Category: Feature
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Look at the Hands of the People — The Work of Valerie Maynard
Bill Gaskins’ poignant reflection on Valerie Maynard’s six-decade career first appeared in the 2020 exhibition catalog, Lost and Found, published by the BMA on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum. Maynard, an inimitable artist and mentor who called Baltimore home for the past twenty years passed away on September 19, 2022. This […]
Bill Gaskins | 10.03.2022 -
Maryland’s Tobacco-Scented Past Emerges in Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears
In the BMA exhibition Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears, multimedia artist Beatrice Glow centers the smell of tobacco, creating artworks across various media that reflect upon the ties between scent, memory, and emotion. Her multisensory works offer aromatic cultural histories of plants, places, and perfumes. Smell is all but absent in the creation of […]
Colleen Kennedy | 09.19.2022 -
BMA Partners with the National Museum of Women in the Arts
Through the summer of 2023, the BMA is displaying ten works from the National Museum of Women in the Art’s (NMWA) permanent collection while NMWA renovates its building in Washington, DC. The current interpolation of NMWA’s holdings into the BMA galleries shows the important intervention of correcting art histories, building upon recent successful initiatives by […]
Colleen Kennedy | 07.20.2022 -
The Experiment Realized, What Happens Next?
In the final days of the groundbreaking exhibition Guarding the Art, curator and Museum guard Rob Kempton offers an analysis of what it has meant to serve as a curator and how it has—at least for now—changed the relationship between guard and visitor at the BMA. Since its opening in March, I have watched visitors […]
Rob Kempton | 07.06.2022 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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