Category: Feature

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  Woodlawn Vase: The Prize of Preakness

  Proudly standing just under three feet tall, the Maryland Jockey Club’s lavishly ornate Woodlawn Vase is perhaps the most famous trophy in American sports history and certainly one of the most important pieces of presentation silver in the United States. Visitors to the Baltimore Museum of Art can see the original Woodlawn Vase year-round, except […]

  Anne Brown | 05.20.2022

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  Drawn To: Charles Mason III Reflects on Sister Lu by Mark di Suvero

  Mark di Suvero’s Sister Lu sits at the top of an incline in the BMA’s Ryda and Robert H. Levi Sculpture Garden. It’s a kinetic sculpture made with repurposed steel parts painted matte black. Railroad ties and metal beams collide, balancing the weight of a central sphere, accented in electric blue. Sister Lu is a […]

  Andrea Boston | 11.30.2021

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  Baltimore History Figures Prominently in New Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

  This winter, as you step into the Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, look up at the stone archway to see figures of the past welcoming a new present. Sculpted by Giuseppe Franzoni (b. Italy, 1775–1815), the stone archway features the Roman deities Mercury and Ceres and […]

  Staff | 11.30.2021

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  A Conversation about Joan Mitchell

  Opening in March 2022 at the BMA, the retrospective Joan Mitchell, co-organized by the BMA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, explores 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. […]

  Staff | 02.12.2021

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  8-Minute Guided Meditation with Mark Rothko’s Black over Reds

  Meditation is a process of fully experiencing the present moment that generally uses the breath—or, more specifically, the sensations of the breath—as a focal point. For centuries, people have used visual aids during meditation to help them enter contemplative states. The process of slowly and closely examining a work of art, especially an abstract work […]

  Elizabeth Benskin | 06.17.2020

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  Anti-Chinese Messages Poured Out of 19th-Century Pitcher

  Why does this object with an aggressive racialized scene remain on view at the BMA? The first time I saw Karl L.H. Müller’s ‘Walrus’ Beer Pitcher, I felt nauseous. The porcelain pitcher on view in the BMA’s American Wing features a white man choking a Chinese man, who is depicted with Western stereotypes of Chinese […]

  Sarah Cho | 05.07.2020

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  Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young In Conversation with Arthur Jafa, Part 1

  How do life, breath, joy, and pain manifest in black experience from cradle to grave? How are health and wellness nurtured? Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young’s Back and Song considers the labor and care provided by generations of black healers, including their historic contributions to and resistance of Western medicine’s flawed and discriminatory structures. […]

  Staff | 02.28.2020

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  Candice Breitz: Too Long, Didn’t Read

  The artist’s work confronts our celebrity-obsessed culture, click-based empathy, and attention economy A 2015 open letter to Amnesty International (AI) from Meryl Streep, Gloria Steinem, and more than 400 other prominent figures and organizations reads: “… your ‘Draft Policy on Sex Work’ is incomprehensibly proposing the wholesale decriminalization of the sex industry, which in effect […]

  Jessica Novak | 02.28.2020

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  In Conversation with Mickalene Thomas

  The artist discusses her hopes for how Baltimore receives her work and what it feels like to go first You can hear in Mickalene Thomas’ voice her affection for Baltimore and enthusiasm for this moment in BMA history when she speaks by phone from her Brooklyn studio about her immersive two-story installation now on view […]

  Jessica Novak | 12.19.2019

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  Drawn To with Ernest Shaw

  Which works of art at the BMA draw you in? For Ernest Shaw, an image-maker and educator born and raised in West Baltimore, it’s Gary Simmons’ charcoal drawing, Triple Burn, on view through January 5, 2020, in Every Day: Selections from the Collection. The symbolism and technique in Simmons’ work aligns with Shaw’s colorful approach […]

  Andrea Boston | 12.12.2019