Gallery

If you didn't get a chance to attend the recent Black and White Party, a fund-raiser for the Enoch Pratt Free Library, you can get a taste of the event at this Baltimore Sun photo gallery. The event, whose theme was "Evening in Paris," was organized by the Pratt Contemporaries, a group of young professional who support the library.  Here's another Pratt event worth attending: this Saturday's Booklovers' Breakfast with Michael Eric Dyson. It will be held at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, 700 Aliceanna St., from 8:30 a.m. to noon.

The headless figure in the "cow face" yoga position, made of porcelain clay, still needs its arm fixed and a few touch-ups before Lauren Siminski hollows it out and sands it. For now, it sits calmly on a table, surrounded by other projects in Century High School's art room, awaiting its time to be baked and glazed. The figure will be the largest of the eight statues of women doing yoga poses that Siminski will create for her AP portfolio, and it'll be the one she presents at the end of her high school seminar at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. "It's going to be on display, and I didn't want it to be really small," said Siminski, 17. "Most of the people are doing paintings.

Group exhibits tend to feature an assortment of subjects treated in several different mediums. The "All Member Holiday Show" at the Artists' Gallery in downtown Columbia showcases local artists who instinctively seem to favor the mediums best-suited for their individual messages. Bonita Glaser's watercolor "Deep Into Winter," for instance, is a landscape that is compositionally anchored by a barn. What really makes this watercolor hold your attention, though, are the blue shadows cast against a snowy field.

War is hell, but it seems beautiful in the textiles hanging on the walls of Washington's National Gallery of Art in the exhibit "The Invention of Glory: Afonso V and the Pastrana Tapestries. " Celebrating that Portuguese Catholic king's victory over a Muslim army in North Africa in 1471, they're a gloriously woven testament to his military might. "The tapestries are a political statement about the power of the king, but they're also an expression of the Portuguese people," said Nino Brito, Portuguese ambassador to the United States, at the media unveiling of this temporary exhibit.

The Old Masters have come to Laurel. Some of the most memorable works of Boticelli, da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, Dali, Wyeth — among others — have been installed at a new museum on Main Street. Ok, so they're not original works. But the high-quality reproductions, framed and hung in a floor-to-ceiling museum presentation, make an impressive display at a newly remodeled section of the Laurel Art Center. Earlier this month the Main Street art store unveiled its new "museum" at an invitation-only open house attended by some of its most loyal customers.

Engaging, museum-level work fills two venues in Baltimore. Maryland Art Place has assembled a remarkable survey of minimalist painters from different areas and generations, while C. Grimaldis Gallery is offering a collection of pieces by five exceptional artists who produced work locally. The Grimaldis show, "Five Maryland Icons," provides a richly varied experience — and, for those in the market, a fairly expensive one, with most of the pieces priced from $3,500 to $125,000.

Before Celebration heads out on a "short southern tour" (the band's words on its blog; the stops include Atlanta, Chapel Hill and more), the group will play Metro Gallery Saturday. It's been a big year for the Baltimore trio, with the well-received release of "Hello Paradise" acting as both a step-forward artistically and a commitment to presenting the music how they want to (i.e. the only way to get a CD copy was by buying the vinyl, too). Watch the video for "Honeysuckle Blue" below.

You need to use your imagination as much as your eyes when viewing the three-artist exhibit "Seeing Differently: Abstractions" at the Bernice Kish Gallery at Slayton House. Although these artists provide the occasional figurative reference, they mostly rely on colorful abstract forms to prompt you to see things in the mind's eye. Look quickly at Karen Carpenter 's acrylic painting "Flamenco" and you see a jagged-edged red form set against a yellow background. So far, so abstract.

Listings are accepted on a space-available basis. Deadline is 5 p.m. Thursday prior to date of publication at the latest. To submit contest items, mail to Contests, Patuxent Publishing Co. Editorial, 501 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, MD 21278; email hccalendar@patuxent.com ; fax 410-332-6336; or call 410-332-6497. Howard County Arts Council Call for Entries - Seeking submissions for its biennial juried exhibit, Art HoCo 2011. Entrants must be 18-years-old or older who live, work or study in Howard County.

For Demetrios "Dimitri" Fotos, the challenge could not have felt more natural. An Annapolis photographer, he learned the power of reading as a child when his father took dozens of adult-education courses at St. John's College. Yet it was the visual arts Dimitri fell in love with at age 13, and that passion has never waned. So when organizers at the Mitchell Gallery at St. John's told him of their latest plan — to stage an exhibit for which artists would create works "inspired by books" — his mind went off like a strobe flash.