Edward Gunts reports:  

This is the last weekend to see the Walters Art Museum's popular exhibit Maps: Finding our Place in the World.

Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday but may be extended slightly if demand warrants.

The museum is at 600 N. Charles St. For more information, call 410-547-9000 or go to thewalters.org.

Admission to the Maps exhibit is $12 for adults, $8 for seniors 65 and over, $6 for college students and young adults and free for visitors younger than 18. Admisson to the permanent exhibit is free of charge.

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The Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts says Artscape 2008, the city's annual outdoor arts festival, will have a significantly larger footprint than last year that will take in part of the Station North Arts & Entertainment District as well as a section of Charles Street between Mount Royal Avenue and Lafayette Street. The festival runs July 18-20.

The changes are partly due to a construction project at the University of Baltimore parking lot adjacent to the Lyric Opera House, which in recent years housed the festival's food park. This year there will be several smaller food parks at strategic locations along the Mount Royal Avenue corridor.

The new Charles Street venues will include the Art Car Show, a do-it-yourself craft project, booths for installation art on the Charles Street bridge and a photo project where local photographers will snap 1,000 portraits of festivalgoers and display them on the 60-foot-long wall at the west entrance of Penn Station (rendering pictured above). There'll also be film at the Charles Theatre, performance at Metro Gallery and a Chick Webb Jazz Combo Competition at Everyman Theatre.

Nest week: BOPA announces the half dozen finalists for this year's $25,000 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize, whose works will be displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Art June 21 through Aug. 2. The semi-finalists' work will be displayed in the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries in the Fox Building of the Maryland Institute College of Art from July 17 through Aug. 2.

(Rendering of photo wall exhibit courtesy of Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts)

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Walters Art Museum curator Eik Kahng will take over the museum's department of 18th- and 19th-century art, replacing longtime department head William Johnston, who will become senior curator at large and director of the archives, the museum said today.

Kahng has curated several loan exhibitions since coming to the Walters in 2001, including shows on French Impressionism, the Russian avant-garde, horse painter George Stubbs, contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois and the landscapes of Courbet. Her most recent show was last year's Deja Vu: Revealing Repetition in French Masterpieces.

Kahng holds a Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley and has published widely on 18th- and 19th-century French painting. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the art history department at The Johns Hopkins University.

Johnston, who came to the Walters in 1967, is a former associate director of the museum and the author of William and Henry Walters: The Reticent Collectors (1999), the first history of the museum's founders. In his new position, he will continue to research the collection and oversee the cataloging of the museum's archives.

"We hope to continue benefiting from Bill's deep knowledge of the collection as a whole, especially in the area of decorative arts," said Walters director Gary Vikan. "I know Eik will provide excellent leadership for her department and will bring thought-provoking exhibitions to the Walters."

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For centuries, art students sketched the nude human body to sharpen their eye and hone their skills. But you don't have to be a budding Michelangelo to join the life drawing class tomorrow at the Maryland Science Center.

 As part of its Body Worlds 2 exhibition, the center is giving everyone with an interest in drawing a chance to try their hand at sketching the human figure using male and female models hired for the occasion as well as the plastinated human specimens featured in the show.

"People can come in, sketch the plastinates and compare them with live nude models posing beside them," says Christopher Cropper, the center's senior director of marketing. "Like the exhibition itself, the goal is to give people a greater appreciation of the beauty of the human body."

Cropper says that since the show opened in February, dozens of artists have visited the center during regular hours to sketch the specimens on display.

"We wanted to set aside an extended period to give more people an opportunity to draw in the galleries," Croppers says, adding that he expects 100-150 artists, amateur and professional, to attend the event, which runs 6 p.m.-9 p.m.

The center recruited four professional models for Tuesday's event through the Maryland Institute College of Art, Cropper said.

Admission to the life drawing class is $19 for adults and $16.50 for students. Participants must bring their own art supplies to be admitted. The center is at 601 Light St. For more information, call 410-685-5225 or go here.

Above: Sun photo of the BodyWorlds 2 exhibit by Glenn Fawcett

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A Maryland Institute student's golden fence -- a public art project that restricted access to Mount Vernon Place and angered many nearby residents -- has come down in two squares of the downtown park. MICA says the fences were dismantled Thursday evening - two days ahead of schedule - after it was discovered that they were tampered with.

