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

Welcome to the fall. The fall of American democracy, you ask? Perhaps. But also to this lovely autumnal season replete with crisp air, apple cider doughnuts and jackets — a special time of year when orange facial foundation changes to a deep pumpkin spice hue.

All political jokes aside, there is a plethora of great art exhibitions happening in Baltimore this season. Rather than doomscrolling and posting clever burns against your foes on social media, I encourage you to put on your cute shoes and head to Baltimore’s fabulous galleries for great art, free wine and interactions with a wonderful community of creative people.

These are just a few of my favorite free exhibits happening this month.

‘The Brave: Affirming Power, Presence & Possibility’

• Galerie Myrtis
• 2224 N. Charles St.
• Through Oct. 11

Galerie Myrtis’ new group exhibit, featuring many of their standout artists, is inspired by lyrics from Danielle Ponder’s “Some of Us Are Brave.” “All we want is to be ourselves, shine our light with no problems,” she sings, expressing a shared desire for freedom and safety in the face of silence and violence. Specifically addressing the emotional interiors of Black life in myriad ways, “The Brave’s” included artists offer visions of power in tenderness, pain as a change agent, and how we gather strength both as individuals and in larger groups where diversity is championed and beauty functions as strength.

Expect to be inspired by beauty and a deep connection to history and place with Baltimore functioning as a communal laboratory for liberation. The gallery describes the exhibit, which includes painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media and installations, as “a collective testimony that honors ancestral strength, celebrates embodied truth, and demands space for joy, grief, intimacy, and transformation.”

Featured artists include Devin Allen, Lavett Ballard, Jerrell Gibbs, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Megan Lewis, Delita Martin, Ronald Jackson, Ya La’Ford, Bria Wilson-Sterling and more.

Lynn Silverman, ‘In A Matter of Time’

• Goya Contemporary Gallery
• 3000 Chestnut Ave. (Mill Centre Studio 214)
• Through Oct. 16

Photography is believed to be an accurate medium for capturing a realistic moment in time, but often what we try to achieve is simply unphotographable. Our experiences are ephemeral and multifaceted; most photos fall short of the ideal images in our mind compared to the ones we’ve actually taken.

Lynn Silverman is a photographic artist who works in exactly the opposite way, so much so that her black-and-white images can be confusing, confrontational and abstract. Silverman often photographs a mundane object, but in a way that prioritizes the language of the camera and the darkroom: flavors of light, velvety contrast and a shallow depth of field that creates moments of lucid clarity while the rest is a blur.

The internationally acclaimed photographer and former Maryland Institute College of Art professor has spent a career pushing beyond the traditional boundaries of her medium in new and unexpected ways. Her latest series, “In A Matter of Time,” centers on archival panoramic photos and vintage photographic scrolls depicting early 20th-century life. As her camera zeroes in, she re-illuminates, reanimates, crops and rotates the images to reveal hidden scripts and details, luxuriating in the hidden lives buried in these objects as well as their unique physical characteristics.

“Given the relationship a photograph inevitably has with the past, my desire is to focus on the act of remembering,” Silverman said. “My manipulation of the scrolls attempts to evoke how the gap between the photograph and memory continues to widen as the time when the picture was taken recedes further into the past.”

Also at Goya Contemporary: Check out Liam Davis’ solo exhibition, “Living With It,” which runs through Oct. 16.

‘Picturing Mobility: Black Tourism and Leisure During the Jim Crow Era’

• Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery at University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• 1000 Hilltop Circle
• Through Dec. 19

We all deserve a much-needed vacation at times. However, during the Jim Crow era of intense racial segregation, Black Americans risked their lives to travel, facing significant and dangerous limitations of movement. For those determined to experience a leisurely trip, careful planning could mean the difference between life and death; guidebooks like “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book” helped find safe accommodations and welcoming spaces.

The ‘Picturing Mobility: Black Tourism and Leisure During the Jim Crow Era’ exhibit includes historic photographs and other materials from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Special Collections, including oral histories, audio, video and travel ephemera related to Black tourism and leisure activities from the 1920s to 1960s, mainly from the mid-Atlantic region.

Viewed all together, the act of travel and the participation in joyful leisure activities forms a multifaceted view of resistance against an America that restricted the right of Black citizens to enjoy parks, beaches, pools, hotels and restaurants. These images, documents and stories celebrate those who insisted they be allowed to move freely and to embrace pleasure and relaxation, and centers the dignity inherent in such action. Materials on loan for the exhibit include pieces from the AFRO American Newspapers Archives, Maryland State Archives, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, Yale University and many more.

