Contemporary Art

Peter Walsh, Baltimore artist, critic and curator, will lecture on the state of contemporary art in Baltimore at 8 p.m. Oct. 4 at Halcyon Gallery, 909 Fell St.Walsh has just received a $20,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Called "Subversive Acts: Baltimore Aesthetics and the Role of Criticism in Tiny Town," his lecture will draw on Walsh's knowledge of the local art scene and on the essay he wrote for a show he curated at Artscape 1992.The lecture will be free and open to the public.

One artist began to paint after her mother was murdered by her brother when she was 14 years old. As an adult, she's obsessed with drawing circles, a infinite shape that begins but never ends. Another woman, also a painter, depicts barrier after barrier: wooden fences and chain-link fences, closed doors and shutters. But she also depicts the air pockets between those metal links and the holes in the slabs, rendering not just the impediments but a way through them. A third thinks of herself as a builder, someone who makes things.

A conceptual art scholar with a flair for communication has been hired to oversee the contemporary art collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art and to develop exhibitions attractive to broad audiences, museum administrators announced yesterday. Chris Gilbert, an associate curator at Iowa's Des Moines Art Center who has organized shows on topics from Scottish painter Chad McCail to an exploration of identity in sports and spectacle, will step into the post in August. He replaces Helen Molesworth, who resigned last November to become chief curator for exhibitions at the Wexner Center in Ohio.

On her first official day of work, Julia Marciari-Alexander heads down to the basement of the Walters Art Museum to say hello to a room full of squirmy 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds attending summer camp. A girl with curly, brown hair looks up from the strand of wire she's twisting with a pair of pliers to form the framework of a small animal. "What does a museum director do?," she asks Marciari-Alexander. All of Baltimore's arts community is waiting to find out how the Walters' new leader will answer that question.

THE "museum without walls" or collection now has the former. This should not bog the Contemporary Museum down too much from the cutting-edge exhibitions it has mounted for a decade in other spaces, often in collaboration with radically different institutions.Its new Centre Street home, which opened Saturday, enlivens the Mount Vernon Cultural District, which is visibly on the rebound from urban ills."Museum," is not the right word in physical description, connoting rooms, stairways, a menu of exhibitions.

Just when you thought you'd finally got the hang of the art of our time, along comes Chris Gilbert, contemporary art curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, with three "sound installations" that challenge conventional definitions of art all over again. Sound Politics, the third of four experimental exhibitions in Cram Sessions, the museum's contemporary art series, explores the political dimension of pure sound "both as a device for claiming public space and, alternatively, as a means for creating and encouraging cultures of dissent," Gilbert writes in the show's tabloid-sized brochure.

NEW YORK - Today's grand reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in completely renovated quarters that include a spectacular new wing by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi does more than vastly increase the floor space of that venerable institution. The $858 million project - including $425 million for construction costs - is also a concrete expression of how the museum interprets its mission as home to the world's pre-eminent collection of modern art, and a statement of how it will balance the art of our own time with that of the early modernist period that gave MoMA its original reason for being.

A recent trip to New York suggests that the contemporary art world is in love with photographs, whether they're scanned from a computer, painted with a brush or made the old-fashioned way with a camera. Mine was admittedly a hurried sample - a couple of big museum exhibits, plus the annual Armory Show, also known as the International Fair of New Art, and a smattering of galleries. But I couldn't help noticing the ubiquity of photographic imagery in the most ambitious venues. The Museum of Modern Art, for instance, is mounting a major retrospective of the German-born painter Gerhard Richter, whose work alternates between abstract expressionist-style gestural painting and figurative canvases based on photographs.

Avant-garde, up to the minute, cutting edge - all these phrases have been used to describe contemporary art. But what is contemporary? Is it art that was made since World War II? Since last week? Being made as you watch? A new series of exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art wrestles with precisely that issue. Entitled Cram Sessions, this series of four informal, month-long presentations put together by Chris Gilbert, the BMA's new curator of contemporary art, invites viewers to both experience and participate in the art of our time as it is being created.

These are heady days at Baltimore's Goya-Girl Press, which six years after its founding is distinguishing itself in the international art world as the Little Gallery That Could. Last month, owner Martha Macks and her staff were in New York to participate in the annual Armory Show, also known as the International Fair of New Art, the premier seasonal showcase for contemporary art. Not only was this Goya-Girl's first time at the prestigious event, but Macks' gallery was also one of a mere handful of non-New-York-based U.S. galleries selected to display their wares alongside those from Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, London and Vienna.

With its bell tower, arched windows and handsome red-brick facade, the structure at 1427 Light St. looks like what it once was — an elementary school. Nothing about the 1890 building suggests that for the past 33 years, School 33 has been one of Baltimore's premier showcases for contemporary local art. That's about to change, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation that will help enhance the reputation of the nonprofit, city-run arts group with its neighbors, throughout the city and nationwide.

