Museum Of Art

Students from all Baltimore County public elementary schools and their families are invited to participate in the annual Project Quality Time event 2-5 p.m. Dec. 11 at The Baltimore Museum of Art. The free event will include self-guided tours and a Free Family Sundays hands-on workshop in the museum's classroom.

Moving through the Baltimore Museum of Art 's exhibit of work by the 2011 Baker Artist Awards provides an experience akin to that in the film "Pleasantville. " You start in living color and, before you know it, you're swallowed up in a black-and-white world. That cool, if slightly unsettling, transformation is achieved by an installation called "Interior/Exterior" by Gary Kachadourian, who has filled nearly every square inch of a gallery in the museum. "I've only done corners of rooms before," the artist said.

A teenage girl in a two-piece bathing suit stands on a sunlit beach, leaning slightly on one hip as she stares at the camera. From a distance, it could be an innocuous vacation snap shot, albeit one blown up to nearly 5-by-4-feet proportions. But the more you look and the closer you get to Rineke Dijkstra's color print, "Hel. Poland, August 12, 1988," the deeper and stranger the photograph becomes. Maybe it's the bandage placed over the girl's navel, or the half-friendly expression on her face, but something tells you that all is not quite what it seems in this portrait against the sea and sky. The eye takes in more and more of what is there, and starts to fill in what is not there.

Picasso exhibit debuts in U.S. Where: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond When: Feb. 19-May 15 What: A traveling exhibition of essential works from Pablo Picasso's personal collection, on its U.S. debut, is making its only East Coast stop at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in February. "Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musee National Picasso, Paris" will include paintings, drawings, sculptures and etchings by the artist and serves as a retrospective covering each notable artistic period of his eight-decade career.

At age 82, Bennard B. Perlman, the noted Baltimore artist, critic, author, professor and lecturer, is as busy as ever and shows no sign of slowing down. The other day he called to say he was looking forward to the BMA's "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade" exhibition, which opens Oct. 17 . The forthcoming exhibition has special significance for Perlman, who was a close friend of Warhol's when the two were painting and design classmates from 1945 to 1949 at Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh.

Nancy Christie, a retired interior designer and manager of the Baltimore Museum of Art 's gift shop, died July 21 of complications from Alzheimer's disease complications at the Blakehurst retirement community in Towson. The former Roland Park resident was 85. Born Nancy Kidder in Charlottesville, Va., she was a 1943 graduate of St. Anne's Belfield School. She earned a degree from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and later opened an interior decorating business in Charlottesville.

Martha Leich Parkhurst, who founded the Baltimore Museum of Art's development office and was a voice for governmental arts support, died Tuesday of pneumonia at the Blakehurst Retirement Community. She was 97. Born Martha Leich in Evansville, Ind., she earned an economics degree at Wellesley College and worked for a Wall Street investment firm. She married her boss, Martin Pfahler. After his death a decade later, she married Baltimore attorney George V. Parkhurst. The couple lived for many years in Roland Park.

On July 4, 2009, E A memorial service will be held Tuesday, July 21 at 11 A.M. in the chapel at St. David's Church, 4700 Roland Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21210. In lieu of flowers contributions in her memory may be made to St. David's Church at the above address or to support the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Contributions to the BMA may be sent to Development Office, Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218.

If there is a common theme linking the finalists for the Janet & Walker Sondheim Prize, it may be that the methods of creating art can be as important as the art itself. "This year is a very process-oriented, installation-based type of show," says Gary Kachadourian, visual arts coordinator with the Baltimore Office for Promotion in the Arts, which created the prize to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Artscape in 2006. "It is a good mix of people, representing a good mix of ideas." Those ideas include finding the artistic potential in dirt, photocopied books, recycled materials, barren parking lots, a polar bear's heart rate and even vintage cartoon character Mr. Magoo.

David Winfield Scott, a noted American artist and author and former Eastern Shore resident who was the founding director of the National Museum of American Art, died of multiple organ failure Monday at an Austin, Texas, hospice. He was 92. Dr. Scott was born in Fall River, Mass., and raised in Claremont, Calif., where his father was a professor at Pomona College. After graduating from the Webb School in Claremont, he studied painting with Millard Sheets, a prominent California watercolorist, who became a formative influence on the young artist.