Katie Pumphrey, ‘Swimming Pool’

• Creative Alliance
• 3134 Eastern Ave.
• Through Oct. 11

“Swimming is about repetition. Stroke after stroke, mile after mile,” says Katie Pumphrey, the Baltimore-based ultramarathon open water swimmer and the first to complete the 24-mile swim from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. “Swimming in the dark, your mind plays tricks on you. I’m fascinated by how fear, imagination, and humor collide in moments when we are stressed. My work examines these feelings with a hint of humor and lightheartedness — and hopefully invites you to jump in feet first.”

No doubt you’ve read about the incredible swimming records set by Pumphrey, but perhaps you did not realize that she is a painter, MICA graduate and former Creative Alliance resident artist. Her newest exhibition, “Swimming Pool,” merges her two divergent practices into one space, featuring new paintings and an immersive installation that has a simulated pool as well as a lifeguard stand and beach chairs. On opening night, crowds were entertained by a performance by Fluid Movement, Baltimore’s water ballet troupe.

At the center of the exhibit, Pumphrey’s muscular, cool and loosely painted canvases allude to her athletic practice and endurance, where motion and color come together to resemble figures and waves. Academically trained, Pumphrey’s paintings are inspired by art history, referencing John Singleton Copley’s iconic “Watson and the Shark,” but updated and playful, teeming with swimmers and marine life. The monumentally sized paintings tower over you and envelop your entire line of vision, capturing the movement and power of nature, both menacing and beautiful.

Jen White-Johnson, ‘KnoxRoxs: Autistic Joy’

• Julio Fine Arts Gallery at Loyola University of Maryland
• 4501 N. Charles St.
• Through Oct. 10

At Loyola University’s Julio Gallery, a block of 36 photo-zine spreads fills the wall with hues of blue and lavender. Some of the photos bear text like “Autistic Joy” and “Black Autistic Lives Matter” and “KnoxRoxs.” On another wall, similarly sized photos of a young Black boy with beautiful curls form a cloud of images. You see him smiling and blowing bubbles, at the beach, hugging his mom, and encased in a blue sensory body sock, a compression blanket used to calm autistic overstimulation.

All the images were created by artist, activist and designer Jen White-Johnson, a Baltimore-based artist-educator who is Afro Latina, disabled and neurodivergent. When her son, Knox, was diagnosed with autism at age 3, White-Johnson recognized her own neurodivergence and its impact on her creative output and parenting. Art and design became a critical tool in redefining her role “as a disabled parent raising a disabled child,” explored in a framework White-Johnson calls “Disabled Mothering as an Act of Resistance.” Her ability to communicate through beautiful images and text about her experiences as the parent of an autistic son forms the basis of a redesign of ableist visual culture.

White-Johnson has received international recognition for KnoxRoxs, the photo zine released in 2018 and dedicated to her son, which she rereleased with additional photography in 2024. The publication emphasizes authentic moments of joy and provides much-needed visibility to children of color from neurodivergent communities and challenging social stigmas.

Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, ‘Tales from Future Past’

• CPM Gallery
• 1512 Bolton St.
• Sept. 27 through Nov. 15

This intimate gallery is located inside a private residence in a Bolton Hill brownstone, but its exhibits encompass an international ambition. Its latest features new works on paper in ink, watercolor and gouache by Nigerian-born and London-raised Richard Ayodeji Ikhide.

The influence of comic books and Japanese manga is obvious on large and small multipaneled wall vignettes in which the artist combines his own personal history with much larger art historical themes. A relationship to classical watercolorists like Winslow Homer and William Blake, and a use of water-based painting media, lend a unique immediacy to his surfaces. The romantic and ethereal nature of the medium helps the artist render mythical stories of heroic conflicts, imagined realms and spirit worlds full of lyrical figures and ancestral spirits. Both ancient and futuristic, Ikhide punctuates his compositions with speech bubbles filled with familiar yet unrecognizable shapes, reminiscent of visual communication but representing no particular language. “Tales from Future Past” came from the artist’s study of the 20th-century Romanian scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, where the rites of passage from youth into adulthood forms new archetypes and a new mythology for an evolving era.