Category: Events

Visit the Virtual Peale ANYTIME in Second Life

Video about the Peale in Second Life by NovataSecondLife.

NOW OPEN! Visit the Virtual Peale Anytime!

The newest incarnation of the historic Peale Museum building opens on its 206th birthday as a full 3-D virtual space in Second Life, hosting exhibitions, events, programs, and casual visits!

You can now check out the building anytime!

New to Second Life?

  1. Install the Second Life viewer to participate in the tour in Second Life.
  2. Set up your free account from the Virtual Ability website and get logged in! (Picking an avatar is the fun part!)
  3. Learn some essential skills for moving around and interacting with the environment on the New Resident Orientation Course.

If you are joining us in Second Life, Peale Museum Island will be open to visitors starting at 11:00am ET at this link.

If you need assistance setting up your Second Life account or Avatar, please contact our friends at Virtual Ability here.

 

Call for Entries- No Walls, No Bans, No Border

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Exhibition applications are due March 31! Submit here: https://www.rebellensbmore.org/entries

The exhibition will be held May 9-June 2, 2019.

“No Walls, No Bans, No Borders” is a benefit photography and art exhibit featuring the work of Baltimore-based activists connecting ideas of the violence of capitalism, colonialism, and the racist/fascist state both locally here in Baltimore and globally. A portion of artist’s sales will go back to the groups doing the work on the ground.

This is a call to activists for their photo and video documentation of movements they are a part of, along with art made made in response to those issues and movements. Submit your entries online at: https://www.rebellensbmore.org/entries. Artists may submit up to three available artworks for inclusion in the exhibition.

The theme focuses on the work being done to dismantle walls/bans/borders of oppression, whether through physical state walls, walls of a prison, walls of stigma, or institutional walls. The goal is to tell the story through the eyes of those on the ground doing the work.

The event is being curated by Rebel Lens Bmore – a group of on-the-ground activists using photo and video to document social movements in Baltimore – in collaboration with a number of other great artists in Baltimore.

For more information about Rebel Lens, or to submit works for the Benefit Exhibition, please visit rebellensbmore.org.

Questions? Contact us at rebellensbmore@gmail.com.

What is a Time Travel Tour anyway?

You are not alone in asking, as this is a unique new way to experience history!

Part puzzle, part exhibit, part performance, total immersion!

The Time Travel Tours experience is an interactive exhibit that engages with the history of the Peale and its founder in 1818, and connects certain aspects of that time to ours and to the future.

Watch this interview with tour guide David London to learn more, and get tour updates here or call 1-866-TMETRVL.

Click here for times and tickets.

Tours are also available for groups and by special appointment: contact us at events@old.thepealecenter.org to schedule yours. 

“Standing Room Only” extended through July 1

“Standing Room Only,” the exhibition curated by Tiffany Jones of BootPrints, the play and film directed by Nate Couser, can now be seen at the Peale through July 1. At 6pm on Saturday, June 30, in addition to the exhibition, enjoy an Immersive Performance of the production including a staged reading with live chorus and conversation between the playwright, Latonia Valincia-Moss and Angela Carroll of BmoreArt Magazine. 

Tickets are $15 in advance/$20 at the door and include a vegan tasting. Drinks can be purchased additionally.

Self-guided visits to “Standing Room Only” are free and open to the public Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 12-6pm and Sundays 10am-4pm. Advanced booking is recommended.

Bootprints: Standing Room Only at the Peale Museum is an Immersive Experience in Black Memory; review by Angela N. Carroll

Black Grandmothers: Labor, Lace, and Wide-Brimmed Hats

By Angela Carroll

“God specting womens to lay down and gurd up. Womens have to take boots on ‘deir chest and dress shoes, sneakers and cleats too. Women like carpet—all kinds of shoes gotta walk on womens.” – from Bootprints

Latonia Valencia’s dramatic play, Bootprints, is an unsettling but familiar narrative about death, family secrets, and the revelations of those who survive. Bootprints unpacks Black memory and the frustrations of younger generations who grapple with the histories, traditions, and secrets they have inherited.  The perpetuity of Black mourning, Black grandmothers, labor, lace and wide-brimmed hats. Silk and sore backs from working as housemaids, Gmama’s hands, Sunday mornings, all these memories come into focus when Gmama dies.  Her granddaughter Myeshia is left mourning her loss and remembering the impact of her grandmother on her life.

