Office of Exhibitions

Past Exhibitions

Home
Offices & Divisions
Office of Exhibitions
Past Exhibitions
Through organizing and producing diverse, critically challenging exhibitions and public programming the Office of Exhibitions enriches the community’s awareness, education, and appreciation of contemporary art and design. In this archive, you'll find a sampling of the 80+ exhibitions the Office of Exhibitions presents each academic year.

2023-2024

Transcending Tradition: The Art of Elizabeth Talford Scott, and the MICA Quilt Group

January 25, 2024 - March 10, 2024 // Decker Gallery // This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS), a two-semester course at MICA in which students serve in many capacities. They design, developing and implementing proposals for both graphic identity and exhibition space. They curate, write interpretive texts and publications. They educate, crafting public programs and community outreach. They market, creating website content and public relations strategies.

Atlantika Collective: Climate for Change

January 19, 2024 - March 3, 2024 // Pinkard Gallery // As a worldwide ecological crisis unfolds before our eyes, more voices are needed in demanding urgent action to prevent the ultimate cataclysm for the human race. Over the last two years, the artists of Atlantika Collective have addressed this critical issue from diverse vantage points. Their works speak to concerns about unsustainable development, wildfires, erosion, poisoned waters, floods, and pollution—and the looming specter of a climate crisis that threatens to spiral out of control. However, they also balance fear with hope, moving us beyond the step of raising awareness into action that has the potential to result in meaningful change. Curated by María Sáenz.

Women’s Rights Are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-based Inequality, Violence, and Discrimination

January 16, 2024 - March 5, 2024 // Meyerhoff Gallery // Women’s Rights Are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-based Inequality, Violence, and Discrimination is an exhibition that features posters created by both men and women to celebrate and acknowledge the vital role that all citizens play in protecting and promoting human rights while challenging gender inequality and stereotypes, advancing reproductive and sexual rights, protecting women and girls against brutality, and promoting women’s empowerment, education, and participation in society. The posters argue for the empowerment of women, the achievement of equality between women and men, and the elimination of discrimination against women and girls. Organized and curated by Elizabeth Resnick, Professor Emerita, Graphic Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston.

2023 Faculty Exhibition

November 9, 2023 - December 10, 2023 // Decker & Meyerhoff Galleries // The 2023 Faculty Exhibition featured the work of MICA’s world-renowned faculty, highlighting their diversity in content, medium, and style.

YOUniverse (through the lens)

October 11, 2023 - November 5, 2023 // Pinkard Gallery // YOUniverse (through the lens) is a group exhibition by student photographers from Lens on Life Project, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, supporting photography and computer literacy training for youth around the world. Through their unique perspective in places like Goma (DR Congo), Zaatari refugee camp, Cameroon, Iraq, and New York, these young photographers explore the diverse reality of human connection. By self-reflecting on family, love, and identity, YOUniverse opens a pathway to the boundless possibilities of connection–known and unknown. In a time where surface-level connection often defines us, YOUniverse allows time and space for viewers to reflect. Curated by MJ Banks. Presented by Lens on Life + MICAphoto.

Fall 2023 Juried Undergraduate Exhibition

October 4, 2023 - October 29, 2023 // Decker Gallery // The work in this annual exhibition is a selection of the best submissions from all four years of undergraduate students. From hundreds of entries, selected artists are chosen in a variety of disciplines based on artistic merit, creativity, and vision. The jurors for this year's competition are Michael Benevento, artist, curator, and co-director of Current Space, and Inés Sanchez de Lozada, curator, and Coordinator for BmoreArt’s Connect + Collect Gallery.

2023 Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize Semifinalists Exhibition

September 21, 2023 - October 1, 2023 // Meyerhoff & Pinkard Galleries // The Sondheim Semifinalists exhibition brings together artists from disciplines including painting, photography, sculpture, animation, and fiber craft. Named in honor of the philanthropists and civic leaders Janet and Walter Sondheim, the Sondheim exhibition is co-organized by Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, which serves as the city’s arts council, events producer, and film office, in addition to organizing free city-wide events. The eleven semifinalists selected for this year’s competition are Aliana Bailey, Amanda Burnham, Andersen Woof, David Page, Eleisha Faith & Tonisha Hope McCorkle (Faith & Hope), Elliot Doughtie, Giulia Livi, Jennifer Reed, Katherine Mann, Kelli Williams, and Rae Anna Hample. Jurors for the 2023 competition are Kelly Baum, John and Mary Pappajohn Director of the Des Moines Art Center; Devin N. Morris, Brooklyn-based artist; and Ingrid Schaffner, Curator at Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

2023 Sabbatical Exhibition

August 25, 2023 - September 24, 2023 // Decker Gallery // The 2023 Sabbatical Exhibition showcases the work of faculty members who took a semester away from MICA during the 2022/23 academic year to explore new themes. Featured faculty include Lauren Frances Adams, Christina P. Day, Erinn E. Hagerty, Kirsten D'Andrea Hollander, Nate Larson, Valeska Populoh and Michael Weiss.

