Projects.
We commission site-specific and subject-oriented projects that exist in public space and are in collaboration with artists and existing arts and non-arts institutions, organizations, sites, and spaces.
We commission site-specific and subject-oriented projects that exist in public space and are in collaboration with artists and existing arts and non-arts institutions, organizations, sites, and spaces.
The Contemporary presents The Ground, a solo commission by New York and Richmond-based artist Michael Jones McKean, at the historic Hutzler Brothers Palace Building, located at 200 North Howard Street. In partnership with AiNET, the project is free and open to the public through May 19, 2017. Join us on Saturday, February 18 from 6-9pm for the opening reception.
Hutzler Brothers Palace, erected 1888, and originally advertised as a “museum of merchandise” was the first department store of its kind in Baltimore. In the shell of this former emporium, McKean has fabricated a massive, multi-room, two-story structure, an architectonic labyrinth enfolding diverse aesthetic languages and multiple modes of representation. He merges the museological, the domestic, the store display, the geological, the theatrical, and the digital. In its totality, he has created an extended metaphor on “place”. Not place as a stagnant reality fixed in time, but as an emergent, fecund, and evolving set of conditions metabolizing past histories into the present. With The Ground, McKean proposes longer overlapping and diverging timelines where actants, human and non-human, live in close, nonhierarchical proximity with their time scales flattened and enmeshed. Here, a handmade replica of the human brain co-mingles casually with that of a wolf, whale, cat, and elephant. An out-of-time cave diorama shares a wall with twelve heads, possibly those of costumed members of some undetermined, future leaning, pan-cultural cult. A mise-en-scene built of clay and dirt depicting people participating in a water birth of a new human conflates the contemporary and historical, creation myth and quotidian, abject realism and magic realism.
As Hutzler’s slips with each passing year into more hazily remembered regional folklore, it also cements its historical status in a complex and problematic continuum of socio-commercial spaces—the marketplace— where substances and objects from eyeliner to boom boxes, handbags to frying pans, chocolates to wristwatches, were crafted to elicit various degrees of human desire. In this way, McKean conceives of the building as a filter through which materials and objects, each existing within complex global supply chains, have traveled to be displayed, browsed, and purchased before finally dispersing into the community-at-large. Today, nearly thirty years after Hutzler’s has closed, the building houses a vast internet server farm, where information streams into homes, phones, and businesses. Noting that the building sits atop roughly 25% of the earth’s data flow—tweets and texts, selfies, emails, merchandise orders, Skype calls, and search queries—The Ground projects a world slipping into phantom being, matter flattening into proto-screen realities —stoic back-lit voids.
The Ground indexes the mysterious and ungraspable space below us— the mantle where all earthbound creation rises from and will return to— carbon to rare earth minerals, platinum to silk, 64GB USB drives to arrowheads.
The project also speaks to the complex history of the site stretching from the Holocene, to Anthropocene, to pre-industrial, to 4th wave postindustrial—a testing ground for the successes, challenges, and failures of modernity. McKean offers timelines and sedimented realities, which archive the facades of a crumbling past and future. Expanding a temporal understanding of site, The Ground transmutes artifacts, relics, and talismans, to be discovered again as harbingers of a new time.
Site: The Bank Building
Multiple Artists
Site: Gallery CA
Whoop Dee Doo
Site: Penn Station
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Ben Gest
Site: Contemporary Museum and various locations around Baltimore
Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry
Site: Contemporary Museum
Lee Mingwei, Neighborhood Public Radio, Finishing School
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Hugh Pocock
Site: Contemporary Museum
Soledad Salame
Site: Contemporary Museum
Futurefarmers
Site: Contemporary Museum and the Walters Art Museum
Dawoud Bey
Site: Contemporary Museum and various locations around Baltimore
Kianga Ford
Site: Contemporary Museum and various locations around Baltimore
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Alexandra Grant, Bernhard Hildebrant and Mary Temple
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Joseph Grigely
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
municipalWORKSHOP and Super Pride Studio
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum and various locations around Baltimore
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum and the Walters Art Museum
Louise Bourgeois
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Sanford Biggers
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Isaac Julien
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum and MTA buses
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum and the Walters Art Museum
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Site: Contemporary Museum
Louisa Chase
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum and the Walters Art Museum
Dennis Adams
Site: Contemporary Museum
Moira Dryer
Site: Contemporary Museum
TK
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum and Peabody Institute
Ellen Gallagher, Christian Marclay and Liliana Porter
Site: Holiday Street Window Galleries
Multiple Artists
Site: Contemporary Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Maryland State Fairgrounds
Multiple Artists
Site: Rash Field
Multiple Artists
Site: Alex. Brown Building
Multiple Artists
Site: Alex. Brown Building
Teresita Fernández & Quisqueya Henríquez
Site: Retail Space at Garrison Forest Plaza
Multiple Artists
Site: Multiple Venus & Online Exhibition
Lee Boot & Frank Fietzek
Site: Howard P. Rawlings Conservatory at Druid Hill Park
Paul Etienne Lincoln
Site: The Walters Art Museum
Multiple Artists
Site: Canton National Bank
Hung Liu
Site: Baltimore Museum of Industry
Willie Cole
Site: Morgan State University
Aboudramane & Bodys Isek Kingelez
Site: St. Stanislaus Kostka Convent
Multiple Artists
Site: 1959 Chevy Truck
Alison Saar
Site: Maryland Historical Society
Fred Wilson
Site: University of Baltimore Street Garage
Multiple Artists
Site: Greyhound Service Terminal
Multiple Artists
Site: Famous Ballroom
Multiple Artists
Site: Maryland Institute College of Art
Multiple Artists