The Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA) has announced Free Fall Baltimore presented by BGE and Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC),featuring free arts & cultural events from participating venues and organizations throughout Baltimore City. Free Fall Baltimore is held each October, in conjunction with National Arts and Humanities Month, and showcases the importance of the arts with free concerts, dance and theater performances, festivals, lectures, workshops, art exhibitions, and special events. The Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts provides grants, ranging from $250 to $1,500, to cultural organizations with operating budgets under $300,000 to provide free events during the month of October. Due to the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic, Free Fall Baltimore will occur as a hybrid of virtual and small in-person events. The celebration kicks off on Thursday, October 1, 2020 and lasts all month through Saturday, October 31, 2020.

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Close Read is a group exhibition featuring new work by three Baltimore-based photographers: Akea Brionne Brown, SHAN Wallace and Savannah Wood. Each artist has spent time conducting research in the historic AFRO American Newspapers’ archives, and has created new work inspired by their findings. The exhibition is open at Baltimore’s Connect + Collect Gallery, which is sited in the former AFRO headquarters. Join the artists for a virtual artist talk on Wednesday, September 23.

Close Read: Artist Talk with Savannah Wood, Akea Brown, SHAN Wallace, and Angela N. Carroll
Wednesday, September 23, at 5 pm – Virtual
Register Here

This project marks the first time that artists have been explicitly invited to work with the AFRO American Newspapers’ archives. The work produced for this show highlights different artistic approaches to archival inquiry, with Baltimore’s Black communities as a common thread.

The artwork is projected on the windows of Connect + Collect Gallery nightly from sunset to 11pm, allowing for an in-person art experience while maintaining physical-distancing protocols. The work is also screened on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Screening Room.

Close Read is produced by Savannah Wood and the AFRO American Newspapers. This project is supported by a grant from the Grit Fund, which is an initiative of Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation. Additional funding was provided by the Awesome Foundation and Afro Charities.

Connect + Collect Gallery
2519 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

More info available at www.afrocharities.org.

For the 2020-2021 year, the Maryland State Poetry Out Loud competition will be held virtually! Students (who want to independently participate), educators, and community organizers are encouraged to register indicating their intent to submit student poetry recitation videos for competition consideration.

Poetry Out Loud is a great opportunity for a remote and hybrid student learning project. You can showcase your students’ creativity in a new, fun, digitally engaging way! To view the full Poetry Out Loud schedule, see here.

Deadline to Apply: Monday, November 2 at 11:59 p.m.

Poetry Out Loud (POL) is a literary arts program created by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation. Through Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) support, students across Maryland are enriched by this national arts education program that encourages the mastery of great poetry through memorization, performance, and competition. Since 2005, nearly 4.7 million students have competed in Poetry Out Loud nationwide. That’s almost 4.7 million students who have learned at least one poem by heart! In Maryland, approximately 129,000 students have participated in the program, learning the power of poetry firsthand.

More information about the Poetry Out Loud competition is available here.

Recording History: A Juried Virtual Exhibition

Entries due October 9, 2020

Gormley Gallery at Notre Dame of Maryland University calls for submissions for a juried virtual exhibition on the theme “Recording History.” The exhibition examines art’s role in recording history and documenting our lived experience of it. Gormley Gallery seeks artworks that reflect personal responses to the political and social realities of the historic moment we are living through — the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and protests over racial justice, the looming national election, just to name a few. How are we recording the events of the present? How does our art express our experience of these times?

Visual artworks in all media and formats are eligible for consideration for this virtual exhibition, to be held on the gallery website, gormleygallery.com. A nonrefundable entry fee of $16 entitles the artist to submit up to three artworks, online only. No mailed or emailed entries will be accepted. Images should have a minimum width of 1500 pixels.

Exhibition Dates: October 26 through November 27, 2020.

More information about the application is available here.

The Maryland Art Place (MAP) has announced that it will open its first exhibition to the public since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. SEEN, curated by Josh Sisk, Joe Giordano with support from Audrey Gatewood, represents a comprehensive and inclusive overview of music with a heavy emphasis on Baltimore Indie, Rap and Hip-Hop genres and the photographers that captured this important time.

SEEN includes the following photographers (in no order): Mike Jon, Valerie Paulsgrove, Jefferson Jackson Steele, Andrew Mangum, Frank Hamilton, Josh Sisk, Brandon Fieldhouse, Perri Fae, Natasha Tylea, Kate Frese, Sydney Allen, Ted Henn, Kelley Connelly, Farrah Skeiky, Shane Gardner, Megan Elyse Lloyd, Stewart Mostofsky, J.M. Giordano, Dubscience, Pink Lloyd Wright, Micah E. Wood and Theresa Keil. Stage Design Support by Chris Attenborough and Jenna Dutton. SEEN is produced in partnership with WTMD radio who is creating a documentary segment on the last 20 years of Baltimore music. The documentary will be screened at MAP in November (details to come.) 

SEEN will be on view Thursday, September 24 – Saturday, November, 14.  The exhibition will open Thursday, September 24 with a reception held from 5:00 pm to 8:30 pm: Reception A with a timeslot from 5 pm to 6:30 pm and Reception B with at timeslot of 7 pm to 8:30 pm. YOU MUST  RSVP TO ATTEND. Click on the link below to RSVP.

RECEPTION A– 5pm

RECEPTION B– 7pm

More information is available here.

The Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) has announced that nominations are open for 2021 Maryland Heritage Awards. The public is invited to nominate individuals, places, and traditions for outstanding achievement in traditional arts and culture. Awards are $5,000 each. Three winners will be selected and honored at a public ceremony.

Nominations are due Thursday, October 15, at 5 p.m.

Begin a nomination using MSAC’s application system, SmartSimple. Log in to SmartSimple or create a free account here.

Awards are given based on a nominee’s sustained commitment to a particular traditional practice, current importance to communities in which that traditional practice is significant, and past contributions to that traditional practice. Each year, winners are chosen in the categories of Person or People, Place, and Tradition. Read the Heritage Awards guidelines and evaluation criteria here.

Maryland Traditions, the traditional arts program of MSAC, has given Heritage Awards annually since 2007. See a list of past winners here.

The Oral History Organization (OHA) is a national association of diverse professionals who seek to advance the practice of oral history in historical and cultural organizations, in education at all levels, and in multiple documentary forms. OHA’s 2020 meeting was originally scheduled to take place in Baltimore this fall; however, because of the ongoing pandemic, the program will be delivered virtually via Zoom and other platforms, October 19-24. 

The Local Arrangements Committee is also working hard to retain a sense of place and support oral history in the region. As a way of reaching out to people, communities, and organizations in greater Baltimore and Maryland, they are sponsoring two interactive, on-line oral history workshops in October, prior to the conference:

Introduction to Oral History – Saturday October 3, 9am-1:30pm ET; and Sunday, October 4, 3:30-6:45pm ET (2 sessions, 7 hours) – conducted via Zoom

Oral History in the Classroom – Saturday, October 17, 10am-1pm ET  (1 session, 3 hours) – also conducted via Zoom

Whether you’re interested in beginning an oral history project for your family, community, church, organization, or school, or if you’re a librarian or archivist who works with oral histories, the workshops are great opportunities to learn more about the oral history process in an interactive, small-group format online. Workshops will be delivered via Zoom.

Registration to the above two virtual local workshops is now open to those who live or work in Maryland or attend a Maryland school, college, or university.

Visit the following link to learn more about the workshops and to register: https://www.oralhistory.org/oha-2020-local-workshops/

The full conference schedule is available to download here.