Untitled

Nas Untitled Sun Grade: B- Oops, he did it again. Nas managed to get pop and hip-hop circles buzzing over an album title before a beat or rhyme could be heard from it. The last time the New York rapper did this was in 2006, when he declared in the title of his eighth CD Hip Hop is Dead. When Nas announced the original title for the follow-up (an all-too-familiar racial epithet of various usage), he fell under more scrutiny, as articles and urban music blogs tightly tracked the album's status.

Alexey Titarenko's black-and-white photographs conjure up gray areas between motion and inertia, living and getting by, past and present. The images haunt, and are haunted. For the third time since 2003, Baltimore's C. Grimaldis Gallery is presenting a Titarenko exhibit. This one focuses on the place where the 50-year-old Russian photographer was born — known then as Leningrad and, since the fall of the Soviet government, as St. Petersburg. The photographer, whose works have been exhibited widely and are now in museums in Europe and the U.S., started taking pictures in the 1970s but stayed largely underground until perestroika allowed for freer artistic expression.

From a distance, the painting looks like somebody's version of hell. Brushstrokes of deep red and yellow cover the canvas and seem to flicker like flames. But looking more closely, I realize that the dabs and dashes of paint actually are small figures. There may be thousands of them: tiny men, women and children, their bodies painted with frenetic intensity in red, yellow, purple, blue and black oils until they fill 128 square feet of canvas. Some of the figures are nude; some are wearing clothing so carefully rendered that wrinkles in the fabric can be seen.

The Maryland Institute College of Art is awash in absorbing, occasionally provocative, exhibits these days. As for the provocative, consider "In This, I Believe," a juried show on view through Sunday with works by students, faculty and staff that address issues of faith and spirituality. It's part of MICA's Unity Week, an annual project started in 2008 to focus on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A mix of reactions to the subject matter can be detected in this display, which starts in the lobby of the Brown Center and moves to a corridor upstairs.

UNTITLED, by Christopher Wool, is a 8-by-5-foot piece of white aluminum with the word "terrorist" on it in black stenciled letters. It was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1990. After Sept. 11, visitors to the BMA began complaining about Untitled and breaking down in tears after seeing it. So, on Sept. 15, the BMA chose to remove the painting, claiming it was "disturbing." Soon after, Untitled was put back in place with a plaque giving the BMA's interpretation of the painting.

A walk along West Centre Street might provide the usual downtown stimulus these days - the whooshing noise of traffic, the sight of pedestrians coming and going - but head east across Cathedral, and you're liable to feel, for a moment, as if you've stepped off the curb into quite another realm. A sense of space and emptiness, an odd calm, beckons the eye upward. High above the street, anchored to a blank wall, a vinyl mural - 24 feet high, 36 feet across, bolted in place to minimize flapping in the wind - depicts, across a simple field of gray and white, a single, open hand.

After his newspaper business failed, Whitman started on his best known work, "Leaves of Grass." It contains 12 untitled poems with a preface.The Civil War was a catalyst for other writings of Whitman's. He published his diary notes and sketches in "Memoranda During the War." He saw the effects of war firsthand through his enlisted brother.Much of Whitman's writing is on the cycle of life and death. He also used the Italian opera as an influence for his poetry. Whitman will be remembered as one of the first poets to use free verse.

Robert Courtwright's best collages, at Grimaldis, have nuanced surfaces with subtle modulations of a single color that evoke a sense of serenity. They can also be "read" for meaning in a couple of ways. But at times there's not a lot of staying power to them; some grow in the mind, others just stop.Courtwright cuts rectangular pieces of paper from other sources -- magazines, journals -- and paints them. He arranges them in rectangular grids on a backing -- say, six across and five down.Because these pieces had been printed with words and images, which the paint has not completely covered, one can see things bleeding through the red or the blue of the surface paint.

"Personal Vision/Diverse Images: An Exhibition of Recent Sculptural Glass" (through May 31) might seem a strange choice for the National Museum of Ceramic Art. But a look in the dictionary reveals that the word ceramic can refer to "the manufacture of any product [as earthenware, porcelain, tile, brick, glass, vitreous enamels . . .] made essentially from a non-metallic mineral by firing at high temperatures." You're never too old to learn.The 44 examples gathered for this show may not cover all the bases of contemporary glassmaking, but they constitute an attractive group of sculptural (that is, non-functional)

Printmaking is alive and well, and so is abstraction, in the Maryland Institute's latest show, "Collector's Choice: A Selection from Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop."Blackburn, a member of the Institute faculty and a printmaker himself, has a workshop in New York. The show has been selected from his collection of the prints made there by a number of artists, and his taste tends toward abstraction.Among the artists, we will all recognize Grace Hartigan, whose lithograph "Butterfly Woman" has her characteristic dynamic energy, fluid line, color sense and vivid imagery.

