Fall 2018 exhibitions

Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day
September 23, 2018–March 3, 2019

Originally presented at the U.S. Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Tomorrow Is Another Day was born out of Mark Bradford’s ongoing interest in the inherently social nature of the material world we inhabit. In its U.S. debut, the exhibition takes on new meaning within the context of the Baltimore community and speaks to the artist’s belief in art as a platform to examine contradictory histories and effect positive change. Among the works from Venice are Spoiled Foot, a behemoth collage installation suspended from the ceiling that literally bears down on visitors, pushing them to the periphery of the room, and “The Odyssey” series, a suite of three shimmering black-purple paintings made of endpapers. Medusa, a tangled sculpture of black, bleached paper, is inspired by accounts of her as a beautiful and powerful woman wronged by Poseidon. A new suite of monumental abstract canvases created with commercial paper that the artist molded by hand includes the exhibition title’s namesake, Tomorrow Is Another Day. The exhibition concludes with Niagara (2005), a video that takes on new meaning as the national perception of Black identity continues to evolve in relation to ongoing conversations around the Black Lives Matter movement.

John Waters: Indecent Exposure
October 7, 2018–January 6, 2019

John Waters’s reputation as an uncompromising cultural force has grown not only in the cinematic field, but also through his visual artwork, writing, and performances. This major retrospective organized by the BMA examines the artist’s influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculpture, and sound and video works he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters’s renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy. Exhibition highlights include a photographic installation in which Waters explores the absurdities of famous films and a suite of photographs and sculptures that proposes humor as a way to humanize dark moments in history. Waters also manipulates images of less-than-sacred, low-brow cultural references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, Justin Bieber’s preening poses, his own self-portraits—and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counter-culture muse, Divine. Other themes explored in the exhibition include the artist’s childhood and identity, a satirical consideration of the contemporary art world, and the transgressive power of images.

Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin
October 7, 2018–January 6, 2019 

The BMA is presenting three movies and two sculptural theaters created by artist collaborators Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin. Mark Trade (2016), a one-hour movie exhibited in a sculptural theater that resembles a hotel bar, follows the behind-the-scenes conflicts and confessions of a hard-drinking, eccentric protagonist and his production crew during a series of shoots that resemble reality TV. The 21-minute movie Permission Streak (2016), shown in a sculptural theater that combines aspects of gymnastics and aquatics facilities, jumps jarringly between a string of unrelated vignettes. The 24-minute unscripted movie Junior War (2013) follows a group of teenagers gathered in the woods for a late-night party. The work is composed of night-vision footage shot by Trecartin as a high school senior in 1999. Captured before smartphones became ubiquitous, the young people in the movie treat the camera’s presence as a novelty.

Ebony G. Patterson: …for little whispers…                          
October 10, 2018-April 7, 2019

Ebony G. Patterson creates opulent tapestries out of dazzling arrays of found and fabricated materials—glitter, sequins, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments. For her exhibition at the BMA, Patterson has created an immersive installation featuring her work …and babies too… (2016). Elevated on a plinth, the mixed media jacquard tapestry with digitally embroidered appliqués is accompanied by 18 hand‐embellished cast glass shoes and toy cars in a plush pink environment ornamented with artificial butterflies and papier-mâché balloons. The installation is a memorial to nine girls and nine boys who were murdered in the artist’s hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, in 2015. Patterson also presents a new work—a corner sculpture comprising 150 hand-embellished toy guns—in dialogue with Joshua Johnson’s painting Charles Herman Stricker Wilmans (c. 1804).

Time Frames: Contemporary East Asian Photography    
November 4, 2018–March 24, 2019

More than 40 photographs by artists born in Vietnam, China, Japan, and South Korea explore a time of day, a reflection on legend or history, a past remembered and missed, or a future imagined and anticipated. The images also explore suspended time, such as periods of waiting or boredom, prolonged labor, urban development, and physical displacement. Most of the works are from the BMA’s collection and have never been shown in Baltimore or haven’t been displayed at the museum for decades. The artists represented include Naoya Hatakeyama, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sze Tsung Leong, Chen Jiagang, Wang Qingsong, Don Hong-Oai, Liu Bolin, Liu Zheng, Lu Yao, Bae Bien-U, Noh Suntag, Lê Van Khoa, An-My Lê, Koichiro Kurita, and Toshio Shibata.

DIS: A Good Crisis
November 14, 2018–November 17, 2019

The BMA has commissioned the innovative New York-based DIS collective to create an immersive video installation and a series of public programs that invite visitors into critical conversations about money, politics, and contemporary media. The videos take the form of cartoons, public service announcements, talk shows, and mini-documentaries, and address the period following the 2008 financial crisis and the economic future. This is exemplified by A Good Crisis (2018), a video narrated by an actor playing the Night King from Game of Thrones. DIS worked with leading inequality economist Moritz Schularick to consider housing and the “new rentership society”—a term used to describe the cultural and economic shift that has seen the renter population of the United States swell following the housing crash in 2008. Two other DIS videos address the concept of universal basic income and the shifting economic circumstances of Millennials and their loss of a financial safety net. The exhibition will also include additional videos created by other artists and writers.