the BMA’s iconic Fox Court
The evening kicks off with cocktails followed by a spirited awards program celebrating our honorees.
7:30 p.m. – Seated Dinner in the Galleries
Guests will proceed to the galleries for a seated dinner surrounded by world-class art.
9 p.m. – The After Party
Doors open for a high-voltage night of music, dancing, late-night bites, and an open bar.
For more information about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Anna Lincoln Whitehurst, Senior Director of Advancement at alwhitehurst@artbma.org or 443-573-1806.
Amy Sherald | Artist Who Inspires
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.
Wangechi Mutu | Artist Who Inspires
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.
The Sherman Family Foundation in Honor of the Late George Sherman | Changemaker Who Inspires
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.
George Petrocheilos and Diamantis Xylas
Patricia and Mark Joseph
The Shelter Foundation
Whiting-Turner
The Hackerman Foundation
Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker
The Sherman Family Foundation
Michele Speaks and David Warnock
Anonymous
Alexander Baer
BGE
Rick Bennett and Andy Frake
Sam Callard and Rachel Gahan
Ellen and Linwood Dame and The Rothschild Foundation
Joanne Gold and Andrew Stern
Agnes Gund
Himelfarb/Hurwitz family
Professor Sherrilyn Ifill
Kramon & Graham
MICA Board of Trustees
Shawe Family Foundation
Anne Stone
Lorayne and Jim Thornton
Chris Morgan and David W. Wallace
Kwame Webb and Kathryn Bradley