The play opens on Myeshia in conversation with her alternate personality Gingel as they determine what outfit to bury Gmama in.  Gmama had a vast collection of colorful suits and each marked a significant event in the women’s lives; miscarriages, molestation, wealth, abandonment, love, failed marriages, poverty. As Myeshia/Gingel and Gmama’s apparition sort through the suits, they share their memories aloud as epic choreopoems.  Like Ntzoke Shange’s timeless homage, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Bootstraps uses color, fashion and domestic interiors as cues for the emotional and psychological states of its protagonists. The play honors and humanizes narratives about southern Black women.

Director Nate Couser and Curator Tiffany Jones reimagine the theatrical script as an immersive installation series, Bootprints Standing Room Only at the Peale Museum. The installations convert the second floor of the museum into surreal visualizations of Gmama and Myeshia/Gingels memories. Photographs, prints and collage works from Brianna Faulkner, Antonio McAfee, and I Henry Phillips are incorporated into and/or placed opposite the installations.

In all instances, Jones installations provide powerful imagery that enunciates key moments in the play and offer new perspectives about Black women’s lived experiences. Each installation tugs at the senses. Visitors can take lollipops or mints from any of the many candy dishes spread around the museum/Gmama’s house.  You may smell the sweet dense aroma of incense or the pungent funk of moth balls. You will hear the voice of Gmama, Myeshia and Gingel tell their own stories through looped audio projections. You will surely leave the experience inspired.

Read more…

“Moving Walls” reviewed by thINKing DANCE

Moving Bodies, Embodied Walls

by Andrew Sargus Klein

In a room damp with early summer humidity, the soloist’s slow pace approached a breaking point. Prone in the center of the floor, all torso, mantis-like, isolated limbs slowly unfolded, reached, paused. No air circulation, no score, a thin sheen of sweat over everyone, save for the soloist who captivated the audience as first one limb, then two, then all left the ground in a suspended geometry.

We were watching a kinetic sculpture compiled of wood slats, a piece of bannister, some pocket shutter, a chair leg, shoe molding, several varieties of hinge, and eye hooks. The creation was manipulated by two sets of hands holding black cord that ran through squeaking pulleys and connected to the eye hooks.

It was part sculpture, part puppet, part voice—the wood and metal breathed as if it were its own body. It transformed static materials beyond the mere connectibility of their individual parts, and it was a near-perfect culimination of a performance focused on the “human experience in relation to architecture” which questioned “concepts of stability.”

Moving Walls, set in the first two floors of the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture, was a collaborative and site-specific effort in the truest sense of those terms. Five artists came together in an almost year-long generative process: Sidney Pink (movement), Noa    Heyne (filmography and sculpture), Sarah Smith (movement), Matthew Williams (movement), and Khristian Weeks (score).

Read more…

Moving Walls performances begin this Saturday!

Moving Walls is an experimental dance piece that examines human experience in relation to architecture. Combining movement with sculpture, animation, and sound, the piece is a collaborative project that questions our concepts of stability. With wheels, ropes, pulleys, hooks, and hinges, three performers construct and deconstruct the space around them. In turn, they are influenced by their shifting surroundings.

Performances are Saturday April 28, 8pm; Sunday April 29, 7pm; Thursday May 3, 8pm; and Saturday May 5, 8pm. Get tickets here for the dance performances.

Exhibition open April 14–May 5. Self-guided visits are free with timed entry until closing on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 12-6pm, and Sundays from 10-4pm. Book your visit here.