Category: Feature

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  ELISSA BLOUNT MOORHEAD AND BRADFORD YOUNG IN CONVERSATION WITH ARTHUR JAFA, PART 3

  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. The Baltimore-based artists’ four-channel video installation was on view through January 3, 2021, in the Contemporary Wing of The Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition was […]

  Staff | 05.10.2021

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  A Fierce Education

  I first met Sharon Lockhart in Israel in 2011. I’d been invited to contribute an essay to the catalog for Lockhart’s project on choreographer Noa Eshkol, soon to premiere at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. 1 Lockhart and I talked about her recent time in Poland, where […]

  Eva Díaz | 03.24.2021

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  What is Mother Power?

  The Next Generation of Arts Professionals Explore the Answer in A Perfect Power: Motherhood and African Art In the matrilineal societies of Central Africa in the 1800s and early 1900s, when kinship was traced through the maternal line, mothers were credited not only with creating life and nurturing families, but protecting communities, strengthening leaders, and […]

  Staff | 12.18.2020

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  ELISSA BLOUNT MOORHEAD AND BRADFORD YOUNG IN CONVERSATION WITH ARTHUR JAFA, PART 2

  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. The Baltimore-based artists’ four-channel video installation is on view through January 3, 2021, in the Contemporary Wing of The Baltimore Museum of Art. (Reserve your timed-entry […]

  Staff | 11.10.2020

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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