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Events & Exhibitions

Just a Drop

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Events & Exhibitions
Just a Drop
On view in Fox Building: Meyerhoff Gallery from February 20 to March 3, 2023.

Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the Curatorial Practice MFA (CP) Practicum class are proud to announce Just a Drop Through a wide range of objects and materials—including sculptures, illustrations, protest banners, textiles, glass art, videos and a large-scale newly-commissioned mural—the 13 artists highlighted in this show reveal how water sustains life and shapes human destinies.

Just a Drop opens on Friday, February 10 with a public reception featuring a live storytelling performance by Griot Grandmother Edna.

Inspired by the September 2022 boil water advisory in West Baltimore, the five MICA students organizing Just a Drop dive deeply into the history of our most precious resource. For this exhibition, they bring together a diverse group of artists, activists and storytellers to describe people’s relationships to water via culture, ritual and conservation. With personal, collective and mythical imagery and stories, the featured artists invite viewers to reconsider the element that makes up 60% of their bodies and covers more than 70% of the planet’s surface.

Related Programming

The exhibition's programming includes an opening reception and live storytelling performance by Griot Grandmother Edna on Friday, February 10. An in-person and online lecture will take place on Wednesday, February 22, from the local non-profit Blue Water Baltimore: titled “A History of Our Most Precious Resource: Watershed Ecology in the Human Era,” it examines how animals (human and non-human) have interacted with this mysterious substance over geological time. Both programs are free and open to all.

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Participating Students

  • jes allie ’24 (Curatorial Practice MFA)
  • Vincent Ruffini ’24 (Curatorial Practice MFA)
  • Simone Sydnor ’24 (Curatorial Practice MFA)
  • Liddy Wells ’24 (General Fine Arts BFA)
  • Minglu Zhong ’24 (Curatorial Practice MFA)

Participating Artists

Just a Drop features works by 13 artists from Baltimore, Detroit, Washington D.C., New Brunswick, and beyond.

Oreoluwa Akinyode ’25 (Photography BFA)

Oreoluwa Ifasola Sangosemilore Akinyode, The Living Breathing archive of what was, what is, and what will be. Through the use of images, moving images, and text, Oreoluwa crafts worlds where their multitudes have a place to love, cry, and feeeeel.With their practice Oreoluwa weaves storytelling and sharing into the archive. This is to encourage other Black people to archive their own lives, the lives of their loved ones–to be their own archivist. To be the holder of you and your loved ones archives is to care for your existence beyond life and death. Utilizing lens based practices, words, and imagination, Oreoluwa wades through the world in search of their reflection and what is reflected onto them. The goal of their work is to invite each viewer to reflect on their own self-perception and how they move through the world. Their work exists as a living prayer, a portal that acts as an enzyme for change.

Website
Sunny Choi Headshot

Sunny Choi ’22 (Illustration + Humanistic Studies BFA)

Seongyoon Choi (SUNG-yoon) (she/her), also known as Sunny to her friends, and Owwmyhands online, is a South Korean illustrator based in Baltimore. She grew up in a Christian household that periodically moved into different and sometimes even disparate countries and communities. The difficulty of reconciling multiple languages, customs, and values drew her to illustration as a more forgiving, and universal, method of communication in which she could express her wishes for a better world without worrying about whether she understood the lingo or not. Biblical stories and social issues, especially the climate crisis, are the main influences and topics in her personal work. Seongyoon studied at and graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2022 with a B.F.A. in Illustration and an Integrated Humanistic Studies major in order to hone a digital art practice that comprises her values and to prepare herself to be a skilled and focused collaborator for the sake of all that is good and fun. When she is not drawing or thinking of what to draw, Seongyoon can be found sitting in front of the oven, watching the next semi-experimental flour concoction rise, or sitting on a bench watching the pigeons and sparrows at the park because she misses her two cockatiels back in Korea.

Website

Griot Grandmother Edna

Edna (Lawrence) Williams, professional name Sacred Griot Grandmother Edna, with her signature African Head Dress, has worn many hats during her 30 years as an educator, social activist, CEO/founder of A Grandmother's Pilgrimage, Inc., Mobile Historic Theater/Educational Classroom & Total Women (Heal Thyself) experience. Grandmother Edna has provided a safe haven for youth in Maryland and the citifies she visits.

Instagram

Avionna Fitzhugh ’22 (Interdisciplinary Sculpture BFA)

Avionna Fitzhugh (they/she/he) is an artist currently living in Baltimore, MD, raised in Rochester, NY. Playfully embodied across mediums including sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and installation, their work invites viewers into a space of communal reflection, blending indexical imagery from childhood and the natural world. Recently graduated from the Maryland Institute College Of Art’s Interdisciplinary Sculpture program, Avionna’s creative practice is continually enriched by a commitment to presence--within self, community, and ecosystem.

Phaan Hwong standing by her yellow and orange pieces

Phaan Howng ’15 (Mount Royal School of Art MFA)

Phaan Howng is a Taiwanese American artist who creates large scale paintings, site specific installations and performances that center around the Earth defensively brandishing its landscape in a post-human future. She incorporates theatrical and cinematic elements in her work to place the viewer in an idealized or satirical speculative future to encourage reflection on current environmental and ecological conditions fostered by extractive global capitalism. Her research into landscape theory, anthropology, and history grounds these interrogations of Western concepts of nature, the human, and time. Howng currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her BFA from Boston University and her MFA from the Mt. Royal School of Art at MICA. Her works have been exhibited at the Asian Arts and Culture Center at Towson University in Maryland, Arlington Arts Center in Virginia, the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. She has completed multiple large-scale commissions including installations for Facebook and American Express, and her work has been featured in notable publications such as The New York Times T List, The American Scholar, Bmore Art Magazine, and Artnet.

