This story is part of a partnership with The Baltimore Banner and BmoreArt that will provide monthly pieces focusing on the region’s artists, galleries and museums. For more stories like this, visit BmoreArt.com.

I had a writing professor in college who explicitly forbade our class to use the word “crisp” when describing autumn. She said it was a writing cliché — a literary insult to the glorious transition of summer into fall. That was many years ago, but I agree that our collective love of autumn has led to a fever pitch of marketing schemes that diminish our authentic enjoyment of shortening days and changing leaves. These days, I find the artificial scent of “pumpkin spice” an equally egregious crime against the season, and though the term “jacket weather” sends a thrill through my heart, I strive to experience autumn unmediated.

This is where good art comes into play. Autumn is typically a time when galleries put their best work forward, when ambitious shows debut and opening receptions are packed. This season is abounding with opportunities to discover yourself and the world around you with fresh eyes, especially when you’re surrounded by change.

I am putting just a few fall favorite exhibits together, with the tacit agreement we will all attempt to relate to them without thinking in crispy clichés, but rather by honoring our own subjective range of senses.

‘Summer ‘24′

C. Grimaldis Gallery

523 N. Charles St.

Through Sept. 14

As summer’s lushness is winding down, I always petition Mother Nature for just a few more weeks. Thankfully, the C. Grimaldis Gallery has extended their summer group exhibition into September, allowing us a grace period to experience this powerful combination of contemporary art gathered from across the world. This is the 47th annual summer group exhibit at the historic Baltimore gallery, with a sophisticated range of painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture featuring Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, James Hennessey, Rania Matar, Jae Ko, John Ruppert and Amelie Wang.

For the art students who just returned to school, there are paintings by the late Hartigan, the legendary abstract expressionist painter who made Maryland Institute College of Art’s Hoffberger program a nationally respected degree. This particular exhibit features her “Lexington Market Series,” which renders verdant, abundant produce and vendors at the beloved food hall. The sculptures of Ruppert, an esteemed University of Maryland, College Park professor, are dramatic metal castings that reference a strike of lightning, both violent and solid. This group show also includes a print by another abstract expressionistic painter, de Kooning, that was inspired by a trip to Lascaux, referencing Paleolithic cave paintings of deer, bison and goats dancing across rough surfaced walls.

Lebanese photographer Matar’s color-soaked photos of female-identifying figures, mysteriously draped in human-made patterns and fabrics, invoke an independent spirit. She has long used photography to explore the relationship between personal agency and reverence for community, always centering the female figure and comparing the way they are viewed in the United States versus the Middle East.

It is customary for summer group exhibitions to include brand new artists to the gallery as well, an opportunity to test their work during the gallery’s quietest season. Recent MICA graduate Wang is included in “Summer ‘24,” presenting mysterious figures in poetic settings, sumptuous with color and masked by swirls of painted gesture. Like Matar, Wang explores a complicated relationship between her identity in the U.S. and her home country, offering a nuanced perspective of layered cultural difference and alluding to China’s deeply censored history.

Monica Ikegwu, ‘Extensions’

Galerie Myrtis

2224 N. Charles St.

Through Sept. 21

If you’re into speculation, I wager that Monica Ikegwu will be the next Baltimore-based painter you will wish you had collected way back when. Galerie Myrtis is nestled in a beautiful Old Goucher brownstone, a gem of a gallery that features mainly work by Black artists verging on national careers. You probably saw Ikegwu’s luscious, hyperrealistic portrait paintings last year at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” exhibit, where they were also emblazoned on giant banners outside the museum. Despite her young age, this MICA graduate is exhibiting across the country regularly and has been collected by museums. It’s a little shocking to realize that “Extensions” is her first solo exhibition at Galerie Myrtis.

There are a lot of existing hyperrealist painters in the art market right now, but Ikegwu’s portraits are unique in their ability to capture a timeless essence, especially in depicting skin that is taut yet glowing and in soft, silky fabrics so compelling it’s hard not to touch them. The painter is already a master of the range of storytelling that only oil paint can accomplish, with the ability to depict a subject with more sensitivity than a photo while also imbuing them with spirit. In “Extensions,” Ikegwu depicts the outer shell of her subjects with lavish adoration, but is able to reveal a much deeper aspect, too, where individuals radiate distinct energy and an inner beauty that can be felt only while standing in front of each painting.