"Someone had unbolted numerous sections of the fence overnight, causing those sections to become unstable," according to a statement on MICA's Web site. "The decision to de-install the fence from two of the parks two days prior to the scheduled date was made to eliminate any danger posed by the possibility of further vandalism to those fences."

Originally, the fences were to block public access to Mount Vernon Place for two weeks, but artist Lee Freeman removed panels after a few days to allow people to use the popular park after residents and a City Council member questioned the project. 

Despite the compromise, opposition to the fence continued. Signs were posted reading "Keep Out Rich Kid Art," and "boycott the Walters" (a co-sponsor of the project) even after the park had been opened.

Above: Sun photo of the dismantled fence by Tim Swift

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Artists and officials of the Maryland Institute College of Art resealed the controversial fence surrounding Mount Vernon Park, citing safety reasons.

Earlier this afternoon, artist Lee Freeman removed sections of the gold-painted gates, which made the fence less stable.

When strong winds threatened to knock down the fences, the sections were replaced.

The issue will be revisited tomorrow.

"Hopefully, opening this gate is shifting the conversation, rather than taking it away," Freeman said. "It's definitely important to keep the conversation open and keep it positive." 

(Photo by Jed Kirschbaum/Sun Photographer)

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Artist Lee B. Freeman (pictured) will open the gold painted gates to the four fenced-in Mount Vernon Place squares today, a Maryland Institute College of Art official said this morning.

Freeman initially fenced in Mount Vernon Place's parks Sunday as part of a collaborative art exhibit sponsored by MICA and the Walters Art Museum.

The city approved the project, which called for keeping the parks closed to the public for two weeks while MICA students and staff installed other artwork inside.

But the exhibit incensed neighborhood residents, who complained to Freeman and city councilman William H. Cole IV.

"There has been a decision made by the faculty, in conversation with Lee, that all the parks will be made accessible to the community," said Kim Carlin, MICA's director of media relations.

"Right now, they're trying to determine where the openings will be - how to do it in a way that maintains the integrity of the piece."

(Photo by Jed Kirschbaum/Sun Photographer) 

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Whether or not the golden chain link fence surrounding all four squares of Mount Vernon Place is compelling and provocative art is under debate.

But the fence, part of a collaborative outdoor art exhibition sponsored by the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Walters Art Gallery, has polarized neighborhood residents and members of the city's arts community.

Artist Lee B. Freeman, a Maryland Institute College of Art senior who is responsible for the fence, fielded at least one anonymous threat of vandalism since the fence went up Sunday.

One critic (or perhaps a group of them) applied red stickers to the fence which read "EXCLUSIONIST." 

And a number of people who live and work in Mount Vernon are mistaking Lee Freeman's fence for a construction site.

"I wasn't compelled to think about it because I didn't know what it was," said Erin Cluely, assistant director of the C. Grimaldis Gallery on North Charles Street.

"It looks like a construction site with a little bit of bling. It's a fence with gold on it."

(Photo by Algerina Perna/Sun Photographer) 

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Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost said, but the gold chain-link fence that went up Sunday around Mount Vernon Square isn't likely to be seen as very neighborly.

The fence, erected by artist Lee Freeman (pictured), a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art, is the first of a group of site-specific installations that will be part of Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square, an outdoor exhibition collaboration between MICA and the Walters Art Museum. What it actually does, however, is restrict public access to the parks surrounding the monument. 

On Lee's web site, goldchainlinkfence.com, the artist seems to suggest that preventing people from entering the part will make them appreciate it more -- in his words, "'re-see' and 're-consider' Mount Vernon Place from an alternate perspective." He's doing us a favor, you see, by keeping us out of the park, sort of an anti-Christo who, instead of filling the park with flowing safron banners, simply shuts it down behind an ugly fence that makes us "re-see" and "re-consider" it as a construction site.

I'm not questioning whether this is art. But it is bad art because it is so morally blind and filled with hubris and because the impulse behind it is exclusionary and can't be rationalized away with the flimsy, self-serving excuse that it somehow relates to the map show at the Walters.

This is really about one guy deciding  he's entitled to keep the rest of us out of the park -- and then boast about the big favor he's done us. Fences are coming down all over the world, boundaries are broken, the things that divide are swept away -- except in Mount Vernon Square, and in the name of "art." How pathetic.