Graduate Studies Alumni Exhibition

August 24, 2023 - September 24, 2023 // Riggs & Leidy Galleries // Curated by accomplished Alumna and Curator, Ashley Molese '14, MFA (Curatorial Practice), the Alumni Exhibition will showcase the work of several alumni from MICA’s graduate MFA and MA programs. Invited artists will exhibit materially rich and diverse practices drawing from their experiences from and beyond their time at MICA.

2023 First Year Experience (FYE) Exhibition

August 18, 2023 – September 12, 2023 // Meyerhoff & Pinkard Galleries // Timed to coincide with the arrival of this year's freshman, the First Year Experience (FYE) Exhibition is one of the College's most highly regarded student shows. The exhibition features work by rising sophomores made during the 2022-23 academic year. The First Year Experience design is in response to the rapid changes in art, design and technology, and the intersections between them that are occurring today. It has been crafted to provide a rigorous, integrated curriculum that reflects the diversity of our people and our learning pathways.

2022-2023

Artwork by Phaan Howng

Just a Drop

February 10 - March 3, 2023 // Meyerhoff Gallery // Through a wide range of objects and materials — including sculptures, illustrations, protest banners, textiles, glass art, videos, and a large-scale newly-commissioned mural — the 13 artists highlighted in this show reveal how water sustains life and shapes human destinies. Inspired by the September 2022 boil water advisory in West Baltimore, the Curatorial Practice MFA (CP) Practicum class organizing “Just a Drop” dive deeply into the history of our most precious resource. For this exhibition, they bring together a diverse group of artists, activists, and storytellers to describe people’s relationships to water via culture, ritual, and conservation. With personal, collective, and mythical imagery and stories, the featured artists invite viewers to reconsider the element that makes up 60% of their bodies and covers more than 70% of the planet’s surface. “Just a Drop” opened with a public reception featuring a live storytelling performance by Griot Grandmother Edna.

Learn more
multi-colored ceramic sculpture in Decker gallery

2023 Juried Undergraduate Exhibition

February 2 - March 5, 2023 // Decker Gallery & Pinkard Gallery // The work in this annual exhibition is a selection of the best submissions from all four years of undergraduate students. From hundreds of entries, selected artists are chosen in a variety of disciplines based on artistic merit, creativity, and vision. This year Nekisha Durret and Lou Joseph served as jurors. Nekisha Durrett is a renowned mixed media artist who employs the visual language of mass media to forward histories that objects, places, and words embody, but are not often celebrated. She is an award winning artist with work in numerous private and public collections. Lou Joseph is project manager for the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, as well as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Baltimore, and is a practicing artist with an MFA in printmaking.

Marquee wall in Riggs Gallery space

Small Works: Big Talent // 2023 MICA Staff Exhibition

January 17 - February 10, 2023 // Sheila & Richard Riggs Gallery // MICA's Staff Empowerment Council (SEC) is proud to present the return of the MICA Staff Exhibition. This exhibition of small artworks by MICA staff from across all departments presents a variety of art created in a size no more than 24 inches in any dimension. Placed together, these small artworks represent the vast amount of talent found across MICA's campus.

Up Before the Sun, work by William Downs

October 3, 2022 – November 6, 2022 // Meyerhoff Gallery // MICA alumnus and educator William Downs (’03 Mt Royal School of Art) creates allegorical drawings and paintings that, in his words: “attempt to archive a particular emotion based on autobiographical experience.” Over the past few years, Downs has shifted away from making smaller works on paper (typically push-pinned onto walls in a free-form, mosaic arrangement) to creating immersive, floor to ceiling murals. For the installation at MICA, Downs will occupy the Meyerhoff Gallery for a period of days and, with the assistance of MICA students will create several continuous, floor-to-ceiling murals, filling the space.

Doing Things With Images: TL;DR Zine Archive

September 29, 2022 – October 31, 2022 // Pinkard Gallery // The TL;DR Zine Archive is a collection of zines that make critical inquiries about design and illustration in formats that are designed and illustrated. Curated by MICA alumni Shreyas R. Krishnan (MFA, Illustration Practice '16) and Aggie Toppins (MFA, Graphic Design '12), the collection is housed at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Chip Kidd presents Batman Black & White

September 16, 2022 – October 2, 2022 // Fox 3 Gallery // Award winning designer, Chip Kidd who is also a Batman aficionado was inspired to invite some of the world's greatest illustrators to sketch a Batman Black and White cover. The exhibition features 165 different, original covers!

