From a charcoal drawing and spare and subtle watercolors to thickly painted bold explorations of color and form on canvas, this exhibition explores how a selection of European and American artists from the BMA’s collection depicted nature in the early 20th century. Many took inspiration from the previous generation. Some were drawn to the Impressionists’ fascination with a realistic yet modern depiction of light and color captured at a particular moment in time.

Projected lights, sounds, and reflective surfaces convey a sense of flowing water in Oletha DeVane’s installation, Traces of the Spirit, presented inside the BMA’s Spring House. The exhibition references the building’s past as a dairy and place where enslaved people were forced to labor and creates an altar-like location for a selection of the artist’s spirit sculptures. For these totem-like objects, DeVane (American, b.

Spencer Finch’s impressive light installation Moon Dust (Apollo 17), first presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale, will illuminate the BMA’s majestic Fox Court for the next seven years. The work consists of 150 individual chandeliers with 417 lights. The chandeliers are hung individually from the ceiling and form one large, cloud-like structure. Although an abstract sculpture, the installation is also a scientifically precise representation of the chemical composition of moon dust as it was gathered during the Apollo 17 mission.

Beauty stops us in our tracks. It makes us pause, look, consider. Sometimes it overwhelms us. We are often told art should aspire to this standard and be proportionate, symmetrical, naturalistic, and orderly. But what of work that is designed to revolt and terrify? Across subSaharan Africa, artists working across a range of states, societies, and cultures deliberately created artwork that violated conceptions of beauty, symmetry, and grace—both ours and theirs. Subverting Beauty features approximately two dozen works from sub-Saharan African’s colonial period (c.1880-c.

For more than 30 years, New Orleans-natives Keith Calhoun (b. 1955) and Chandra McCormick (b. 1957) have been documenting life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Known as “The Farm,” the prison was founded on the consolidated land of several cotton and sugarcane plantations. Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex includes poignant photographs and videos that record the exploitation of men incarcerated in the maximum-security prison farm while also showcasing their humanity and individual narratives.

In the fall of 2018, the BMA’s oldest friends group, the Print, Drawing & Photograph Society (PDPS), will celebrate its 50th anniversary by sponsoring an exhibition to highlight a selection of late 19th-century, modern, and contemporary works on paper that PDPS has helped the BMA acquire over the years. Installed in a gallery adjacent to the Cone Collection, this one-gallery exhibition will be organized in two six-month presentations, each including 20–30 prints, drawings, and artists’ books.

Commissioned by the BMA, the New York-based collective, DIS, debuts a video series on the wide-reaching impact of the 2008 financial crisis. The series contemplates the future of money, income inequality, and the uncertain economic prospects of Millennials.

MacArthur award-winning artist and Baltimore icon Joyce J. Scott’s earliest art lessons were at the knee of her mother, the renowned fiber artist Elizabeth Talford Scott. The eldest Scott passed down to her daughter knowledge inherited from generations of craftspeople in their family who had honed their expertise and persisted in their artistry through the extreme deprivations of slavery and its aftermath in sharecropping, migration, and segregation. “They couldn’t buy things,” Joyce J. Scott recounts, “so they made things.

Every Day: Selections from the Collection is the BMA’s first reinstallation of its contemporary collection centered on black artistic imagination. Nearly 50 works of painting, sculpture, video, printmaking, and photography from the BMA’s permanent collection, alongside a select group of loans primarily from the celebrated Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection, foreground the critical contributions black artists have made to postwar visual art.