What do you think about this project? Leave a comment below.

(Photo by Algerina Perna / Sun Photographer)

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Karen Milbourne, curator of African art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, has put together a stellar show for her valedictory installment of Meditations on African Art, the three-part series of exhibitions begun in 2006 designed to bring the museum's African artworks into dialogue with its collection of early European modernist works.

The first two installments focused on the elements light and color in the traditional arts of Africa and their evolution in the work of contemporary African artists. The current show examines pattern as an element of design in both traditional and contemporary African art.

Alas, this show also marks Milbourne's valedictory effort as curator at the BMA. At the end of the month, she's leaving to take up her new duties as a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington. During her three years in Baltimore, Milbourne brought a penetrating intellect, enormous scholarly knowledge and an imaginative eye to her stewardship of the African collection. She also found new ways to open up the collection; prior to this exhibition, two-thirds of the works now on view had never been displayed publicly.

The show is divided into four sections:

Continue reading "African art at the BMA" »

Posted by Glenn McNatt at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Andy Warhol said in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, but MICA senior Rebecca Nagle has gone him one better: For 15 minutes, she'll be famous for you.

Nagle, whose video installation will be on view at MICA next month, invites people to request her to perform silly, mostly innocuous activities like smearing her face with pie or hula-hooping. Because the artist reserves the right to refuse or modify any request, her performances are as much about the negotiation of power relationships as they are about the contortions she puts her body through.

Still, some of requests seemed to verge on the misogynistic or the outright demeaning. "A lot of them were really tests about what kinds of things I actually would do," Nagle said. "There was a range from benign to definitely less benign requests."

Nagle said she negotiated each request in terms of four broad guidelines she established when the project began. The guidelines stated that the activity would last 15 minutes, cost less than $10, not harm any non-consenting party and not damage property owned by non-consenting parties.

"I've only had to reject one that fell outside the guidelines," Nagle said. "Most people imagine power as fixed from the top down. I sort of have a more postmodern concept, so in this work I try to make the way power works more transparent. I'm not just a puppet people can use however they want. I decide how the activity will be performed, so it becomes about negotiation rather than just me fulfilling other people's desires."

You can see a preview of Nagle's show, which opens March 10 at the Maryland Institute College of Art, on her website fifteenminutesvideo.com. 

(Still from "Make me laugh pie fight" courtesy of Rebecca Nagle)

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After the mini-controversy stirred up over artist Christine Bailey's exhibition of faux Cara Ober paintings at a downtown office building last month, we were eager to check out Boundary Crossings, the current show at School 33 Art Center that Bailey curated. 

The show presents three artists -- Ariana Wol, Nadine Freund and "the international digital collective" A.N.N.A. -- who, on closer inspection, all turn out to be creatures of Bailey's own fertile imagination. During a phone conversation yesterday it only took a little prodding before she admitted that the show's trio of "artists" are, in fact, completely fictitious identities invented by her.

I suppose you could complain that Bailey's description of her role as "curator" is a bit misleading, since this is essentially a one-woman show put together by the artist herself. But if invented identities are what the exhibition is about anyway, why bother?

As Bailey's alter egos, Wol, Freund and A.N.N.A. turn out to be a pretty feisty bunch. Wol is a photographer and performance artist who documents her highly mutable identity in short films and still photographs. Freund is an animator and graffiti artist whose 20-minute video of a pine tree in a snowy landscape offers one of the show's most compelling visual experiences. The "collective" A.N.N.A. appropriates animated images of IKEA's bland, on-line customer service rep and lets her brush off callers' off-the-wall queries in an astonishing variety of languages.

Mark Twain called novelists the biggest liers that ever came down the pike, but the antics of Bailey's wholly fictitious "artists" may give them a real run for their money. We'll have a full review of the show next week, so stay tuned.

(Above: Still from projection work by Nadine Freund)

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When an invitation to painter Cara Ober's upcoming exhibition at Randall Scott Gallery in Washington landed on our desk the other day, we couldn't help noticing the show's title: I am who I pretend to be.