2020-2021

2021 Faculty Exhibition

November 18 - December 12, 2021 // Decker & Meyerhoff Galleries // The Faculty Exhibition features the work of MICA’s world-renowned faculty, highlighting their diversity in content, medium, and style.

2021 Sabbatical Exhibition II

October 9 - October 31, 2021 // Decker Gallery // The 2021 Sabbatical Exhibition II showcases the work of faculty members who took a semester away from MICA during the 2019-2021 academic years to explore new themes. Participants include: Joyce Hesselberth, Nadia Hironaka, LaToya Hobbs, Ryan Hoover, Mark Karnes, Benjamin Luzzatto, Nan Park, Hugh Pocock and Renee Rendine.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion

September 22 - October 31, 2021 // Meyerhoff Gallery // The New Black Vanguard presents artists, whose vibrant portraits and conceptual images fuse the genres of art and fashion photography in ways that break down long-established boundaries.

Learn More

2021 Sabbatical Exhibition I

September 7 - October 3, 2021 // Decker Gallery // The 2021 Sabbatical Exhibition I showcases the work of faculty members who took a semester away from MICA during the 2019-2021 academic years to explore new themes. Participants include: Catherine Behrent, Frank Fantuzzi, Lili Maya, Kiel Mutschelknaus, Pereira, Chezia Thompson, and Elizabeth Wagenheim.

2019-2020

Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space

January 31 – March 15, 2020 // Decker Gallery // Artist Shaun Leonardo is interested in the physical and psychosocial negative space that is activated when viewers fill in the blanks, reframe details, and remix narratives based on both personal experience and perceptions ingrained by media and cultural biases.

Gallery Guide

Cindy Cheng: The Pretenders

January 31 – March 15, 2020 // Pinkard Gallery // The work in this exhibition is a collection of sketches resulting from Cheng's experiments with constructing such objects and spaces of insidious “leisure”. These spaces and objects aspire to attract and repulse. They are tools of joy and conspiracy.

Gallery Guide

Migrations and Meaning(s) in Art

January 30 – March 15, 2020 // Meyerhoff Gallery // An exhibition curated by scholar and artist Deborah Willis, PhD, the inaugural Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography features a diverse range of local, national and international visual artists, the exhibition explores debates on the topic of migration from historical references such as slavery and emancipation; the Great Migration; and virtual communities from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Gallery Guide

Juried Faculty: It Can Begin With Clouds

November 1 - December 15, 2019 // Decker, Meyerhoff, and Pinkard Galleries // This exhibition offers but a glimpse of these hard-working and multi-faceted artists, dedicated to their own fine art practice, while sharing with a broad range of learners. As professors, our audience expands beyond the public cultural sphere and into the classroom. These moments are precious and unforgettable. They shape our understanding of the world, allow the development of understanding and if we are all lucky, a little bit of empathy. At its best, this is what higher education is about.

Gallery Guide
Norman Carlberg Installation

Norman Carlberg

September 28 – October 16, 2019/ Rosenberg/Leidy Atrium Galleries/In 1962, Norman Carlberg came to MICA to become the director of The Rinehart School of Graduate Sculpture. Over the next 36 years, Norman developed a wonderful kinship with his students and provided a learning space that encouraged all forms of contemporary art process, intellectual curiosity, and individual artistic expression. Norman’s gift to his students was his humanity.

Exhibition Publication

Stephen Byram: The Visibility of Music

September 12 – October 6, 2019/Riggs/Leidy Galleries/Stephen Byram is an important Art Director, Master Type Manipulator, Graphic Designer, Drawer, Collage Artist, Sculptor and Computer Magician. He works almost exclusively in the Music Business/Scene, where he has been engaged for almost four decades. In addition to his own unique sketches, collages and three-dimensional pieces, Byram is well known in pop music circles for his forward-thinking work as a designer at CBS Records, Sony Music, EMI, JMT, Screwgun, Winter & Winter, and he has executed around a dozen Op-Ed pieces for The New York Times.

Exhibition Poster

2018-2019

For Freedoms

Everyday, Everyday, Everyday, Everyday Freedoms

February 1 - March 17, 2019/ Meyerhoff Gallery/The Maryland Institute College of Art and the For Freedoms 50 State Initiative present Everyday, Everyday, Everyday, Everyday Freedoms, an exhibition that reimagines civic engagement beyond voting in elections. This group exhibition considers how a democracy could be free from disenfranchisement; forming a critique of the frayed political climate from a multiplicity of perspectives. Featuring local, national, and international artists at all stages of their careers, their artwork frames participation and activism through photography, video, game design, sculpture, installation, data visualization, text, and textiles.

