BmoreArt’s Picks: October 29 – November 4This Week: Derrick Adams curates a show by V Walton at Swann House, Sasha Baskin Faculty Artist Talk at JHU, Dagmawi Woubshet lectures on James Baldwin at UMBC, virutal Q&A with BOPA leadership, renaming and Emancipation Day Celebration at Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum, opening reception for FAITH McCorkle and performance by Black Assets at Creative Alliance, Art After Hours at the BMA, Current Space’s 20th Anniversary Exhibition opening reception, 2024 Black Artists Fair at Coppin, and Full Circle Dance Company performances at the BMA — PLUS applications due for the 2025 Sondheim Prize and more featured opportunities! BmoreArt’s Picks presents the best weekly art openings, events, and performances happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas. For a more comprehensive perspective, check the BmoreArt Calendar page, which includes ongoing exhibits and performances, and is updated on a daily basis.To submit your calendar event, email us at [email protected]!TERRA: A Solo Show Curated by Multidisciplinary Artist Derrick Adams,Featuring Works by V WaltonOngoing through December 15@ Swann House Gallery at Ulysses in BaltimoreMultidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams announces the second show in “Beautiful Decay,” his conceptual curatorial project: “Terra,” a solo exhibition from Baltimorean artist V Walton. Opening October 3, the ten week-long exhibition will be on view at Swann House Gallery, a rotating exhibition space in Baltimore adjacent to Ulysses, an Ash hotel.“Beautiful Decay,” as envisioned by Adams, is a series of artist interventions and installations that respond to the state of the interior and exterior of Swann House, through direct and indirect relationships to material, form and application. The series will tap into the local community to highlight the immense talent and artistry present in Baltimore.“V Walton’s work and overall installation transforms the space in a way that makes the viewer more aware of the organic nature of the aging interior. Comparable to our lived experience as humans. What makes us and what is left behind when we are gone? The earthy materials that make up the work and that are also incorporated throughout heighten our sensibility in understanding decay as it allows us to make peace with our own impermanence” said Derrick Adams, Curator.This second exhibition “Terra” features the sculptural work of V Walton, a series of ceramic and soil-based figurative sculptures. Trained as a figurative ceramicist, Walton’s practice has shifted from heavily ceramic based to a more biodegradable, organic focused composition. At various scales, Walton’s works show in abstracted vessel forms and naturalistic representation. They pivot between creating variations of bodily forms, some that will exist in a state of permanence, and others meant to decompose – playing with blurring the lines between what we understand about the body by morphing into something else, something less human, something reminiscent of flora.Answering questions such as what it means to be human and what it means for Black people to reconnect with terra, “Terra” seeks to remedy a divide between the human body and nature, calling to Black people to reimagine a relationship with the organic. Walton works with different clays, types of soil, plant life, and sustainably found wood to create installations that feel alive. Grouped as a community or in more intimate pairings, these figures and organic forms wind their way through the space. Meanwhile other figures will live within an installation of organics, involving soil, tree roots, and similar materials.The works overall respond to the interior space at its present condition. Rich in texture as well as character. Piling and exposing its vulnerability due to the natural elements all around. Representation of the body in juxtaposition with the space mirroring one another alluding to fragmentation of the self.The exhibition will be on view Thursday, October 3rd through Sunday, December 15th by appointment.Swann House is a new event space and extension of Ulysses, located in the historic townhouse next door to the hotel. The parlor floor of the brownstone has been reimagined as a space for gathering and celebrations, welcoming parties of up to 85 guests, while Swann House Gallery takes residence on the second floor.ARTIST STATEMENTWhen we expand past our human experience as being paramount and turn towards nature, that is where healing begins. There, we deconstruct the self imposed hierarchy that we have inflicted onto our environment and realize that we are an extension of it – and even more so, perhaps the most finite and divisive factor within this ecosystem.Our reaction to the organic becomes a reflection of us. My work expounds upon restoring this relationship, reflecting the bounty and decay – growth and chaos that co-exist. When we are not limited by an imagination centered in extraction, we begin to live in a way that is regenerative and reciprocal with the natural world. We are a part of this framework and yet nature is infinitely beyond our comprehension.Faculty Artist Talk: Sasha BaskinTuesday, October 29 :: 4-5pm@ JHU Center for Visual ArtThe Center for Visual Arts invites you to a Faculty Artist Talk with Sasha Baskin – October 29th, 2024. Saul Zaentz Screening Room, JHU MICA / CVA Film Centre, 2nd fl. 10 E. North Ave. Baltimore, MD 21202. For more information contact [email protected] Forum — Dagmawi WoubshetTuesday, October 29 :: 5:30-7pm@ UMBC Albin O. Kuhn LibraryDagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor, English, University of PennsylvaniaJames Baldwin and the Art of Late StyleThe annual Daphne Harrison LectureThis event is part of the Fall 2024 Humanities Forum.James Baldwin has come back with full force in our era of Black Lives Matter. In the 100 years since his birth, he has become the most cited literary artist—living or dead—on matters of race on social media since the Ferguson Uprising, his words deployed to expose white power and innocence and to express black rage and ethics. Decades after his death, the fact that Baldwin’s words ring loud and true today not only testifies to his genius, but also offers an indictment of an America that continues to disparage, torture, and murder black people with impunity. However, even as this revival champions Baldwin for our times, this emphasis on the author’s 1960s Civil Rights era writings eclipses the body of literary work he produced from the mid-1970s until his death in 1987. In this talk, Woubshet will focus on the author’s neglected later writings, which foreground black interior and intra-racial life, recasting a black world unencumbered by the white-black racial antagonism that drives much of Baldwin’s earlier writings. Ultimately, as he argues, the work Baldwin produced in the 1980s reaches a depth of perception that comes perhaps only with age.Dagmawi Woubshet is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Associate Term Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A scholar of literature and visual culture, he works at the intersections of Africana and LGBTQIA+ studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. His essays have appeared in Callaloo, Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and The Atlantic. Woubshet is the recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the Africa Institute in Sharjah, and the Modern Art Museum in Addis Ababa, where he curated Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show. He is currently completing a book on James Baldwin’s late style. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, Woubshet taught at Cornell University where he was named one of “The 10 Best Professors at Cornell.” He received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and his B.A. in Political Science and History from Duke University.Read more of this week’s picks at BmoreArt.