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.

Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower” accurately envisioned the year 2024 as a time with growing wealth inequality, devastating climate change and a populist president vowing to “make America great again.” Given the chilling prescience of this 31-year-old work of fiction, it’s tempting to see our collective future in dystopian terms.

However dark and foreboding, Butler’s novels do offer a ray of hope at the end of the tunnel, a way forward that is more phoenix than ash. This is the power of great art, which takes on urgency during difficult times. It’s part of the reason art is policed and banned by fascist governments, and why funding cuts to the arts are of vital importance to all of us.

As we head towards 2025, I want to remind you that art and artists see the future in ways the rest of us don’t. No matter what happens, we have to keep our attention focused on them so we can be enriched by their brilliance and find new sources of strength and solidarity.

This month, I’m sharing four exhibitions that provide hope, insight and inspiration, centered specifically in the past, present and future of the magical city known as Baltimore.

Irving Henry Phillips Sr., ‘The Daily Hustle: Work, Joy, and Community in Black Baltimore’

Charm City Cultural Cultivation

3100 Greenmount Ave.

Through Jan. 1, 2025

We can’t understand our future if we don’t know the past. One beautiful source of our city’s history comes in the form of the I. Henry Photo Project, the archive of Irving Henry Phillips Sr., a prominent Baltimore-based photojournalist.

Phillips is to Baltimore what James Van Der Zee was to the Harlem Renaissance. Riveting in their grace, elegance and style, Phillips’ subjects stand in direct contrast to mainstream narratives of an impoverished and crime-ridden Baltimore. Instead, Phillips presents vast and compelling proof of a rich cultural and community history that has been somewhat erased over the past 50 years of redlining and disinvestment.

The photographer left behind thousands of unprinted black-and-white negatives. His grandson, photographer Webster Phillips III, has made it his life’s work to ensure those images are available to the communities that inspired them via prints, slide shows and on the web. These impeccable compositions with a familiar signature in the corner are a testament to Baltimore’s streets, parks, businesses and homes as they were a hundred years ago.

On display at a new art space in Waverly, “The Daily Hustle: Work, Joy and Community in Black Baltimore” features 21 black-and-white images from mid-century Baltimore, featuring a proud and diverse array of labor and commerce. In front of Phillips’ lens, we see bricklayers, telephone operators, mechanics, shop owners, teachers and musicians, dignified and dressed for success. These photos capture the ways entrepreneurship and labor build community, presenting the city’s African American neighborhoods and street corners as a beacon of hope for the future.

The images are also profoundly beautiful and brim with the sophisticated aesthetic Phillips brought to his medium, squarely in line with the photographic geniuses of his time: Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Robert Frank.

“Daily Hustle” is the inaugural exhibit at Charm City Cultivation, which falls under the Derrick Adams umbrella of spaces and programs that include The Last Resort Artist Retreat, Zora’s Den and the Black Baltimore Digital Database. The Black Lens Project is a new collaboration between the Black Baltimore Digital Database and the I. Henry Photo Project designed to showcase images and oral histories emerging from the extensive Phillips archive.

At the very least, this show offers compelling motivation to pick up a camera, chronicle ordinary and extraordinary events, and participate in an ever-expanding archive documenting the present.

‘Baker Artist Portfolios: Off the Web’

The Peale

225 Holliday St.

Through Jan. 19, 2025

For many artists, getting a foot in the door is the most difficult part of their career. This is why inclusive survey shows like Baker’s “Off the Web,” featuring over 200 works by Baltimore-area artists, are so important. In a city where there isn’t any municipal support for art galleries and very little financial patronage, the Baker Artist Portfolios has played a significant role in starting and sustaining artists’ careers.

Each year, approximately 1,000 artists create a free online portfolio, making it one of the largest digital collections of artwork from the Baltimore region. The beautiful website functions as an art gallery itself, where local artists, performers, writers and creatives can create free profiles, curate online exhibits, discover new artists and compete for financial awards. (The Baker Artist Portfolios were established by the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund and are a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.)

The biennial “Off the Web” exhibition invites any artist with a Baker Artist Portfolio to share one piece of art at The Peale, Baltimore’s community museum. While the online site is a great resource, it’s so important to see these works of art in person and host exhibitions and programs for community members to come together and celebrate their accomplishments.

While I am all for curation and editing, curators are usually forced to operate within the boundaries of small spaces and limited budget constraints. This exhibit, however, is gloriously rambling. It’s a time capsule into who Baltimore’s artists are right now, and an opportunity to immerse yourself in a multifaceted world of creative productivity from established artists like Linda DePalma, Sara Dittrich and Sherry Insley alongside emerging stars like Elijah Trice, Hope and Faith McCorkle, Maria-Theresa Fernandes and many more. You’ll certainly add a few names to your list of community artists to follow, support and collect.