Inaugural Exhibit

The Crow’s Nest

116 W. Mulberry St.

Sept. 7 through Sept. 22

Everyone loves the energy of a new art space, especially one designed as an incubator for the twin challenges of climate change and environmental justice. Baltimore’s newest is opening its doors with a bang, and this opening promises to be one of the buzziest in town.

After a year of renovation, D.C. transplant Leonardo Martinez-Diaz will open The Crow’s Nest to provide work, social and exhibition space for artistic production of all kinds, with a particular nod to “radical and public art.” Attracted to Baltimore’s affordability, architecture and history of activism, Martinez moved to the city in 2022. In a story from BmoreArt’s migration-themed print journal, Martinez told Michael Anthony Farley that one source of inspiration was Rachel Carson, a scientist with Baltimore ties whose book, “Silent Spring,” helped spark the modern environmental movement.

The Crow’s Nest’s inaugural exhibition will feature 20 works of art ranging from paintings to photography to sculpture, from regional artists including Lynn Cazabon, Rosemary Feit Covey, Se Jong Cho, Phaan Howng, Alexander Heilner, Sookkyung Park, Hugh Pocock, Alexi Scheiber, Piotr Szyhalski and Jordan Tierney. Each artist was selected because they address issues of climate change and environmental injustice through their own personal lens, translated into a variety of media. The goal of the exhibition — and the new space — is to educate people about our current climate emergency and its varying impact on communities and the natural environment, as well as challenge the way we perceive such information and consider new ways to address it.

In addition to a gallery, the Crow’s Nest will have studios for rent on-site and a variety of events, forums and experimental projects available for the general public to participate in.

‘Balancing Acts’

The Peale

225 Holliday St.

Through Sept. 22

The Peale, the nation’s first purpose-built museum, is a conundrum. Simultaneously a historic monument, a living archive, a performance space and an exhibiting museum, it seems appropriate that their fall group show features artists whose work fits the same mold.

“Balancing Acts,” featuring John Bohl, Phaan Howng, Ed Istwan and Magnolia Laurie, centers around the idea that we are always a multitude of different things all at once. There is no one overarching theme; each artist tends to switch back and forth between abstraction and observation, between expressionism and realism, undermining the categories of art that currently exist in a muscular display of representation.

All four artists are Baltimore-based and collegial, but find their subjects and techniques from very different places. Bohl mines pop culture for his design-centric compositions, mishmashing images from YouTube, vintage print ads and photography. Howng’s paintings and installations mimic nature’s lush natural growth, overwhelming and sometimes threatening in color and intensity. Laurie’s landscapes are simultaneously empty and full, referencing human structures and a wild natural energy through innovative painterly brushwork that mimics the hand of nature. And Istwan’s repeated geometric studies distill and refine nature’s color palette into pleasing arrangements that belie their own simplicity.

Esther Kläs, ‘How to Imagine Difference’

CPM Gallery

1512 Bolton St.

Sept. 6 through Oct. 19 (open by appointment)

You can always expect to be challenged at CPM Gallery. The space, located in a Bolton Hill brownstone, yields a shocking wealth of cutting-edge work, but is grounded in an accessible space that allows for an immediate curiosity. CPM’s newest is a solo exhibit of recent sculpture and prints by German-born, Barcelona-based Esther Kläs, entitled “How to Imagine Difference.” The artist has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at New York’s MoMA PS1 and at the Fondazione Giuliani in Rome, but in Baltimore her work takes on a more intimate approach.

Using intuitive aesthetics honed over the past decade, Kläs assembles sculpture out of found objects and fabricated elements alongside more traditional art materials. In this exhibit, the artist employs a marble slab, a steel ring and a rusted metal pipe — all found objects — and combines them with neon designed by the artist in hues of pink, blue and green. The resulting mashups are poetic and luminescent, romanticizing the provenance of each found object in a playful way and suggesting new potential for each as an iconic representation. Other bodies of work include handbuilt ceramics cobbled together with metal wire into a patterned tapestry, and text-based mono prints based on the artist’s own writing about her plans for the exhibition.