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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More than 10,000 items in the Walters Art Museum — about a third of the total collection — can now be viewed and downloaded online for free, without copyright restrictions. The museum's collection is "basically public domain," said Dylan Kinnett, manager of web and social media at the Walters. "Something like this would be less likely at a museum with contemporary art, where the artist is still alive or the estate is still active. " The free online accessibility, which complements the Walters' free admission policy, allows viewers to see works spanning several eras, from ancient Egypt and the Americas to 18th- and 19th-century Europe.

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.

The Baltimore Museum of Art on Tuesday night selected Synthesis, a Columbia-based firm, to serve as project manager and owner's representative for a three-year, $24 million renovation. The museum's board of trustees voted unanimously to hire the company, which also served as the project manager for the American Brewery conversion in East Baltimore and for the expansion of the Maryland Science Center . As part of its contract, Synthesis will coordinate the selection of the architectural and construction management firms and will assist the museum in completing the project on schedule and on budget.

The Baltimore Museum of Art 's west wing will be closed for renovations for more than a year, starting on Jan. 17, 2011. The Baltimore Museum of Art 's west wing will be closed for renovations for more than a year, starting on Jan. 17, 2011. The closure is part of the museum's $24 million renovation plan that will upgrade the buildings currently housing the contemporary art, American art and African art collections. Among other things, the west wing renovations will include the addition of state of the art lighting in the 16 galleries, plus the construction of a black box space dedicated to showcasing new media.

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.

New York contemporary art dealer Brooke Alexander will speak at the Baltimore Museum of Art on "Collecting Contemporary Art" tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. His lecture will be given in conjunction with the museum's contemporary print fair Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., at which 20 East Coast dealers will offer prints. Call 396-6345.Among dealers participating will be Mr. Alexander, B. R. Kornblatt Gallery, Robert Brown Contemporary Art and Mary Ryan Gallery. Artists whose work will be for sale include John Baldessari, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Susan Rothenberg, Pat Steir and Frank Stella.

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.