18th Annual Critics' Residency Program
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Critics curate show
By Glenn McNatt, Sun Art Critic
This year's annual critics' residency program sponsored by Maryland Art Place aimed to bring a distinguished arts commentator to town to work with local writers in curating a show of new and emerging talent.
New York-based Amei Wallach, a former president of the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, chose City Paper arts editor Blake de Pastino and Washington writer Cathryn Keller to help select area artists for an exhibition and catalog publication.
The results, on view at MAP's gallery through April 17, amply justify Wallach's enthusiasm for Baltimore's art scene. She writes that while working on the MAP show, she was also jurying exhibitions in New York and New Mexico, and that between the artists involved in those shows and the ones here "there was simply no comparison."
"The Baltimore artists on the whole worked with greater clarity, sophistication and ambition than most of the others," Wallach wrote in the MAP catalog.
"Perhaps it was because they came from a geographically defined artistic community. Or perhaps it was simply that Baltimore is fecund soil for the maturation of art and artists," she added. "Whatever the reason, the Baltimore artists were simply better than those who submitted to the other exhibitions, and I had an embarrassment of riches from which to choose."
After sorting through hundreds of slides and visiting studios, Wallach, de Pastino and Keller chose six artists for the show: Laura Amussen, Seth Adelsberger, Anthony Cervino, Brandon Morse, Nora Sturges and Rebecca Webber.
Sturges makes small, exquisitely detailed panel paintings in the style of Renaissance altarpieces that narrate the adventures of 13th-century traveler Marco Polo, whom she portrays as a paunchy, middle-aged American salaryman with a slightly befuddled air.
Morse's medium is video, and his contributions include an is an impressive abstract two-channel video projection and a smaller screen displaying a swarming pattern that resembles migratory sea birds.
Webber's inward-looking, highly allusive panel drawings depicting scenes from German artist Joseph Beuys' legendary 1974 New York gallery performance with a shepherd's staff and a live coyote seem to be a lament for the diminished possibilities of artmaking among her own generation, though it's not exactly clear why or how or even if this may have come to be.
The show includes interesting sculpture by Cervino, installation by Amussen and painting by Adelsberger. Catalog entries by Wallach, de Pastino and Keller display clarity and empathy.
The gallery is at 8 Market Place, Suite 100, in the Port Discovery Plaza. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Call 410-962-8565 or visit www.mdartplace.org.
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