Nas Untitled Sun Grade: B- Oops, he did it again. Nas managed to get pop and hip-hop circles buzzing over an album title before a beat or rhyme could be heard from it. The last time the New York rapper did this was in 2006, when he declared in the title of his eighth CD Hip Hop is Dead. When Nas announced the original title for the follow-up (an all-too-familiar racial epithet of various usage), he fell under more scrutiny, as articles and urban music blogs tightly tracked the album's status.

Mellencamp to rock for free at Final Four Hoosier rocker John Mellencamp will take the stage in Indianapolis' Monument Circle on April 2 to perform a free concert during the NCAA's Final Four. The concert will take place in between the NCAA men's basketball semifinals on April 1 and the championship game on April 3, Mellencamp's publicist, Bob Merlis, told the Indianapolis Star. Mellencamp, 54, is a native of Seymour, Ind., who now lives near Bloomington. He's also an Indiana University basketball fan. "He's out of his mind for basketball and CBS is using `R.O.

Talk of a year-round TV season - with new shows popping up any old time and not just the fall - hasn't affected spring's pilot season. Two-thirds of the roughly 100 pilots under way will be shelved. But what has gotten the green light so far gives a hint at what the networks are interested in. In a year when a quirky new scripted program, Desperate Housewives, proved it could vault over reality shows to rank No. 1, there's hope for network shows with new ideas - though there's no shortage of the usual suspects proposed.

A walk along West Centre Street might provide the usual downtown stimulus these days - the whooshing noise of traffic, the sight of pedestrians coming and going - but head east across Cathedral, and you're liable to feel, for a moment, as if you've stepped off the curb into quite another realm. A sense of space and emptiness, an odd calm, beckons the eye upward. High above the street, anchored to a blank wall, a vinyl mural - 24 feet high, 36 feet across, bolted in place to minimize flapping in the wind - depicts, across a simple field of gray and white, a single, open hand.

UNTITLED, by Christopher Wool, is a 8-by-5-foot piece of white aluminum with the word "terrorist" on it in black stenciled letters. It was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1990. After Sept. 11, visitors to the BMA began complaining about Untitled and breaking down in tears after seeing it. So, on Sept. 15, the BMA chose to remove the painting, claiming it was "disturbing." Soon after, Untitled was put back in place with a plaque giving the BMA's interpretation of the painting.

Cameron Crowe, the phenomenally successful author of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and writer-director of Say Anything and Jerry Maguire, has been doing double duty this month -- promoting both Vanilla Sky, his big-star remake of the Spanish movie Open Your Eyes, and the director's-edition DVD of his most personal film to date, Almost Famous. And though Crowe is the only major movie writer-director who started out as a teen reporter for Rolling Stone, he's not an MTV addict but a loopy traditionalist.

Everything is relative, and how a work of art strikes you depends partly on where you're coming from. The works of three artists in the current Grimaldis show of drawings by sculptors make the point well.Take the Richard Serra drawing: a black rectangle of oil paint stick, centered at the bottom of a white piece of paper. That's all. Pretty austere, right?Ah, but let's approach it a bit differently. There are three artists in this show whose works consist of black images on white pieces of paper: Ulrich Ruckriem, Jene Highstein and Serra.

In a book on the works of Bruno Romeda, the Italian sculptor featured in this month's show at C. Grimaldis Gallery, essayist Alan Jones suggests that Romeda wants his work to be seen not in a gallery setting but outdoors. There, his open bronze triangles and squares and circles can interact with the landscape or the cityscape."The desire to plant his works squarely in the world itself, and to expose them to the forces of the elements, to measure up to or become part of, lies at the heart of Romeda's ambition," writes Jones.

From a distance, the painting looks like somebody's version of hell. Brushstrokes of deep red and yellow cover the canvas and seem to flicker like flames. But looking more closely, I realize that the dabs and dashes of paint actually are small figures. There may be thousands of them: tiny men, women and children, their bodies painted with frenetic intensity in red, yellow, purple, blue and black oils until they fill 128 square feet of canvas. Some of the figures are nude; some are wearing clothing so carefully rendered that wrinkles in the fabric can be seen.

After his newspaper business failed, Whitman started on his best known work, "Leaves of Grass." It contains 12 untitled poems with a preface.The Civil War was a catalyst for other writings of Whitman's. He published his diary notes and sketches in "Memoranda During the War." He saw the effects of war firsthand through his enlisted brother.Much of Whitman's writing is on the cycle of life and death. He also used the Italian opera as an influence for his poetry. Whitman will be remembered as one of the first poets to use free verse.