BALTIMORE, MD.- The Baltimore Museum of Art opened a suite of four solo exhibitions by some of today’s leading contemporary artists: William Cordova, Beatrice Glow, Elle Pérez, and Salman Toor. The presentations, which opened in April and May, capture the ways in which these artists are exploring and revealing ideas and issues relevant to individual and communal experience, from examinations of structures of power to intimate portrayals of identity, and to the amplification of voices suppressed across history. The artists also employ a wide range of formal and technical approaches within photography, painting, sculpture, mixed-media installation, and immersive works, reflecting the boundary-pushing nature of each of their practices. Together, the exhibitions highlight the significance of artists’ voices within our social and cultural dialogues and understandings. Specific details about each of the exhibitions, including opening and closing dates, follow below.
In addition to this suite of special exhibitions, nine galleries of the BMA’s recently reinstalled contemporary wing, titled How Do We Know the World?, incorporate approximately 27 new works among the 55 objects that center how artists engage with the historic, social, political, and environmental constructs that shape our world. The installation, which is on view through September 2024, is organized around themes relating to expressions of care, progress, wayfinding, self-possession, witnessing, reckoning, and legacy. In April, new acquisitions of works by Emma Amos, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Leonardo Drew, Taha Heydari, Shaun Leonardo, and Woody De Othello will be incorporated into the presentation. Several works are by artists with connections to Baltimore, including Jerrell Gibbs, Linn Meyers, Soledad Salamé, Stephen Towns, and James Voshell. How Do We Know the World? is co-curated by Jessica Bell Brown and Leila Grothe, both BMA Associate Curators of Contemporary Art.
“The exhibitions of works by William Cordova, Beatrice Glow, Elle Pérez, and Salman Toor offer our audiences an exciting roster of experiences that highlight artistic innovation and that engage with astute explorations of the world we inhabit. I am certain that visitors will be compelled by both the aesthetic quality and intricacy of the installations, and by the dialogues and ideas that they put forward,” said Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator. “The upcoming group of shows also speaks to the BMA’s ongoing commitment to present a broad and diverse range of artists contributing to the development and evolution of art history.”
Elle Pérez: Devotions
April 24, 2022 – March 19, 2023
Elle Pérez: Devotions debuts a recent body of work by Elle Pérez with 13 photographs created between 2019 and 2021. The exhibition explores the intimacy of relationship building, creating space to reflect on how we navigate ourselves in relation to others and the world. Pérez’s carefully composed images dwell in moments of grief and care, pain and desire, self-exploration, and transformation. Amidst recurring motifs of water, touch, friendship, and BDSM, intimacy is also conveyed through striking choices in proximity, scale, color, and light. The works are being presented at the BMA as an immersive experience, connecting the John Waters Rotunda and adjacent galleries. Organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, the exhibition is curated at the BMA by Cecilia Wichmann, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.
Elle Pérez (born Bronx, New York, 1989) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include: Host, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021); from sun to sun, Public Art Fund, New York (2019); and Diablo, MoMA PS1, New York (2018). Their work has been included in group exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Barbican Centre, London (2020); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2019); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); among others. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University, and Dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They will be participating in the upcoming Venice Biennale and the New England Triennial, both opening in April 2022.
William Cordova: on the lower frequencies i speak 4 u
May 15 – October 2, 2022
This exhibition showcases on the lower frequencies i speak 4 u (2019), an edition acquired by the BMA in 2021 that includes a suite of 14 mixed-media prints, a wooden boom box with a wire hanger antenna, a handmade glass lens, and eight unique Polaroids. It is further accompanied by a field recording made at the Harlem site of a Jimi Hendrix concert that Cordova transferred to x-ray film—a technique pioneered in Soviet Russia to evade state censorship of western music. The remarkably complex installation captures the artist’s research into individuals, places, and narratives significant to Harlem and the Civil Rights Movement and the ways in which they intersect with contemporary social and musical history. The work encapsulates the artist’s interests in diverse musical forms including Afro-Caribbean, Funk, and Hip-Hop; pre- Columbian culture and ethnography; and mythical and spiritual systems from across the diaspora in order to illuminate the resourcefulness of Black and brown communities. on the lower frequencies i speak 4 u is curated by Leslie Cozzi, BMA Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and Leila Grothe, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.
