Thursday, June 26, 2025
Three miles north of the Inner Harbor, by Johns Hopkins University’s main campus, is the Baltimore Museum of Art, home of the Matisse trove assembled by Claribel and Etta Cone, the painter’s “two Baltimore ladies.”
Both the Baltimore Museum of Art and its counterpart in the city’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, the Walters Art Museum, are rich in art from Europe and Asia. Yet in many ways their collections are complementary. The Walters is strong in ancient, Byzantine, Ethiopian, Islamic and pre-Columbian art; decorative arts; and books and manuscripts. Key holdings at the BMA: African art (but not Ethiopian); American art; modern and contemporary art; and photography.
Installation view of “Malcolm Peacock: a signal, a sprout.” Photo by Richard Selden.
The BMA opened a contemporary art wing in 1994, then renovated and relaunched the space — almost a separate small museum — in 2012. The most recent reinstallation, “Crosscurrents,” made its debut in February, highlighting the expanded collection’s global reach.
In line with a soon-to-conclude five-year initiative called “Turn Again to the Earth,” the reinstallation “also includes a broad focus on artworks exploring experiences of nature, ecological change and human exploitation and restoration of the environment.” The title comes from “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson, who earned her zoology master’s degree at Hopkins.
Igshaan Adams’s “NAGTREIS OP N VLIENDE PERD (a night journey on a winged horse). Photo by Richard Selden.
On view through Sept. 21 is the initiative’s current centerpiece, the ticketed exhibition “Black Earth Rising.” To reach it, you run smack into a tree trunk.
A guard is posted to make sure you don’t actually make contact. Even so, the installation “Malcolm Peacock: a signal, a sprout” — in the John Waters Rotunda, which separates European galleries from Antioch Court — will stop you in your tracks.
In the center of the rotunda is an eight-foot-tall foam, cement and wood construction representing the lower part of a giant redwood, its “bark” made of synthetic hair hand-braided by the artist, a marathoner who trained in the Pacific Northwest among the ancient trees. A few pages from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” are pinned to the “tree.” Playing continuously: an hourlong, six-channel recording of conversational snippets and Peacock’s breathing while running.
Now suitably prepared, you proceed around a corner of Antioch Court, displaying Syrian mosaics excavated in the 1930s, to enter “Black Earth Rising.” In three galleries and two projection rooms are works by more than a dozen artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American descent, including London-born, Lagos-raised Yinka Shonibare and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana, who died in January at age 85.
The “Black Earth” of the title is a translation of the Portuguese “terra preta,” an enriched soil managed for millennia by Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. Guest-curated by British cultural figure Ekow Eshun, the exhibition is a concentrated, three-dimensional dose of his coffee-table anthology “Black Earth Rising: Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Art,” which cites more than 150 artists.
The spring house/dairy where the video piece “My Cave Call” by Wangechi Mutu is on view. Photo by Richard Selden.
Four child-size sculptures by Shonibare from 2020 are reason enough for fans of this Young British Artist, now 62, to travel to Baltimore. The quartet of “Earth Kids” — “Fire Kid (Boy),” “Water Kid (Boy),” “Earth Kid (Girl) II” and “Air Kid (Boy)” — are inventive variations on a theme, each a fiberglass mannequin dressed in Shonibare’s signature wax-printed Ankara fabric with a small globe for a head.
Behind “Fire Kid (Boy)” in the first gallery is Quick-to-See Smith’s “Echo Map 1” of 2000 from the BMA’s collection, in which she takes Jasper Johns’s motif a step further, allowing Indigenous names for the land to bleed through the simplified U.S. map.
Two more standout works in this gallery: Antwerp-based Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga’s “Meanders” of 2024, an intricately woven, semi-abstract textile in earth tones; and Cape Town-born artist Igshaan Adams’s remarkable 2021 mixed-media piece — materials: wood, plastic, stone, metal and glass beads, polyester and nylon rope, chain, cotton twine — “NAGTREIS OP N VLIENDE PERD (a night journey on a winged horse).”
Can works more than 50 years old be contemporary? An artist of an earlier generation, Frank Bowling, 91, who emigrated to London from British Guiana at age 19, is represented in the second gallery by two paintings with the ghostly outlines of world maps: “Polish Rebecca” of 1971 and the spectacular, bright yellow “Mel Edward Decides” of 1968, name-checking the African American sculptor three years Bowling’s junior.
Also in this gallery, flanked by two of Shonibare’s “Kids,” is Havana-born Alejandro Piñero Bello’s “Viajando En La Franja Del Iris” (English: “Traveling on the Fringe of the Iris”) of 2024, a coastal desert landscape bursting with organic swirls of color. Seated in front of it on a bench, visitors can listen on headphones to “Ma’at Nadjartet Nun” (the title references ancient Egyptian gods), a 20-minute immersive soundscape by Baltimore composer Jamal R. Moore.
Looping in rooms off the galleries are two video pieces: the four-minute “Mnemonics of Shape and Reason” of 2021, a poetic, visually layered work by Sky Hopinka of the Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians in Washington State; and the 10-minute “from the forest to the concrete (to the forest)” of 2019 by Alberta Whittle, a Barbadian now working in Glasgow, in which short episodes with five “players” are juxtaposed with footage from Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, complete with passages from Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel “Parable of the Sower.”
The third video of “Black Earth Rising” is presented on the museum grounds in a spring house/dairy designed around 1812 by neoclassical architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, relocated from a Maryland plantation.
This 12-minute piece from 2021 is “My Cave Call” by Wangechi Mutu, who divides her time between Brooklyn and Nairobi (now the scene of anti-government protests). In the video, filmed near Mount Suswa in Kenya’s Rift Valley, she takes on the role of a shaman, her arms attached to cattle horns.
In a conversation published in Interview Magazine in December of 2020, Mutu told American artist Carrie Mae Weems: “I try to put these objects [things she collected from the garden and the beach] together in the form of characters, in the form of these spirits that can speak of a place and a time that is probably in the future, when we are able to live in harmony with one another, in harmony with the land, and in harmony with what literally has created us. I think it has something to do with Kenya being one of the areas where humans first became human.”
Providing encounters with art and nature are adjacent sculpture gardens named for Alan and Janet Wurtzburger and Ryda and Robert H. Levi, where more than 30 sculptures by artists including Calder, Caro, Lipchitz, Miró, Nevelson, Noguchi, Rodin and Tony Smith are set along paths on nearly three acres of greenery.
Opening onto the gardens is Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen, named for the grandmother of chef John Shields (and possibly for former Baltimorean Gertrude Stein, friend of the Cone sisters). On Thursday nights, when the museum stays open until 9 p.m., Gertrude’s offers a $20 entrée special and a $36 three-course meal.
Black Earth Rising
Through Sept. 21
Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Thursday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
artbma.org