Exhibition Publication
Rural Avant- Garde

Rural Avant-Garde: The Mountain Lake Experience

January 31 - March 17, 2019/ Decker Gallery/Contemporary art, interdisciplinary research communities, and traditional Appalachian culture converge in Rural Avant-Garde: The Mountain Lake Experience, an exhibition showcasing the collaborative creative works that emerged from nearly four decades of the Mountain Lake Workshop series. Founded by artist and scholar Ray Kass in 1980 and co-organized with influential art critic Dr. Donald B. Kuspit, Dr. Howard Risatti, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), The Mountain Lake Workshops integrated the arts and sciences in a dynamic experimental creative process that pushed past the traditional boundaries of art, dance, performance, and theater.

Regina DeLuise

Regina DeLuise: Dreamer’s House

January 31 - March 17, 2018/ Pinkard Gallery/Solo faculty exhibition by Regina DeLuise. DeLuise joined the full time faculty at MICA in 2007. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and is represented in private and public collections, including MOMA, MET, SFOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, Houston Museum of Fine Art, NMAH Smithsonian Institute and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

Gallery Guide

2017-2018

Land/Trust

Land Trust

February 1 – March 11, 2018/Decker Gallery/Organized by the Curatorial Practice MFA Class of 2019 under the direction of José Ruiz, Director of the MFA in Curatorial Practice program, and Gerald Ross, Director of Exhibitions, Land/Trust, is an exhibition of six local, national, and international contemporary artists exploring their relationships to the land and their positions as community activists, caretakers, investigators, and researchers in an era of ecological crisis. In forging these intimate relationships, the participating artists illuminate systematically neglected spaces, question imposed political and social boundaries, and facilitate conversations on issues of ownership and possession of the ground we travel on everyday.

Exhibition Publication
Draw itOUT!

Draw itOut!

January 24 – March 12, 2018 /Meyerhoff Gallery/Curated by MICA faculty members Renee van der Stelt and Gerald Ross, this drawing program and exhibition encourages students and faculty to build upon developing skills, explore drawing in changing, incisive ways toward individual and collective study, research, and long-term growth. In recent years, there has been growing interest in drawing as a broad practice with many applications and understandings concerning all it might include. This extends towards various disciplines & visual forms of engagement: the broader interest is partially due to developing technologies and increased inter-disciplinary approaches regarding artistic practice.

Exhibition Website
Lauren Adams

Lauren Adams: Germinal

February 15, 2018 – March 13, 2018/Pinkard Gallery/MICA presents “Germinal,” a solo exhibition consisting of a site-specific installation by B.F.A. Painting faculty Lauren Frances Adams. The exhibition explores themes converging around feminist activists from American history, domestic ornament in service of political messages, such as Quaker abolitionist quilts and pro-Confederacy secessionist cockades, and the recent removal of Baltimore’s Confederate monuments.

Gallery Guide

2016-2017

Mickalene Thomas

MUSE: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête

Muse is Mickalene Thomas’s first exhibition containing exclusively photographic work. Thomas’s large-scale photographs, Polaroids, and collages along with the tête-à-tête collective create a space for open conversation about both personal and cultural topics. In some of the spaces to which the show travels, a three-dimensional tableau, reminiscent of a seventies-era domestic space, replicates the studio installation where Thomas and her models collaborate. Each feature in the show can be explored individually at length; however, visitors engage in a more meaningful way by comparing multiple works and discovering the numerous themes that Thomas and her contemporaries are addressing.

MUSE Education Resource
William Christenberry

Laying - By Time: Revisiting The Works Of William A. Christenberry

December 9, 2016 - March 12, 2017/Decker Gallery/ Laying-by Time highlights a broad sample of work by William Christenberry. Drawing on his explorations, recollections and interpretations of Hale County, Ala., Christenberry balanced the beauty, hopefulness and resilience of the deep south against its tensions, pathos and flaws. Moving fluidly between painting, photography, sculpture and drawing, the artist wove a story that is simultaneously celebratory and melancholy, inviting and inhospitable.

Gallery Guide
Breadzoo

Intersections/Interaction/Action!

November 28 - December 15, 2016, Meyerhoff Gallery Intersections/Interactions/Action! is a multimedia, free-form space activation site. Conceived and curated by Exhibitions Director Gerald Ross, the roster of participants have all been invited to create works, installations and performances rooted in the culture and communities of Baltimore – specifically outside of MICA - and have been tasked with engaging with and bringing that audience to MICA. The gallery space will be officially “activated” on November 28 and artists will begin building, installing, and creating in the space that week. Over the course of the three weeks, the gallery will evolve and take different shapes as more workshops occur and installations grow. Films are also being screened at night in the gallery, throughout the three-week period.