William Cordova (born Lima, Peru, 1969) lives and works in Miami, New York City, and Lima. Recent solo exhibitions of Cordova’s work include ceiba: reconsidering ephemeral spaces at Davidson College, Davidson, NC (2016); yawar mallku: metaphysics of time and space at 80M2, Lima, Peru; and swing/SPACE/miami: william cordova – ceiba: reconsidering ephemeral spaces, Museum of Art + Design at Miami Dade College, Miami, FL (2014). He has participated in numerous artist residencies including Artpace, San Antonio, TX; The Core program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine; and American Academy in Berlin, Germany.
Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears
May 15 – October 2, 2022
Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears examines the erased and difficult socio-historical and ecological realities that underlie the tobacco industry and its veneer of luxury. Through hand-embroidered digital prints on silk, 3D-printed objects that were sculpted in virtual reality, watercolors, and scent experiences, Glow explores the global uses of tobacco and highlights the injustices wrought by colonial desires to profit from the lucrative tobacco trade. Drawing on historical sources and references from the early modern period, Glow resurfaces the embedded visual and cultural history of tobacco and its expansive trade networks. Beautiful and tantalizing, the objects critique the structures enabling historical and continued oppression. Also included in this exhibition are tobacco-related artworks from the BMA’s permanent collection that connect to the visual and historical concepts Glow explores. This exhibition is curated by Sarah Cho, BMA Curatorial Assistant of American Painting & Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Virginia Anderson, Curator of American Art.
Beatrice Glow (born Santa Clara, CA, 1986) is a New York- and Bay-Area-based multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artist. Her solo shows include Forts and Flowers, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taiwan (2019); Beatrice Glow: Spice Routes/Roots, Duke House with New York University Institute of Fine Arts, New York, NY (2017); Aromérica Parfumeur, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile (2016); and Rhunhattan Tearoom, Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center, Bronx, NY (2015). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at 601Artspace, New York (2021); Westfries Museum, Hoorn, Netherlands (2021); Honolulu Biennial (2017); among others. Glow has been a Yale-NUS College Artist-in Residence in Singapore (2021); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Artist (2019-20); and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow (2018-19). She serves as the Program Manager for The Public History Project, an interdisciplinary research consortium, and is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Practice Program in New York.
Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love
May 22 – October 23, 2022
Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love will feature more than 45 paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022, that weave together motifs found in historical paintings with recognizable 21st-century moments to create new worlds based in Toor’s imagination. Among the works are several made especially for the exhibition and inspired by paintings in the BMA’s renowned 17th- to 19th-century European collection, such as Sir Anthony van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida (1629). This builds on the museum’s commitment to inviting contemporary artists to reinterpret historical works within its holdings, with prior projects by artists such as Tschabalala Self and Stanley Whitney. No Ordinary Love captures the ways in which Toor upends art historical traditions to center brown, queer figures and to investigate outdated concepts of power and sexuality. The exhibition will also include a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks.
Salman Toor (born Lahore, Pakistan, 1983) currently lives and works in New York. His first institutional solo exhibition, Salman Toor: How Will I Know, was recently presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2020-2021). Toor’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and projects, including Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at Frick Madison, New York, NY, and others held at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; the Public Art Fund, New York, NY; Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Lahore Biennale 2018, Pakistan; and the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India. Toor is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and his work is in many public collections. Toor’s work will be presented in the forthcoming Lyon Biennial and his first solo exhibition in China will open this fall at M Woods in Beijing.
The BMA’s exhibition is curated by Asma Naeem, the museum’s Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, including essays by Naeem as well as writers Evan Moffitt and Hanya Yanagihara.
