BNHA 3rd Annual History Through Arts Competition

Baltimore youth are invited to submit art that reflects their take on life in Baltimore City past and present.

The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA) invites Baltimore City youth to participate in our 3rd Annual History Through Arts Competition. The purpose of this contest is to engage City youth in an art exhibit showcasing their unique talents while also expressing their view of life in Baltimore City.

Celebrate Spring with Emily Carter Mitchell's Nature and Wildlife Photography Exhibit - Heaven and Earth. Mitchell is an award winning, published nature and wildlife photographer based in Annapolis, MD. Her work has been featured in numberous juried exhibits and published in books, magazines, and newspapers. Heaven and Earth displays Mitchell's creative interpretation of the natural beauty found in our world.

Port Discovery Children’s Museum and Enoch Pratt Free Library are partnering to encourage children to read, play and discover through Ticket to Discovery Book Club. Baltimore-area children in fifth grade or younger with a Pratt Library card can receive a special Ticket to Discovery bookmark from their local Pratt Library (supplies are limited). After reading or listening to five books, participants can use the unique code on the bookmark to reserve up to two free admission tickets to Port Discovery Children’s Museum via the Museum’s online ticketing system.

Organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, this exhibition debuts a recent body of work by New York-based artist Elle Pérez.

Including 13 photographs created between 2019 and 2021, Devotions explores relationship building, creating space to reflect on how we navigate ourselves in relation to others and the world. Pérez’s carefully sequenced images dwell in moments of grief and care, pain and pleasure, desire and self-exploration. Amidst recurring motifs of water, touch, and BDSM are also striking choices in proximity, scale, color, and light.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love will feature more than 45 paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022, that weave together motifs found in historical paintings with recognizable 21st-century moments to create new worlds based in Toor’s imagination. Among the works are several made especially for the exhibition and inspired by paintings in the BMA’s renowned 17th- to 19th-century European collection, such as Sir Anthony van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida (1629).

Suzanne F. Cohen’s (1935–2018) extraordinary leadership and enduring support for the BMA touched every area of the Museum. In addition to chairing the Board and numerous Trustee committees, Cohen helped establish an endowment for free admission and funded many exhibitions, commissions, restorations, public programs, and gifts of art.

Guarding the Art will feature works from the BMA’s collection, across eras, genres, cultures, and mediums, selected by guest curators from the BMA’s Security department. As guest curators, the officers will collaborate with leadership and staff across the museum to select and reinterpret works. In addition, the team is working with renowned art historian and curator Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, who is providing additional mentorship and professional development.

Beatrice Glow is a New York- and Bay Area-based multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the social history of plants. For her first exhibition in a major U.S. museum, Glow delves into the unseen and unsavory sociohistorical and ecological realities underlying the tobacco industry’s veneer of luxury through her digitally printed and embroidered silk textiles, VR-sculpted and 3D-printed objects, watercolors, and scent experiences.

Mickalene Thomas’ immersive two-story installation transforms the BMA’s East Lobby into a living room for Baltimore reflective of Thomas’ signature aesthetic influenced by 1970s and 1980s motifs. The experience–the most expansive commission undertaken by both the artist and the BMA—extends onto an enclosed terrace, where Thomas has curated a presentation of works by artists with ties to Baltimore. Featured artists include: Derrick Adams, Zoë Charlton Theresa Chromati, Alex Dukes, Dominiqua S. Eldridge, Devin N. Morris, Clifford Owens, and D’Metrius John Rice.

Explore five centuries of the artifice of identity— from the splendid metamorphoses of classical myths to the posturing and bodily reinvention of contemporary drag culture. Shapeshifting includes approximately 50 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books from the BMA’s collection that explore transformation and masquerade as recurring themes of artistic imagination across time and place.

This exhibition showcases William Cordova’s on the lower frequencies i speak 4 u (2019), a remarkably complex work that originates from the Peruvian American artist’s research into individuals, places, and narratives significant to the Civil Rights Movement that intersect with contemporary social and musical history.

The Maryland Center for History and Culture welcomes members of the “Passion and Purpose: Voices of Maryland’s Civil Rights Activists” exhibition curatorial panel for a conversation about civil rights activism in Maryland. David Taft Terry PhD of Morgan State University, Joshua Clark Davis PhD of University of Baltimore, Linda Day Clark, visual artist and scholar, and MCHC staff discuss the ways Black Marylanders have fought and continue to fight for equality, from letter writing, to sit-ins, to marching.