Neysa Grassi

Neysa Grassi: Foreign Language

September 8 – October 2, 2016/Rosenberg Gallery/ Locks Gallery Director Doug Schaller, MICA Exhibitions Director Gerald Ross, and acclaimed painter Neysa Grassi collaborate to feature a select number of paintings and drawings of Grassi from the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. A full color publication with an essay by MICA art history faculty member Jennie Hirsh, PhD, accompanies the exhibition. Born in Philadelphia, Grassi is well known for the luminous, layered surfaces of her oil paintings and gouaches. Painted, burnished, sanded, and then reworked again and again, the results are both meditative and archeological-like: a lustrous and earnest record of time and action.

Dan Meyers

Dan Meyers: Rusted Eyes

October 21 – November 13, 2016/Pinkard Gallery/The exhibition of photographs by MICA part-time faculty member Dan Meyers is a group of images reflecting personal encounters with the unremarkable. Grounded in a film-based mentality, these photographs linger in their unmanipulated renderings of examination while searching for the omitted.

Gallery Guide

2015-2016

Fletcher Mackey

N-Outta-Da-Deep: Fletcher Mackey:

January 22 - March 13, 2016/Pinkard Gallery/Faculty member Fletcher Mackey installed a mixed media exhibition with content derived from social phenomena and culture.

Gallery Guide
Just Press print

Just Press Print

December 11, 2015 - March 13, 2016/Meyerhoff Gallery/ Curated by Paul Laidler, Ph.D., the exhibition derived from Laidler's research fellowship at the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol, South West England. The exhibition highlighted the evolving nature of digital technology and its potential influence on established definitions and practices within the field of printmaking.

Exhibition Publication
Queer Threads

Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community

December 11, 2015 - March 13, 2016/Decker Gallery/ Curated by John Chaich. Presented by MICA and organized by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. The exhibition included 26 artists based in around the world, including New York, Copenhagen, Toronto, Cape Town and Buenos Aires, who use thread-based craft materials and techniques to examine the diversity of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer experiences.

Gallery Guide
Jan Razauskas

Jan Razauskas: Carbon Drawings

November 19, 2015 - January 10, 2016/Pinkard Gallery/ Foundation faculty member and alumna Jan Razauskas showed new drawings that combine flat images and volumetric forms in imagined, abstract scenarios. The images pursue the collapse of the distinction between likeness and presence through the use of cut shapes of carbon paper as both object and sign. Building a vocabulary of unique modules, repetitions, tracing and mirroring, Razauskas considers ideas of association and disconnect, absence and presence, and the replication and origin of the image.

Gallery Guide
Alain Corbel

Alain Corbel: The Garden of Kongolote, Graphic Novel Project

October 23 - November 15, 2015/Pinkard Gallery/ Faculty member Alain Corbel's upbringing on a small farm on the north coast of Brittany in France had a significant influence on his personal work. Now, as he travels personally and professionally, he carries with him the sense of place that he developed growing up on the farm. His solo exhibition, The Garden of Kongolote, showed part of the raw material produced in Maputo, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe.

Gallery Guide

2014-2015

Middleman Exhibition

Selfies: Over 50 Years of Raoul Middleman's Self Portraits

January 30 – March 15, 2015/Meyerhoff Gallery/In this solo show, visitors will glimpse an intimate view of the artist from his own perspective through self-portraits created throughout his more than 50-year career. A prolific painter, Middleman has created nearly 10,000 paintings during his career, with nearly one-tenth self-portraits. For the artist, the act of creating the self-portrait is reflective and part of his overall process for developing narratives in his paintings. Perhaps best known for his allegorical paintings, Middleman's generous use of paint and garish color capture the frenetic energy of the stories he depicts.

Gallery Guide
Hand Made Exhibition

HAND / MADE

January 30 – March 15, 2015/Decker Gallery/An art show juxtaposing an original 19th-century marble sculpture by artist and former MICA student William Henry Rinehart with 3-D, performance and video works by contemporary sculptors and interdisciplinary artists. HAND / MADE makes vital connections between traditional methods employed by artists working with 19th-century studio artisan teams and collaborative practices in contemporary studios.

Exhibition Publication
Carolyn Case Exhibition

Carolyn Case

January 21 – March 12, 2015/Pinkard Gallery/Foundation Department faculty member Carolyn Case's '97 (Mount Royal School of Art) field of art includes paintings that explore the idea of a "timeless paradise" and transcultural conceptions of immortality and the afterlife. Her designed landscapes draw on her international travels, including countries in Asia, where Japanese screens, Persian and Indian miniature painting, and India's Ajanta Caves paintings intrigued her.

