In Baltimore, Confronting Chaos Through Contemporary Art

This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.

“What is your wildest dream for our future?”

That is the question written boldly on the 16-by-11-foot blue wall that is featured in “Dreamseeds,” an interactive art and sound installation.

Here are two of the answers, written on pieces of handmade, recycled paper:

“Energy, food, love, sufficient for everyone.”

“That we can be loved for who we are.”

And because “Dreamseeds” is part of an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, one young visitor had a very specific wish: “I want to be an Orioles player — the first girl.”

The notes hang on metal pegs lined up in neat rows below the question. Speakers behind the wall emit a soundscape of voices and music that were gathered by the artists during workshops they conducted and then woven into a sound tapestry.

“Dreaming in a time of chaos is absolutely revolutionary,” said Sanahara Ama Chandra Brown, who created “Dreamseeds” with Hannah Brancato, both Baltimore artists. “It is revolutionary for someone to say, ‘I will still have hope. I will still have desire.’”

The installation is one of 66 works in the show “Crosscurrents.” Most of them are from the museum’s collection, and 28 are on exhibit for the first time. There is no official closing date, but a selection of works will rotate about every six months.

The exhibition explores how, over the past 60 years, artists have imagined their relationships to the earth, environmental justice, grief and restoration, as well as how they have found light during dark times.

One of three solo presentations in the show, “Lay Me Down in Praise,” uses powerful imagery and sound to bring viewers “to the center of how beautiful, but how devastating, our planet can be,” said Justen Leroy, the artist behind the piece, who lives in Los Angeles.

In a small theater, the three-channel video installation shows slow-moving rivers of fiery lava, surging oceans and calving glaciers alongside close-ups of people staring at the camera, hugging and moving gracefully.

It is the first artwork Leroy created, and he directed it with the visual artist Kordae Jatafa Henry. The performers are Leroy’s family and friends, and the images, he said, put “Black people next to geographies that we typically don’t have access to.”

“We don’t think about going to Iceland or different terrains — that world isn’t necessarily open to us,” he said. “I’m trying to help them crack open their imagination for the world and for themselves.”

The music — composed by Leroy and the multidisciplinary artist Alexander Hadyn — is very much in the Black soul tradition of vocal riffs, runs and melismas, which are “the connecting of notes that aren’t necessarily a word but they are packed with emotion,” Leroy said.

“I began thinking, ‘What is the soundtrack of our planet and what does the floor of the Atlantic sound like? What does that cry sound like?’” he said. The essence of gospel style, he noted, has been described as “the wordless moan.”

The piece was shown as part of the 2023 Biennial of the Americas in Denver, then as part of the 2024 Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal. The Baltimore museum has acquired it.

Another solo presentation — but a very different way of imagining nature and resilience — sits in the first of 11 galleries that make up the exhibition. Titled “Under Other Skies,” this is the only work commissioned specifically for the show. Visitors can walk among 10 metal sculptures by Abigail Lucien, ranging from an 11-foot-tall bird cage with a swing inside to a delicate six-inch black-eyed Susan, Maryland’s state flower.

On the walls are trellis-like sculptures with animals such as cats and rabbits scampering in and out of the bars. All are made of recycled iron or a metal alloy that includes iron.

For Lucien, who lived in Baltimore before moving to New York and uses they/them pronouns, iron is a key element of their work.

It is vital to the life of the earth — whose core is made almost entirely of iron and nickel — but also to each individual’s existence, they said. Human bodies contain a small amount of iron, and a lack of iron can lead to learning and memory deficits.

“There’s something really poetic to me about this idea of thinking about this material of capturing or holding memory,” Lucien said, adding that it took about a year to make all 10 pieces. This is their first solo presentation in a museum.

Originally a printmaker, Lucien, an assistant professor at Hunter College in New York City, turned toward metalwork in 2020 when the world seemed suffused in grief. Lucien’s father in Haiti died of Covid in the same week that George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis police.

“I didn’t know what to do anymore, and I found solace in slowing down in the metal studio,” they said. “I felt that was a place that I had agency, that I could actually bend something to my will.”

The sculptures embrace contradiction: A ribbon or a spider web in the real world is made of fragile material, but in the exhibit they are composed of solid steel.

As a biracial person who grew up both in Haiti and the United States, Lucien has always been drawn to spaces or things “that feel like they are able to flourish in an in-between world.”

“How do we create space where things are not easily defined,” they continued, “where they can become something that’s embraced or can become connecting points, rather than are outcast or feared.”

Tools of connection appear in “Tightrope — Familiar Yet Complex 4,” a 6-by-10-foot artwork that looks as if it could be a painting or a collage of green-brown water or land but is actually made entirely of fiberboards.

The Ethiopian artist Elias Sime “goes to a massive open-air market in Addis Ababa where scrap like this is traded and collected over years and years,” said Cecilia Wichmann, curator and head of the museum’s contemporary art department. He also collects and makes art out of other telecommunications detritus, including motherboards, keyboards and coaxial cables.

Through his work, Sime raises the question of what it means “to be so intensively interconnected and at what cost,” Wichmann said, adding, “And how does the extraction of the materials used to make these systems impact the earth that we need to sustain our lives and our interpersonal relationships?”

Another exhibition standout is “Peace Keeper” by Nari Ward. It was originally shown at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, dismantled and recreated for the New Museum in New York City, then acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art.

A black full-size hearse covered in peacock feathers and what looks like thick tar — but is actually petroleum jelly mixed with black pigmentation — sits enclosed by metal bars with mufflers hanging above it. It is, in its essence, caged death.

Ward told The Art Newspaper that the new iteration of “Peace Keeper” is “still about man’s inhumanity to man, because there’s something very violent in the piece.”

“Peace Keeper” is in dialogue with a nearby painting, Robert Motherwell’s “Elegy to the Spanish Republic CII” from 1965. It is from a series of more than 100 Elegies to the Spanish Republic that Motherwell painted over about two decades as a lamentation and a meditation on life and death.

In creating “Crosscurrents,” the curators and all others involved were thinking “about this idea of mourning and grief in a cross-generational, collective way,” Wichmann said. Particularly after the impact of the Covid pandemic, “how do we respond to those losses in a way that has some expression of the potential to keep going?”