Wondering whether the exhibit might be a riposte to fellow artist Christine Bailey, who sparked a mini-controversy last month when she exhibited paintings in a downtown office building that mimicked Ober's style, we called Ober's dealer.

"It has no bearing on the show," insisted Scott regarding the exhibit's title. He noted that Ober's show had been scheduled for almost a year. "There’s gonna be some catch words in some of the paintings, but most of those were all in place before all this even started," Scott said. "Even the word plagiarize is in there, but it was done last year."

Scott said the main fallout from last month's dust-up was that it distracted Ober at a critical moment.

"We would have been much happier if it hadn’t happened," he said. "Cara was working on the show, and it took her attention from work in the studio; she had to deal with this for three weeks when she should have been painting. It didn’t hurt her as an artist, because her work stands." 

But won't the publicity help his artist's career in the long run?

"We’re not pushing the controversy thing," Scott said. "It’s kind of a non-issue. It wasn't even mentioned in the press release, because we feel it’ll blow over."

However, Scott conceded that, in principle, the reasoning behind Bailey's imitating another artist might have been valid had it been done differently. "Actually, it’s an interesting idea for a show, but it wasn’t carried through fully enough," he said. "It would have been a much better show if the artist had gone after several other people as well. and it wouldn't have caused half the ruckus it did."

Sun Photo of Cara Ober by Algerina Perna

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The Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts announced its selection of 27 semi-finalists for the 2008 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. The competition, now in its third year, is open to artists from Maryland, Washington, Delaware and parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania and carries a $25,000 prize. Its purpose is to help area artists further their careers by supporting projects they might not otherwise be able to undertake.

The 27 semi-finalists were selected by a three-judge panel from 324 entries submitted. The jurors were Laura Hoptman, senior curator at the New Museum in New York, Darby English, an art historian at the University of Chicago, and Mickalene Thomas, a New York-based artist.

The finalists in the competition, to be announced later this year, will have their works exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art this summer. The winner of the prize will be announced July 12 at the BMA.

Continue reading "Sondheim semi-finalists announced" »

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The cultivated art thief played by Pierce Brosnan in the Thomas Crown Affair was a dapper billionaire and bon vivant way too clever to get caught. But real art thieves hardly ever have that much class, says Special Agent Robert Wittman, a senior investigator with the FBI's National Art Crime Team.

Wittman, a Baltimore native who's unraveled more than his share of spectacular art heists during his 20 years with the agency, will talk about how the FBI catches the bad guys at 6:30 Thursday night in the Kaplan Concert Hall at Towson University.  

Continue reading "G-man talks about catching art thieves tonight at Towson U" »

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Celebrity portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz was in Washington this week to tout her show, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, which opens at Saturday at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The artist greeted the press, led a tour of the exhibition and spent a lot of time answering the same kinds of questions she faced when the show debuted last year at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York.

Why, for example, did Leibovitz mix her commercial assignment work --  slick images of Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, Queen Elizabeth II, etc. -- with her personal snapshots of family and friends, which, truth be told, look pretty much like anyone else's personal snapshots of family and friends? In New York, the critics savaged her for being self-indulgent. Yet the truth probably is that it was one of those ideas that sounded good at the time, but couldn't really stand the test of time.

Leibovitz admitted as much at yesterday's press preview. "The show came out of a particular moment in my life," she said, noting that in a relatively short period of time she had watched her long-time partner, writer Susan Sontag, die of cancer, then lost her father a few weeks later. Meanwhile, she was having the first of three children that she would raise as a single mother.

"I thought, what have I done to expose my family and my life like this?" Sontag recalled wondering during that period. But she also suggested that creating an exhibition and a book that tied her personal grief and anguish to the celebratory public images she created for publications such as Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines was ultimately a healing experience. During the press preview she made explicit her belief in art's therapeutic value: "Being in love with photography has been a healthy thing for me," she said.

At 58, Leibovitz seems to have made peace with the choices that led her to a fantastically successful 35-year-long career as a celebrity portraitist. Though her work hangs in art museums, she doesn't seem particularly insistent on claiming everything she does is great art. When a reporter criticized her official White House portraits of presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush as superficial, her response was surprisingly mild: "It's not a great picture, but someone's got to document our era," she said of the Clinton portrait. But then she seemed to step back and invite her listeners to make an implicit comparison between celebrities and politicians: "Sometimes," she said, "the surface is as interesting as anything else you could photograph."  