Next weekend, visitors to the Baltimore Art Museum's newly renovated Contemporary Wing may find themselves staring up at a hole in the ceiling, their mouths gaping open like fish. They'll have been hooked by a central feature of the $6.5 million building project - artist Sarah Oppenheimer's playful, gravity-defying illusion with the enigmatic name "W-120301. " And who would blame them for staring? How often can we watch someone appear to walk up a wall? Oppenheimer knocked holes in walls and cut through ceiling to change the architecture of the Baltimore Museum of Art . And, that's not a bad metaphor for museum director Doreen Bolger's goal to knock down the walls between the museum and the community.

For the Contemporary Museum , which abruptly announced last month that it was suspending operations, the challenge going forward may be implicit in its name: How does it stay contemporary? The museum began exhibiting cutting-edge art in Baltimore 23 years ago, helping to create an appetite for nontraditional works. Now it hopes to reinvent itself in an increasingly crowded cultural landscape. "Things have changed from those days," said Rebecca Hoffberger, whose opening in 1995 of the American Visionary Art Museum on Key Highway is one such change.

There are only two weeks left to bid adieu to Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning and all those other modernists whose brilliant, often challenging works fill the Baltimore Museum of Art 's West Wing. Only two weeks left to stand underneath "Flower Observatory," Olafur Eliasson's massive steel sculpture, and be awed one more time by the magical starscape revealed inside. The 16-year-old West Wing, where a substantial portion of the BMA's valuable contemporary art collection is showcased, is about to undergo an extensive yearlong makeover.

One way to counter the heat is with a jolt of cool contemporary art, and exhibits at two commercial venues — C. Grimaldis Gallery in Mount Vernon, Jordan Faye Contemporary in Federal Hill — conveniently provide such relief. For good measure, the Jordan Faye gallery is also throwing a block party Saturday afternoon. "That seemed like a great summer thing to do," says founder and owner Jordan Faye Block. This sort of gesture has helped make the gallery a good fit for the neighborhood since opening 11 months ago in a handsome 1880s building that originally housed a branch of the Enoch Pratt Library.

When Elise Siegel, the owner and curator of the intimate Positron Gallery in Mount Vernon, says her focus is contemporary art, she means contemporary. "My whole idea was to come up with a theme for each exhibit and have the artists make their art interpreting that theme in the month before the show. They can lie," she says with a laugh, "but they're supposed to create it in that time." Paul Maier, one of eight local artists in Positron's current exhibit, calls Siegel's approach "a wonderful challenge.

A director of a New York university gallery known for her ability to communicate with both artists and audiences has been hired by the Baltimore Museum of Art to curate contemporary art exhibitions and to oversee the reinstallation of the museum's contemporary art wing.Helen Molesworth, an assistant professor and the director of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, will begin her new job in January. She will step into a curatorial position unfilled since early 1998 -- when Brenda Richardson resigned after holding the job for 23 years.

IN A SEMINAL 1971 essay, historian Linda Nochlin observed that art "occurs in a social situation, is an integral element of social structure, and is mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions," such as art schools, museums and the marketplace.Nochlin's essay was titled "Why There Are No Great Women Artists," and it sought not only to amend the history of art with what had been left out, but also to question how such omissions had been made in the first place.In doing so, Nochlin found it necessary to re-examine the established "canon" of art masterpieces and the ideological assumptions underlying it. Her work laid the foundation for a new, feminist art criticism that has revolutionized the very definition of the terms "art" and "artist," "exhibition" and "viewer."

The Baltimore Museum of Art unveiled its largest-ever fundraising campaign yesterday, a five-year, $65 million effort to continue its popular free-admission policy and better showcase its collections. The campaign also includes funding to reopen a front entrance that's been locked for more than a quarter-century, once again allowing visitors to climb the 27 stone steps famed architect John Russell Pope included in his 1929 design. "This is really a campaign that, I hope, will make this institution financially secure and will transform it into a much more meaningful place for the citizens of Maryland to visit," said campaign co-chair Charles W. Newhall III, a former head of the museum's board of directors.

Robert Rauschenberg, the multifaceted artist who pioneered a new sense of openness and unlimited possibility in American painting, sculpture, photography and printmaking, died Monday at his home in Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82. Mr. Rauschenberg was an artistic polymath whose interests spanned the visual arts, music and dance. He was most famous for transforming ordinary objects such as bedsheets, newspaper scraps and stuffed animals into mischievously ingenious creations that defied conventional notions of what artworks should be. "He had an extraordinary understanding of the potential of everyday objects to redefine the art of today," said Darcie Alexander, senior curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. "It's almost impossible to trace the legacy of someone like Rauschenberg, whose presence is still being felt in the work of artists today."