Timothy App, ‘Equipoise’

Goya Contemporary Gallery

Mill Centre, 3000 Chestnut Ave. #214

Through Dec. 31

First, let’s address the title. The term equipoise has multiple meanings, but the throughline is a state of balance, and specifically a weight used to balance another weight. In clinical trials, equipoise is a state of genuine uncertainty about the value of two or more treatments, where an informed and rational person has no preference between treatments — essential for randomization to be effective.

“Mental equipoise” is a state of equanimity where the mind is purified of negative emotions and arrives at a steady, balanced composure. I wonder if this mindset is available in a pill form for entire countries? It certainly sounds like a necessary next step for positive, rational thought; a calm quietude achieved at the end of a dedicated journey.

When you see Timothy App’s large geometrical paintings, these definitions click. The term is perfect for his recent solo exhibition at Goya Contemporary, a beautiful gem of a commercial art space tucked into the Mill Centre in Hampden.

App was a Maryland Institute College of Art painting professor for five decades, but it makes sense to learn he first considered becoming an architect. The angles, discipline and precision deployed in App’s hard-edge abstractions take on the status of holy icons; the artist has borrowed aspects of formal rituals from his childhood — Catholic ceremony as well as a devotion to the formality of baseball. A balance of Brutalist and Bauhaus, the artist finds endless variation within dusky earth tones, beiges and blacks that would fall flat under a less-skilled artist’s hand.

Hard-line linear abstraction isn’t for everyone, and these paintings come off as dry if you’re looking for a quick read. In a study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, it was revealed the average length of time a viewer spends with a single work of art is between 15 and 30 seconds. These paintings extend a middle finger to anyone attempting to casually encounter them; the only way to feel the deep exchange of energy is by taking the time to imagine the painstaking, restrained and inspired process by which they were constructed, mirroring the silent, slow work that moves civilizations forward.

Devin Allen, ‘The Textures of Us: A Retrospective by Devin Allen’

Galerie Myrtis

2224 N. Charles St.

Through Jan. 11, 2025

When we think back to Baltimore’s last decade, defining moments include images of massive protests, such as Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March and those opposing Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. We don’t know what the next four years will bring, but one artist to watch is Devin Allen, who rose to international prominence in 2015 when his photograph from the Baltimore uprising was published on the cover of Time magazine.

The self-taught photographer has continued to fight for social justice in Baltimore through a variety of photographic series, some a celebration of resistance and others capturing hometown pride in everyday moments.

Allen’s work was featured again on a Time cover in 2020, and his national reputation as a Gordon Parks Fellow in 2017 and 2023 has made him an iconic success story. It’s a little shocking to realize he hasn’t had a lot of exhibitions in Baltimore, though he has focused his energy on publishing photographic books rather than gallery shows.

This month, you can see a new body of work from Allen at Galerie Myrtis, housed inside an elegant Old Goucher brownstone on Charles Street. The exhibit, “The Textures of Us,” celebrates the release of Allen’s third book, “Devin Allen: Baltimore,” featuring writings from Salamishah Tillet, D. Watkins, Darnell L. Moore and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., and additional photos from some of Allen’s Baltimore-based photographic mentees, such as Ziggy Sayeed Moorhead and Denzel Mitchell III.

The survey exhibition includes a variety of high-contrast black-and-white images captured over the past decade — tranquil moments, community cookouts and festivals, as well as the protest photojournalism he has become known for, alongside excerpts from the forthcoming book.

Allen has always possessed a natural ability to crop and compose, an experimental approach to photography where every rectangular frame can be divided into elegant lines, shapes and values to emphasize formal aspects of balance and visual harmony.

In this new exhibit, Allen leans further into composition, expertly revealing and concealing his subjects to highlight the attributes he finds most essential. Some frames show only the hands of several subjects, lending a universal humanity to the images, while others render Baltimore streets and rowhouses into high-contrast black and white patterns.

Above all else, the virtuosity and diversity of these images will surprise you. In “Around Da Way Cowgirl,” we see a smiling Black woman in cutoff shorts and fishnet tights astride a white horse; in “Baby Hair On Fleek,” a close-cropped profile of a Black woman’s face partially obscured by natural light and shadow. Whether you see them in a book or on a gallery wall, Allen’s gift for the medium is unquestionable; it’s easy to envision them functioning like the historic photos of I. Henry Phillips, but a century from now.