Winter/spring 2018 exhibitions

Spencer Finch: Moon Dust
February 21, 2018–October 14, 2024

Spencer Finch’s impressive light installation Moon Dust (Apollo 17), first presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale, will illuminate the BMA’s historic lobby for the next seven years. This glowing abstract sculpture is comprised of 417 LED light bulbs that create a precise, three-dimensional scale model of the moon’s atomic makeup while evoking the sensation of being immersed in a star-filled sky. Finch represents the chemical elements of moon dust with light bulbs in varied sizes, arranging them on fixtures in patterns that mimic their bonds in molecules. The differently sized bulbs correspond to the relative weights of elements; the smallest indicating oxygen and the largest signifying both iron and chromium. 

Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning
March 7–September 2, 2018

This is the first museum presentation dedicated to the textile work of Baltimore-based artist Stephen Towns. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the artist’s monumental installation, Birth of a Nation (2014), which represents the abstracted figure of a black woman nursing a white child against the backdrop of the first official flag of the United States. The quilt is suspended above a mound of earth and surrounded by Towns’ ongoing “Story Quilts” series (2016–), a cycle of seven works in luminous fabrics and glass-beads that narrates the life of Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion. The exhibition also includes a pair of quilted oval portraits of Nat and Cherry Turner.

Sacred Spring: Vienna Secession Posters from the Collection of LeRoy E. Hoffberger and Paula Gately Tillman Hoffberger
March 25–July 29, 2018

The BMA presents more than a dozen beguiling Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau posters and prints thanks to the generosity of the late Baltimore philanthropist LeRoy E. Hoffberger. Posters by Gustav Klimt, Kolomon Moser, and Egon Schiele advertise exhibitions organized by the Viennese Secession. The Art Nouveau posters include Peter Behren’s seminal color woodcut The Kiss (1898) and Jan Toorop’s striking color lithograph Delft Salad Oil (1894). The Hoffberger bequest of Austrian, Dutch, and German posters is a major addition to the BMA’s collection of late 19th-century and modern works on paper, which includes French posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret.

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: We Are Ghosts
April 4–August 19, 2018

In collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Advanced Media Studies, the BMA is presenting an exhibition of works by Mary Reid Kelley and her collaborator and husband Patrick Kelley. On view will be two recent films with the artists’ signature black-and-white sets and costumes. This is Offal (2016) is inspired by Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem, The Bridge of Sighs, in which the narrator, a forensic pathologist, laments the suicide of a young woman whose body is pulled from the Thames. In the Body of the Sturgeon (2017) brings a feminist perspective to an exploration of life on a submarine stationed in the Pacific at the end of World War II, with the USS Torsk (docked in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor) inspiring the mises-en-scène. The exhibition also includes light boxes featuring characters from both films and elements from the Kelleys’ sculptural sets. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the BMA with Tate Liverpool, where the exhibition is being presented through March 18, 2018.

Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2016
April 22–July 29, 2018

This is the first exhibition of sculpture by the late contemporary artist Jack Whitten. Co-organized with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2016 features approximately 40 of the artist’s sculptures made in Greece over the course of his five-decade career. Created from a diverse spectrum of materials—including wood, marble, copper, bone, fishing wire, and personal mementos—the works are contextualized with a selection of African, Minoan, and Cycladic sculptures. The exhibition also unites Whitten’s Black Monoliths series for the first time to reveal how sculpture influenced his paintings. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that explores Whitten’s landmark achievement and the relation of African American artists to a cosmopolitan, diasporic Africa. The catalogue includes essays by co-curators Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Research & Programming Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern American Art at Stony Brook University, and Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; along with essays by Kellie Jones, Tobias Wofford, Dr. Richard Shiff, and Kwame Anthony Appiah; and an interview with the artist by Courtney J. Martin. The exhibition will be on view at The Met Breuer September 5–December 7, 2018.

Maren Hassinger: The Spirit of Things
May 2–November 25, 2018

In collaboration with L.A.-based arts and education foundation Art + Practice, the BMA presents abstract compositions, videos, and documentary photographs by New York-based artist Maren Hassinger. For more than 40 years, Hassinger has explored relationships between the industrial and natural worlds in a practice that is both meditative and critical. For her abstract compositions, she transforms wire rope, newspapers, plastic bags, and other materials into evocations of beauty found in conditions often dismissed as blighted or marginal. Her videos address race, gender, and other aspects of identity. Photographs of the artist’s performance art and site-specific interventions focus on L.A.-based projects that involved other artists, dancers, and friends from the 1970s, prior to Hassinger living in New York and Baltimore.

Meleko Mokgosi
May 2–August 12, 2018

Meleko Mokgosi produces large-scale figurative paintings that rethink the tradition of historical European compositions. He appropriates the polyptych formats and shapes of altarpieces and paintings used for the decoration of churches and other grand interiors and deploys paintings to present narratives and allegories featuring subjects that come from African history and recent events. For this exhibition, the artist is creating new paintings—some inspired by specific works at the BMA—as well as incorporating existing multi-panel canvases to create a cycle of paintings inspired by contemporary feminist perspectives on African experience.