Hosted by the Baltimore Museum of Art

Category: Top Story

  • Shinah Solomon Etting: Jewish Matriarch of Early Baltimore

    In 1792, Shinah Solomon Etting (1744-1822), a Jewish widow, sat for her portrait in Baltimore. Her portraitist, Charles Peale Polk (1767-1822), was a member of the Peale family, and many of his relatives—including his uncle Charles Willson Peale—were professional artists. Polk’s portrait of Shinah Etting (fig. 1), which is currently on view in Jacob and […]

    Emily Rose Beeber | 03.07.2024
  • Imagining Harriet Tubman’s Visionary Being with Nekisha Durrett

    For the current exhibition Histories Collide: Jackie Milad x Fred Wilson x Nekisha Durrett, on view in the John Waters Rotunda and adjacent galleries, Washington, D.C-based artist Nekisha Durrett turned to the legacy of Harriet Tubman for her installation Frontier. Instead of a traditional portrait of Tubman, Durrett has produced an abstract study of Tubman’s […]

    Colleen Kennedy | 12.13.2023
  • Baltimore and World War II’s Impact on Artist Matsumi Kanemitsu

    One of the first Japanese American servicemen detained in the wake of Pearl Harbor drew on personal experience to develop his work outside of formal training Few people are aware that West Coast abstract artist and influential college educator Matsumi Kanemitsu (1922-1992), or Mike as he was known to his friends, spent his formative years […]

    | 09.20.2023
  • A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration

    The Great Migration (1915–70) saw more than six million African Americans leave the South for destinations across the United States. Now open at the BMA, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration explores how this pivotal period in American history transformed nearly every aspect of Black life and culture through newly commissioned […]

    Staff | 11.16.2022
  • A Glimpse into the Dorman-Mazaroff PDP Center

    When the Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs opened last December, its relocation from the third floor to the first granted the PDP Department more space and flexibility. The PDP Department’s work strategically centers access—both digital and physical—to the BMA’s collection of more than 67,000 prints, drawings, […]

    Rob Kempton | 10.24.2022
  • Honoring Valerie Maynard’s “Human-Beingness”

    Impossible things happen when you come upon Valerie Maynard’s work, wrote Toni Morrison in July 1989 for the introduction to Maynard’s lithographic portfolio, Lost and Found. In a career that spanned more than six decades, the artist told the stories of our time, documenting the struggle for civil rights worldwide and capturing what the artist […]

    Staff | 09.23.2022
  • Spray Paint, Surprise, and Wonder

    Looking at the work of Katharina Grosse What?! She made that with paint? That’s a lot of paint! She did that on a house?! These are the reactions I received when I showed my young daughters a photograph of Katharina Grosse’s Rockaway, the artist’s 2016 commission for MoMA PS1—a transformation of the derelict Fort Tilden […]

    Virginia Anderson | 04.10.2020
  • How the Black Abstract Exhibition Moves America Away from Anemic Art History

    Editor’s Note: This essay was originally written for a guidebook that accompanies Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art. The book is available for free to all exhibition visitors. You can read more from Bridget R. Cooks in her award-winning book Exhibiting Blackness. With the occasion of Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art comes […]

    Bridget R. Cooks | 10.03.2019
  • A Secret Map and Layers of Meaning

    “Here I have a story about the Emancipation of people in needle and thread and fabric,” Joyce J. Scott has said about Plantation, a quilt that her mother created.   Plantation depicts two perspectives—one of a starry night sky, and the other of the fields below—collapsed together into a single composition. The constellation of stars […]

    Melanie Martin | 05.15.2019

Making Her Mark: A History Of Women Artists In Europe, 1400–1800

A Teapot and Our Thirst for Fossil Fuels

Baltimore and World War II’s Impact on Artist Matsumi Kanemitsu