The exhibitions program is run by Visual Arts Director Joy Davis and Visual Arts Manager Daria Parsa.
Inquiries can be sent to visualarts@creativealliance.org
Opening Reception: May 15, 6-9PM
From Trash to Puppets: Street Puppet Building Workshop: May 30–31, 10AM-1PM (RSVP required)
Designed to empower the next generation of ecological researchers, this project seeks to nurture structural change. WHEN THE BUTTERFLIES WOULD VISIT brings together artists/activists/scientists around the environmental struggle in Guna Yala territory of Panama.
The excrement of fossil fuels and capitalism has washed up onto the shores and inside the bodies of the Indigenous Guna. In the summer 2022, on the ecological indigenous artist residency, we seeded this project to share knowledge and build new ways of working—ecological reciprocity.
Reciprocity, something western culture desperately needs to work on, is the social psychological practice of ecology. If we as westerners can shift from capitalistic colonial systems to indigenous practices of living in relationship to the living beings around us, humanity has hope. However, this knowledge is getting harder to keep and pass down—as western culture’s plastic/oil-addictions infiltrate and seep into these communities.
We are in partnership with Yar Burba, an indigenous ecological research center run by Favio and Desy Arosemena. In the words of founder/director Favio, “Yar Burba signifies the Guna people’s spiritual connection with nature. It is an expression of how we understand the world: humans, the jungle, the sea, animals, and spirits form a unity. Everything is alive, everything has energy.”
-Tavia La Follette (curator)
Click here to learn more about the artists involved!
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Opening Reception: May 16, 6-9PM
Mindful Movement & Sound Healing: May 23, 12-2PM
Community Potluck & Storytelling: May 31, 1-4PM
Artist Talk: June 5, 6:30-8:30PM
Closing Reception: June 26, 6-9PM
There is a particular kind of knowing that lives in a dinner table—in the grain of the wood, the weight of the chairs, the smell of a meal that no longer exists but somehow never leaves. Baltimore-based twin artists Hope & Faith McCorkle have built an entire exhibition around that knowing, and what it means to carry it long after the table and the person who set it are gone.
You Can Always Come Back Home is an immersive, multidimensional installation that asks one of the most profound questions we can hold: where is home when the world keeps moving and the people who made it are no longer here? Working across large-scale mixed-media scrolls, domestic objects, inherited furniture, and participatory installations, Hope and Faith construct a gallery environment that breathes like a living room—layered, intimate, and full of presence. Rooted in Black feminist thought and bell hooks’ concept of homeplace as a site of resistance, the exhibition positions home not as a fixed location but as a space where memory, spirit, and ancestry live as one.
At the heart of the exhibition is an altar built from their late mother, Tonya Wendell McCorkle’s dinner table, alongside a meditative labyrinth and scroll-based works that move between personal narrative and collective history. The gallery becomes what the artists have always sought to build: a sanctuary born from the grief of losing their mother at seventeen, and from the collaborative practice that became their way back to life.
The exhibition extends beyond the gallery through community programming, including a movement and sound healing workshop, storytelling gatherings, and a communal meal where participants bring dishes and the memories they hold. These are not simply add-ons. They are the embodiments of the exhibition itself.
This is what art can do at its highest purpose: transform a room into a refuge, and invite Baltimore’s community to remember that no matter how far you have traveled, how much has been lost, or how long you have been away, you can always come back home.
You Can Always Come Back Home is supported by a Rubys Artist Grant, a program of the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.
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