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Baltimore artists Jo Smail and Nicholas  F. Wisniewski are among 11 finalists for this year's Trawick Prize awarded by the Bethesday Urban Partnership. The winner will be announced Sept. 6. Smail, a three-time finalist for the Trawick Prize, is represented by several large oil paintings on canvas. Wisniewski is represented by an installation based on an outdoor project he is completing in Baltimore called the Forest Street City Farm.

The Trawick competition, now in its fifth year, is named after Bethesda businesswoman and arts activist Carol Trawick. The competition awards a $10,000 first prize, $2,000 second prize and a $1,000 third prize; it also awards a $1,000 prize to a young artist under 30.

Lauren Hamilton, a marketing specialist at the Bethesda Urban Partnership, said Baltimore artists were prominently represented among this year's 300 applicants for the prize.

"We've had a lot of crossover," Hamilton said. "A lot of finalists and past winners of the Trawick Prize were also finalists for the Sondheim prize. Baltimore's Tony Shore, who won the Sondheim Prize this year,  won the Bethesda Painting Award in 2006."

The Bethesda Painting Award, which is limited to painters, was also begun under the auspices of Carol Trawick and the Bethesda Urban Partnership. The Trawick Prize is open to all visual artists.

The judges for this year's Trawick Prize are Anne Ellegood, associate curator at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, Amy Moorefield, assistant director and curator of collections at Virginia Commonwealth University's Anderson Gallery in Richmond, and Rex Stevens, chair of the general fine arts department at Maryland Institute College of Art. 

The other finalists for this year's prize are Mary Coble, Mary Early, Inga Frick, Baby Martinez and Kathleen Shafer, all of Washington; Suzanna Fields and Bruce Wilhelm of Richmond; Linda Hesh of Alexandria, Va., and Jeannine Harkelroad of Chesapeake, Va.

The finalists' work will be exhibited from Sept. 4-28 at the Creative Partners Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway in Bethesda. The competition is open to artists from Maryland, Washington and Virginia.

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I stumbled across this video this weekend, which covers 500 years of women in art, with one portrait morphing into the next. It's bizarre but lovely at the same time.

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The "PLASTIC" show at the Creative Alliance came down before we were able to review it in the paper, but it was one of the season's more memorable shows. Here are some of my thoughts about it that I didn't get to publish.

Ever since a tipsy Mr. Robinson whispered the word to a callow Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, plastic has connoted all that is shallow, materialistic and fake about America.

The artists in PLASTIC: Landscape, Cityscape, Lifescape, at the Creative Alliance, came along a full generation after the confused flower children in director Mike Nichols 1967 film.

Many of them grew up in suburbia, shopped in the malls and gradually discovered that even if you moved from one end of the country to the other, things would still look pretty much the same  mass-produced, standardized in quality and firmly attached to a recognizable brand-name.

In short, these artists inherited everything that Dustin Hoffman's Ben Braddock and Katherine Ross' Elaine Robinson were fleeing from when they jumped onto that bus at the end of Nichols movie. Yet rather than shun Americas obsession with material well-being and social conformity, these artists mostly embrace it, if for no other reason than a lack of viable alternatives.

Multimedia artist Bridget Sue Lambert, for example, photographs ingenious, exquisitely detailed images of domestic interiors that she sets up inside a large dollhouse.

It's impossible to view her tiny chairs, carpets, tables and other furnishings without a twinge of nostalgia. They represent a vision of life lived authentically in what now seems a distant era before the arrival of endless tract houses and fast-food joints. It's not exactly Norman Rockwell's America, but its not R. Crumb's either.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Lambert's gentle reminiscences are Ben Furgal's slick, urban architectural fantasies, which are every bit as dazzling (and as wholely imaginary) as those of Giambattista Piranesi, the 18th-century Italian painter who created delightfully ficticious veduti, or views, of Venice.

Furgal's glittery, ultramodern cityscapes are almost kitsch -- but only almost. What saves them is an innocent, joyous whimsy that really makes you wish these stylish American veduti were real. Plastic has never looked so good.

The show, which closed Saturday, also presented works by Ben McKee, Eric Leshinsky, Dina Kelberman and Zachary Thornton. 

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