The Exhibitions
The Contemporary Museum at Twenty
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. During the museum's first ten years the Contemporary became known as a "museum without walls" for its groundbreaking exhibitions staged in temporary sites throughout the city. Following nearly a decade of nomadic programming the museum moved in to a more permanent facility to accommodate the growing audience 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 that brought teens together with artists, 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.
January – April 2010
Participation Nation: Art Invites Input
Project 20 kicks off on January 16 with the opening of Participation Nation, an exhibition that brings together three artists and artist collaboratives who create installations that invite viewers to participate by contributing to the work’s content. Participation Nation will be a highly interactive exhibition experience with new works by Finishing School (Los Angeles), Neighborhood Public Radio (Chicago) and Lee Mingwei (New York).
Formed in late 2001, Finishing School is a Los Angeles-based collective that explores issues such as individual rights and freedoms, governmental power, scientific exploration, and corporate branding and influence using humor, technology, and activism. Finishing School established themselves in 2002 with “Today it’s Voluntary,” a provocative view of surveillance and individual freedoms in a post-911 world. In this installation, Finishing School established their model for participatory projects as they subjected gallery visitors to a series of voluntary “security” screenings as they attempted to enter their exhibition venue. For Participation Nation, Finishing School is developing a new project entitled GO, a project that will invite viewers to document explorations of their neighborhoods using digital cameras that will be available at the museum.
Neighborhood Public Radio is an independent, artist-run radio project committed to providing an alternative media platform for artists, activists, musicians, and community members. Setting up temporary booths to stream content onto the internet, or using low-power portable FM transmitters, NPR’s nomadic team—anchored by artists Jon Brumit (Chicago), Lee Montgomery (Albuquerque), and Michael Trigilio (San Diego)— broadcasts live shows from galleries, residences, and neighborhood points of interest. To celebrate the character of local neighborhoods, “NPR” constructs programmatic narratives with community members’ voices rather than through journalistic reporting. During Participation Nation, NPR will work with local musicians, visual artists, activists, journalists, and Baltimore-area residents to participate in this grassroots activity whose neighborhood-based programming provides inspiration as an alternative radio broadcast model.
Conceptual artist Lee Mingwei creates installations that often depend on shared experiences and collaborations between himself and the public. During Participation Nation, Mingwei will present The Pantheon Project an installation that offers the audience an opportunity to represent themselves to one another through a carefully structured, public ritual exercise orchestrated. Inspired by traditional devotional practices, the artist invites the audience to transform generic wooden boxes into secular shrines honoring the individuals and institutions that have protected and promoted them. Other visitors to the museum who share their sentiments will be able to engage them in dialogue by leaving their own devotional materials at the site of these displays during the run of the exhibition. Taken together, these shrines are intended to paint an unusual and telling portrait of community values.
Exhibition Curators: Gary Sangster, Thom Collins, Irene Hofmann
May 2010
The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry
New York–based artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry formed their collaboration in 1998 when they first began to conceive works that engage with subject matter and images of pressing, topical, and often challenging, civic concerns. In public projects, gallery installations, videos, and interactive works, they have created compelling projects that address issues of race and social justice in communities, history, and the family. As collaborative partners and an interracial married couple, McCallum and Tarry create works that are often informed by their own relationship.
McCallum and Tarry’s Project 20 exhibition is the selection of Contemporary Museum founder George Ciscle and his Exhibition Development Seminar, a year-long course at MICA that empowers young art students to become the curators of a professional exhibition. Over the course of the next six months the EDS students will work with McCallum and Tarry to select seminal works from their ten years of work, seeking a number of exhibition venues around the city of Baltimore. In addition to a multi-venue survey of McCallum and Tarry’s career, the EDS students will work with the artists to realize a new video installation that will be shot in Baltimore and presented at the Contemporary Museum.
Exhibition Curators: George Ciscle and the Exhibition Development Seminar of the Maryland Institute College of Art
Museum History
2007/2010
Broadcast
September 9 – November 18, 2007
Participating Artists: Dara Birnbaum, Chris Burden, Gregory Green, Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Jody Procter, Christian Jankowski, Antoni Muntadas, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Nam June Paik, neurotransmitter, TVTV, Siebren Versteeg
Curator: Irene Hofmann, Executive Director, Contemporary Museum
Broadcast explored the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. Featuring works in video, sound, photography, and installation, Broadcast was the first exhibition of its kind to examine this provocative body of work.
From TVTV’s iconoclastic television broadcast from the floor of the 1972 Republican Convention, to Gregory Green’s recent pirate radio station installations, artists have intervened into systems of broadcasting as a means of examining or challenging the influence and power of TV and radio. Some of the works in Broadcast were hostile, as in the case of Chris Burden’s infamous 1972 hostage-taking of a TV-host at knifepoint; other times they were more collaborative, such as Christian Jankowski’s 1999 project for the Venice Biennale that involved repeatedly calling in to psychics on live Venetian television. In still other instances, an artist’s engagement with broadcasting involved the critical reuse of previously broadcasted material, such as Dara Birnbaum’s use of archival media coverage from the 1977 kidnapping of the German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Baader Meinhoff group, or Antoni Muntadas’ studies of broadcasting conventions in cities worldwide during the cold war.
By co-opting the sounds, images, and presentation strategies of our culture’s dominant forms of mass media, the works included in Broadcast revealed the mechanisms and power structures of broadcasting systems, and challenged their authority and influence.
1990/2010
Double-Take: The Poetics of Illusion and Light
December 20, 2007–May 11, 2008
Curator: Irene Hofmann, Executive Director, Contemporary Museum
With painting, photography, video, and sculpture, the artists in Double-Take create images and environments that challenge perception, often creating works that harness the evocative potential of light and shadow. Visual slights of hand, the provocative doubling of meanings and images, and a poetic and refined aesthetic united the artists in Double-Take creating a dialogue of seductive and richly-layered works.
Images and meanings double in the works of Baltimore-based artist Bernhard Hildebrandt who skillfully merges and manipulates illusion and reality through works in painting, photography, video, and neon word sculpture. Visual illusion merges with architecture in the large site-specific installations by Brooklyn-based Mary Temple whose faint trompe l’oeil paintings of shadows on gallery walls and floors give the appearance of sunlight streaming through a window. The illusionist qualities of light and shadow are also central to Los Angeles-based Alexandra A. Grant whose large sculpture in twisted wire filigree hangs from the ceiling like an ephemeral cloud casting a delicate shadowy double of words and forms on the gallery walls.