It's rare for a work of conceptual art to touch the emotions as strongly as it engages the intellect. Yet Laura Burns' homage to the "disappeared women" of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, where an epidemic of rape and murder has claimed the lives of hundreds of female factory workers over the past 15 years, is surely one of the most compelling shows to appear in Baltimore this year.
Beautifully installed at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson by exhibitions director Jed Dodds and the artist, Laura Burns: Homenaje is a model of simplicity. It consists of about 90 8 1/2 -by- 11-inch identically formatted portraits of women, which are mounted on the wall at eye level in a single row that goes around the gallery.