Gallery Guide
Dan Dudrow Exhibition

Dan Dudrow: Faux Portraits

December 3, 2014 –January 11, 2015/Pinkard Gallery/In this exhibition, longtime faculty member Dan Dudrow will reveal new work for the first time at MICA that veers from his wellknown color-based abstraction to a series of equally colorful figurative work.

Gallery Guide
Jonathan Thomas Exhibition

Jonathan Thomas: Ten Minutes on a Foggy Night

November 7 – 23, 2014/Pinkard Gallery/Printmaking Department Chair Jonathan Thomas took more than a year to complete his project Ten Minutes on a Foggy Night, with the exhibition sharing the same name. Working with an array of subject matter culled from found materials and utilizing chance operations throughout his process, Thomas explores the multiple and often complex roles images have in peoples' lives and the connections they foster.

Gallery Guide
Ren Exhibition

Renaissanz Rzen: Artist In Exile

October 1 -14, 2014/Rosenberg Gallery/The show will feature the work of artist Warren Hynson, who works under the name Renaissanz Rzen. Hynson has spent over twenty years in prison, and is currently incarcerated in Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. He began painting after being inspired by the work of his fellow prison artists; his vibrant acrylic portraits of inmates help tell the story of his own struggle, and the struggles of his comrades in exile. Image attached.

2013-2014

Look Now Exhibition

Look Now: Photographs by MICA Photography Faculty

January 31 – March 16, 2014/Pinkard Gallery/ In conjunction with the SPE National Conference, a celebration of the photographic practice on March 6-9 in Baltimore, MICA’s Photography Department faculty will exhibit a selection of their work together for the first time. Look Now: Photographs by MICA Photography Faculty will showcase the broad spectrum of their vision as artists. The exhibition will feature work by Thomas Baird; Regina DeLuise, Photography Department chair; Jay Gould; Alexander Heilner, associate dean for design and media; Nate Larson, chair of the 2014 SPE National Conference; John McNeil, photography manager; Lynn Silverman; Laurie Snyder; Colette Veasey-Cullors ’96 (photography); and Jack Wilgus, faculty emeritus.

Basil Alkazzi

Basil Alkazzi: An Odyssey of Dreams: A Decade of Paintings 2003-2012

March 22 – April 20, 2014/Rosenberg Gallery/ Renowned British artist Basil Alkazzi’s large-scale gouaches on handmade paper are mystical abstract renderings of nature, reflecting the artist’s deep engagement in the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of paintings. In An Odyssey of Dreams, the viewer is transported on a magical mystery tour of a sensual world of soaring skyscapes, enchanting landscapes, and verdant flora and vegetation that is revelatory and uplifting.

Eck Exhibitions

The Amazing Johnny Eck

December 13, 2013 – March 16, 2014/Decker Gallery/ MICA presents a never-before-seen exhibition of personal objects, artifacts, and artworks by one of Baltimore’s most famous citizens, Johnny Eck. Though healthy, Eck was born with no lower half. Perhaps best known for his role as “the half-man” in Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932), Eck traveled throughout the United States and Canada, performing with his brother, Robert, until the late 50s.

Gallery Guide
Picture Window Exhibition

Picture Windows…The Painted Screens of Baltimore and Beyond

December 13, 2013 – March 16, 2014/ Meyerhoff Gallery/ Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) marks the centennial of Baltimore’s tradition of painting vivid images on row house screens with the exhibition PICTURE WINDOWS ... The Painted Screens of Baltimore and Beyond. Together with Maryland folklorist Elaine Eff, co-founder of the Painted Screen Society of Baltimore, MICA will present the first comprehensive painted screen exhibition to highlight more than 300 years and two dozen artists’ works from Europe and America. PICTURE WINDOWS is the first exhibition of its kind to show this beloved practical folk art alongside its antecedents from Europe and America, as well as today’s high-tech iterations.

Gallery Guide
Veasey-Cullors Exhibition

Colette Veasey-Cullors: Life Interpreted

November 22, 2013 – January 20, 2014/Pinkard Gallery/ Life interpreted represents Colette Veasey-Cullors’ ’96 (photography) visual journey in attempting to understand and reach a personal sense of achievement and fulfillment while balancing the many hats she wears in life, including mother, artist, wife, and educator. Within this series, Veasey-Cullors focuses on the struggle to preserve order within a personal environment as a means of perpetuating an internal order within the individual. Her belief is that if people can construct a sense of physical calm and order around them, then they have a greater opportunity to reach a broader and deeper sense of contentment in their relationships and life in general. She aims to visually contrast the mental and physical characteristics associated with a world, which at times, she feels can seem unorderly and rapidly moving. Veasey-Cullors’ goal for this series is to create a contemplative, visual space in which viewers embrace a sense of peace in an attempt to examine and understand their own chaos.

