Whether you visit Lexington Market to feast on Faidley’s crab cakes or dine on Deddle’s Donuts, you will soon also be able to engage with art at the public market.
Baltimore Museum of Art will reopen their branch location at the new Lexington Market in June, after operating a space in the East Market building before the pandemic.
“We are immensely excited to welcome everyone to the new BMA Lexington Market,” said BMA Director of Public Engagement Dave Eassa in a statement. “Our goal is to leverage art and culture to create an atmosphere of radical hospitality to accept anyone as they are. Art has always been a powerful way for people to connect, to learn, and to grow individually and collectively. BMA Lexington Market is built on the ethos that we all need and benefit from art in our lives, and this can be effectively shared by creating experiences directly where people are moving about their daily lives.”
The 350-square-foot BMA Lexington Market branch location is designed by Baltimore-based architect Jerryn J. McCray, and it will offer free opportunities for the public to view and create art.
BMA Lexington Market will be staffed Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. During hours that it is not staffed, the branch will showcase time-based media from the BMA’s collection.
The first time-based media installation will be Mark Bradford’s 3-minute soundless color video “Niagara” (2005), which the artist displayed in an exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale.
BMA Lexington Market’s installations and creative opportunities will be “designed around the theme ‘holding space,’ to encourage dialogue and co-creation that fosters deep connections and openness,” museum officials said in a news release.
Each month, one class of Baltimore City Public Schools students will visit the BMA Lexington Market, where a local artist will guide them in coordination with the Baltimore City Fine Arts Office.
Though the branch will not be open until June, the BMA’s Manager of Public Engagement Malaika Clements and Public Engagement Coordinator Colby Ware are leading artmaking activities every Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and programs every fourth Saturday of the month in the adjacent Baltimore Room.
Feedback from patrons will inspire themes and activities for future programs, “allowing for a deeper exploration into topics and issues that are reflective of the current moment and relevant to Baltimore residents,” museum officials said.
In September 2014, the museum launched the BMA Outpost, a mobile space for create art and telling stories around the theme of “home.”
The BMA Outpost visited 34 sites across Baltimore over the next four years. One of the most popular sites was Lexington Market, which inspired the museum to establish the first iteration of BMA Lexington Market in June 2019 as a fixed location for community engagement.
In the East Market space, that version of BMA Lexington Market hosted 45 public programs and served almost 9,000 Baltimoreans during the nine months it was open before closing at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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