About

December 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Contemporary Museum.

From the museum’s first exhibition, a courageous community-based examination of the AIDS crisis through art, the Contemporary Museum has been a bold and experimental institution, responsive to the cultural, social, and political climate of our times and serving as a laboratory for new ideas and new models for exhibitions of contemporary art. The museum’s first ten years were spent itinerant, known as the “museum without walls” with groundbreaking exhibitions staged in temporary sites throughout the city. Following a decade of nomadic programming the museum moved in to a more permanent facility to accommodate the growing audience, expand financial support, and offer year-round exhibition programming. With the Contemporary’s Mt. Vernon location as its home base, the past decade has been marked by ambitious new commissions, national tours for Contemporary Museum projects, innovative programming for teens, and off-site installations that have engaged communities throughout the city of Baltimore.

Over the past twenty years, the Contemporary has presented over 50 exhibitions, installed shows in more than 25 venues, collaborated with over ten of Baltimore’s cornerstone institutions, organized exhibitions that have toured to 15 cities around the country, and have supported residencies and new commissions by over 40 artists.

In January 2010, the Contemporary Museum will launch a year-long exhibition series to mark the museum’s 20th anniversary. This exhibition will feature twenty artists from all over the globe, working in all media, and representing some of the most promising new talent in contemporary art. Each artist has been selected by one of twenty guest curators, each of whom played a significant role in shaping the Contemporary Museum’s dynamic twenty-year history. Guest curators include past directors, former curators, and artists who exhibited in Contemporary Museum exhibitions. By inviting the Contemporary Museum’s prominent alumni to each select one artist for this exhibition, Project 20 will celebrate the museum’s visionary and experimental past while looking ahead to the future of contemporary art. Among the guest curators are George Ciscle, the museum’s founding director, artist David Reed, who exhibited in Going For Baroque in 1995, Adam Lerner, the Contemporary Museum’s curator in the late 1990s, and photographer Dawoud Bey, whose 2008 summer residency in collaboration with the Walters Art Museum produced an inspiring portrait exhibition co-curated by fifteen Baltimore-area teens.