Gallery Guide
Garmey

Stephanie Garmey: Wetlands

October 18 –November 17, 2013/ Pinkard Gallery/ General fine arts faculty member Stephanie Garmey will explore the solitude of travel and place through nature. Looking at water, trees, plants, animals, and color will help translate the movement, rhythm, perspective, and time of place. Working with cut paper, drawing, encaustics, wood, and glass, several vignettes will be created throughout the gallery. The viewer will walk through these environments to evoke subtle and sometimes surprising shifts of moods and space.

Gallery Guide

2012-2013

Rowland Ricketts Installation

Rowland Ricketts: Keeping On

February 15 – March 17, 2013/Meyerhoff Gallery/Indiana-based artist Rowland Ricketts, like Lenore Tawney H’92, is an innovator in pushing his personal work and the textile field. Ricketts’ work comprises weaving, surface design, site installation, video and sound, utilizing natural dyes and historical processes to create contemporary textiles. Ricketts’ expansive practice as an artist traversing art, design and social practice while engaging new technologies aligns him with the newest generation of American fiber artists.

Gallery Guide
Tony Shore Installation

Tony Shore: Harry

January 25 – March 17, 2013/Pinkard Gallery/General fine arts faculty member Tony Shore ’93 (painting) has created a wide range of paintings over his lifetime, but one subject has continually reappeared in his work: his father. In this exhibition, Shore will showcase paintings of his father created over a 25-year period, chronicling his growth as an artist while documenting the aging process. Intimate and unabashed, the paintings reveal an inside glimpse of his father’s dignity, humor, and humanity. This will be Shore’s first solo exhibition since his father’s death in 2010.

Gallery Guide
Tawney Installation

Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For

December 7, 2012 – March 17, 2013/Decker Gallery/Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) will take part in the multi-venue exhibition Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For in honor of Lenore Tawney H’92 (1907–2007), a leading figure in the contemporary fiber arts movement. Two complementary exhibitions titled Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For, presented in conjunction with the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, will take place this winter: MICA will focus on the artist’s line-based work while University of the Arts in Philadelphia will highlight Tawney’s paper-focused work.

Press Release
Sandra Brownlee Installation

Sandra Brownlee: Keeping On

December 7, 2012 - March 17, 2013/Meyerhoff Gallery/Similar to Lenore Tawney H’92, Nova Scotia-based artist Sandra Brownlee experiments with the intersections between weaving, drawing and journaling. On the loom she builds fine white linen fields marked by shadowy figures and woven notations. Her approach is at once intuitive and devotional. “For thirty years I worked at the loom, fascinated by the ritual and orderly building of the fabric,” Brownlee explained.

Gallery Guide
Ellen Burchenal Installation

Ellen Burchenal: Sorrento Again

November 21, 2012 – January 13, 2013/Pinkard Gallery/General Fine Arts Department faculty member Ellen Burchenal digitally layers small drawings, paintings, and photographs into large inkjet prints inspired from her interest in Southern Italy, namely Baroque decoration. Through a selection of her work from the 1990s until now, Burchenal will attempt to discern the influence of living in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano in the Gulf of Naples, Italy best known for its eruption in AD 79 that led to the burying and destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii.

Gallery Guide
Phyllis Plattner Installation

Phyllis Plattner: Chronicles of War: Other People’s Pictures

September 28 – October 21, 2012/Pinkard Gallery/In Other People’s Pictures, faculty member Phyllis Plattner will exhibit paneled, altarpiece-shaped paintings based on art historic imagery and photo journalism. Made using oil paints and gold leaf, these paintings grow out of the profound impact of her experiences living for extended periods of time in foreign cultures—mainly in Chiapas, Mexico and Tuscany, Italy—as well as from her horror at the ubiquity of war in global history.

Gallery Guide

2011-2012

Bezalel Installation

Bezalel on Tour

February 10 – March 18, 2012/Leidy Atrium, Rosenberg and Falvey Hall Galleries/ The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is Israel’s oldest institute of higher education and a leading academy of art, design and architecture. To celebrate their 105th anniversary, the Academy has put together an exhibition that will travel throughout the U.S., starting in Baltimore at MICA.

Exhibition Publication
Under Cover Installation

Under Cover

January 27 – March 11, 2012/Decker Gallery/ This year, Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS) class, along with 11 artists, examine the continuously shifting definitions of shelter and privacy through the interdisciplinary group exhibition, Under Cover. Approximately 50 works of sculpture, photography and video explore how private dwellings and public spaces have begun to merge and how, as a result, concepts of and expectations for shelter, protection and privacy have been irrevocably altered. The class looks at how densely populated cities, surveillance of the public and digital overexposure of personal information have contributed to dissolving the boundary between public and private space. As public domain continues to advance, perhaps the only shelter left is in the privacy of the mind.

