On Thursday, June 18, the Baltimore Museum of Art will launch Practicing Place, a new artist-in-residence program that places six artists and organizations at the BMA’s Lexington Market branch for an extended period of visitor engagement. The year-long program invites artists to serve as both practitioners and public-facing cultural hosts, contributing to an evolving conversation around art, community, and the role of public space in one of Baltimore’s most popular public buildings.
The Practicing Place series builds on the success of last year’s artist-led programs that attracted 3,500 participants by bringing back many of the same artists and deepening the museum’s commitment to Baltimore’s public realm as a site of encounter, exchange, and shared civic life. The inaugural residency begins on June 18 with Dreamseeds (Hannah Brancato and Sanahara Ama Chandra), whose six-week session will include facilitated workshops, community gatherings, and public programming. Future activities will range from collective weaving to sound baths and song circles. BMA Lexington Market is open Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Practicing Place program continues through June 2027.
Schedule
June 18 – July 25
Dreamseeds (Hannah Brancato and Sanahara Ama Chandra)
Participants are invited to co-create visions for more just futures with performances and pop-up craft workshops that weave together embodied making, critical fabulation, and improvisational music within a collectively created sacred space.
September 10 – October 17
Ashley Minner Jones
Following an interest in how cultural and built environments change (or resist change) over time, Jones will invite participants to join storytelling, archival research, and artmaking—with the market landscape itself as collaborator.
November 3 – December 19
Seven (Xavier Walker)
This residency focuses on Baltimore’s nightlife from the 1980s to present and invites participants to join an investigation into how sound communicates place, defines culture, and fosters community through archival research and oral histories.
January 7 – February 13 (tentative)
Baltimore Beat
The Beat will build on themes from their “Drop-in Newsroom” and “Looking Back, Moving Forward” workshops at Lexington Market, inviting participants to share and build their own stories while examining questions of who and what make the news.
March 4 – April 10
Rosa Chang
Chang will invite visitors to identify and explore different shades of blue as a material, memory, and emotional landscape—expanding from her roots in Korean indigo into broader questions of place, repair, grief, healing, and transformation.
April 19 – June 5
Jennifer White-Johnson
Taking cues from Kitchen Table Press, where women of color built sovereignty through publishing on their own terms, this residency brings disability justice and abolitionist practices to the ‘art table’ through drop-in zine making.
More information: https://artbma.org