Website

Madeleine Maule ’25 (Illustration BFA)

Madeleine Maule is an illustrator currently living and studying at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, pursuing her BFA in illustration. Her work can be found on Instagram, @madalelly. Initially from New Jersey, her love of surrounding nature and changing seasons inspires her expressive line work. Her illustrations have been shown at many exhibitions in Baltimore and New Jersey, achieving many awards and scholarships. She has self-published several zines and booklets and has experience making products such as prints, stickers and greeting cards. She is interested in every living creature's perspective and emotions, their effect on the world around them, and vice versa. As a tradigital artist, she especially enjoys fountain pens, ink, watercolor, crayons, risograph, and a tablet to create vintage-Esque illustrations creating nostalgia for childhood adventure. She is currently interested in work in surface design, product design, editorials, and illustrating for children’s books.

Ọmọlará Williams McCallister ’20 (Community Arts MFA)

Ọmọlará Williams McCallister (pronouns: o, love, beloved) is a dynamic creator who shows up in many forms. O’s work is a call and response blend of sculpture, performance, installation, ritual, space holding, community building, surface design, adornment, word, sound, song, movement, moving images and photography. The roles that Ọmọlará steps into include: artist, educator, organizer, cultural strategist, conjurer. In all forms O’s work is immersive and interactive, it is co-authored by the people who inspire and encounter it. ​ Ọmọlará is from Atlanta, Ga. O’s artistic journey began in church at 7 years old as a classically trained vocalist and bassist. Love attended Dekalb School of the Arts, a magnet 8 - 12 public school. Beloved has actively organized around social justice issues on the local, regional and national levels since age 13. Ọmọlará’s upbringing in the Black south is the foundation for O’s work. ​ O’s work is how O manifests paths towards personal and collective liberation. Beloved’s work is made possible by the expansive deliciousness of love’s chosen families. These families are ecosystems of interdependent people who dare to define ourselves, shape our experiences, and create new worlds and ways of being everyday. We do all of this while living at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities.

Website

Youcef Menasria (Filmmaking MFA)

Youcef is a multimedia sound and moving image artist, and documentary filmmaker by trade. As a lifelong percussionist and musician, Youcef’s work explores the organic rhythm of sight and sound, while highlighting community and culturally driven subject matter through his documentary practice.

SANO ’25 (General Fine Arts)

SANO is an experimental mixed media installation artist born in Pennsylvania but currently lives and works in Baltimore,MD. They currently study General Fine Arts (GFA) and Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and expect their BFA by 2025. Born to a mixed Italian, Polish, and Arab family, SANO’s paternal great-grandmother would begin a family tradition of textile work upon immigrating to the United States. This tradition was formed through necessity as SANO’s family needed to remain frugal to sustain their life in the U.S. Coincidentally the same love of textile work had manifested on SANO’s maternal side as well, the tradition being started by their grandmother and later passed down to SANO’s mother. Being the culmination and latest inheritor of these two family traditions, SANO’s work endeavors to deconstruct the nature of identity, mental illness, and activism through the reframing of this once purely utilitarian tradition. SANO is drawn to installations' ability to express these themes of identity through its innate power to morph spaces into immersive experiences by either disrupting or creating a space.

Iyosef Melku Tafari

Iyosef Melku Tafari is a Baltimore Artist, self-taught who began pursuing his passion for painting after completing his Associates of Science Degree in Computer Animation in 2005. Drawing inspiration for his art through his RasTafari Culture, heritage and spirituality, Melku’s Acrylic & soft pastel paintings reflect and uplift this African consciousness celebrated throughout the Diaspora. Early in his career he started using construction material such as Ply-board wood, and Gypsum panels as his canvas; this along with his saturation of red, black, yellow, and green to depict the story makes his work easily recognized. His more resent works in developing a series with his “One Perfect Love” murals aim to express and inspire community building by using art in some of Baltimore city neighborhoods

Website

Talking Dolls

Wes Taylor, Ron Watters, Andrea Cardinal. The mission of Talking Dolls is to empower our northeast Detroit neighborhood through justice-focused initiatives. We create a nexus of progressive art and community-led activism through access to our shop facilities, & use of our infrastructure for performances, celebration, and experimental art workshops. We are also home to a Banner and Poster Lending Library, from which the public can borrow oversize banners and hand-held placards for actions, to then be returned and re-used.

Website

Dan Smeby

Dan Smeby holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University and has worked extensively with the creative arts therapy foundation Les Impatients, in Montreal. He has held international residencies in Kuwait City, Kuwait; Kampala, Uganda; and Detroit, Michigan. Most recently he has completed the Boîte Blanche Residency at Galerie Sans Noms in Moncton and the Cross-Cultural Creation Residency at the Saint John Arts Center, both in his home province of New Brunswick. His most recent film “A Mains Nues” is being distributed by Psyche.co and has been officially selected at numerous Canadian festivals including FIN, FIFA, and FICFA.

Website

Erwin Timmers

Erwin Timmers is Co-founder and Director of the Washington Glass School and one of the DC area’s leading ‘eco-artists’. Recycling, waste and how they relate to society are recurring themes in his work. Erwin’s main medium is one of the least recycled materials; float glass or window glass, and he has had to develop new techniques to exploit the properties of this material. His approach to art is multi-faceted, incorporating metalwork, innovative lighting and glass design. His sculptural artwork has been on display in an increasing number of local, regional and national galleries. He has received multiple public art commissions and is also featured in numerous private collections. He has been featured in numerous books, notably “100 Mid-Atlantic Artists” by Ashley Rooney, “Cast” by Jen Townsend and Renée Zettle-Sterling. Montgomery County honored Erwin Timmers as the county’s “Outstanding Artist” in 2018.

Website
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