Exhibition Publication
Jason Sloan Installation

Jason Sloan: Signal to Noise

January 27 – March 1, 2012/Pinkard Gallery/Showcasing a broad selection of work from local and internationally recognized artists, Sight.Sound [Interaction] brings together art celebrating the language of interaction, new media technologies, and the aesthetics of experimentation

Gallery Guide
Common Object Installation

The Common Object

December 1, 2011 – March 11, 2012/Meyerhoff Gallery/Zeuxis still-life painters association and MICA have come together to present The Common Object, an exhibition of more than 60 diverse paintings that incorporate the same everyday object: a dishtowel. The word play with The Common Object, suggests both the subject matter as an ordinary dishtowel and that the towel was used in each painting—that is, it is common to each painting. This travelling exhibition features paintings by 37 Zeuxis artists, including former MICA students Richard Baker and Anthony Martino ’76 (general fine arts), as well as faculty member Mark Karnes and prior faculty members Stanley Friedman and Sharon Yates.

Press Release
Frederique Morrel Installation

Frédérique Morrel and Aaron Levin: Fall/Fail

October 7 – November 9, 2011/Rosenberg Gallery/ According to Parisian artists and couple Frédérique Morrel and Aaron Levin, Fall/Fail is an artistic adventure designed to explore the realms of humanity’s origins: Adam and Eve, the animals of the Garden of Eden, and paradise lost. A series of animals and human figures were constructed out of discarded vintage tapestries found in yard sales and thrift shops, serving as the artist’s solution to “re-enchant the world.”

Press Release
Paul Emmanuel Installation

Paul Emmanuel: Transitions

September 8 – October 2, 2011/Rosenberg Gallery/Paul Emmanuel: Transitions, a touring solo exhibition by the South African artist created to explore how the military has influenced and perpetuated notions of masculinity in his native country. Emmanuel’s works, will welcome viewers to meditate on transitory life stages,stimulate thoughts on patriarchy, and pose questions around perceptions of masculinity, the passage of time and the human condition

Press Release
Youngmi Organ Installation

End to End: Works by Youngmi Organ

November 18 - December 18, 2011/Pinkard Gallery/With an interest in everyday contemporary life, Organ’s exhibition will showcase at least 15 pieces that have been made by affixing strands of her hair to paper in tightly arranged, geometric compositions. Organ’s work reflects her understanding of what it means to live by carefully depicting thought processes through the rhythmic, symmetrical shapes of her drawings. In this case, Organ’s self-reflective process is made possible each morning when she brushes her hair, producing enough loose strands for that day’s work.

Gallery Guide

2010-2011

Dennis Farber Installation

Denny Farber: The Album Project

January 28 – March 13, 2011/Pinkard Gallery/Foundation faculty member Dennis Farber will present images and albums that revive the memory of those who died in the genocides of the past century.

Gallery Guide
Narcissism Installation

The Narcissism of Minor Differences

December 9, 2010 – March 13, 2011/Decker Gallery/The Narcissism of Minor Differences, an exhibition showcasing 18 acclaimed artists, including Francisco de Goya, Philip Guston and Sam Durant, that will explore the dark side of intolerance using art, historical artifacts and documentation. Through more than 40 objects and four installations, the exhibition will examine different types of intolerance by various groups: from the most overt to the benign and sublimated, from the kind of intolerance that excludes to the type of intolerance that kills.

Exhibition Publication
Valerie Piraino Installation

Valerie Piraino: Fidelity

February 18 – March 13, 2011/Meyerhoff Gallery/Accompanying The Narcissism of Minor Differences, three solo shows of MICA alumni work will run approximately one month each. Rwandan-born American Valerie Piraino ’04 (general fine arts), who works in media as varied as sculpture and photography, plans to share her current installation explorations consisting of family slides and shorthand text.

Press Release
Marc Robinson Installation

Marc Andre Robinson: Inheritance

January 14 – February 13, 2011/Meyerhoff Gallery/Accompanying The Narcissism of Minor Differences, three solo shows of MICA alumni work will run approximately one month each. New York sculptor Marc Andre Robinson ’02 (Rinehart School of Sculpture) will explore his South African background.

Press Release
Joe Lewis Installation

Joe Lewis III: The Word

December 9, 2010-January 9, 2011/Meyerhoff Gallery/Accompanying The Narcissism of Minor Differences, three solo shows of MICA alumni work will run approximately one month each. Critic, writer, scholar and internationally known visual artist Joseph Lewis III ’89 (Mount Royal School of Art), who creates art based on the theory that a practitioner can act as change agent, will broadly review intolerance through representational digital prints.

Press Release

Search for anything and everything at MICA: