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.

Is it me or is this winter extra bleak? Everything is freezing or on fire, the news is dire and toxic political absurdity is taking up way too much space in my brain. On a personal note, I have failed already at becoming a better version of myself in 2025. My attempt at “dry January” was laughable, my new exercise regimen has been postponed and that pledge to stay away from my phone and social media? Oof.

What I need is an infusion of tangible positive energy that cannot be gleaned from binge watching “Bad Sisters” from under an electric blanket. What I need is a reason to get out of my house — really good art to feed my soul, inspire my mind and wrest me out of the grip of wintry online malaise. This month, I am sharing four major exhibits with you that will restore your faith in humanity, inspire you to dream big and convince you to bundle up and head back out into the real world.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, ‘More Than Conquerors’

• Baltimore Museum of Art
• 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore
• Through March 23

Within a clinical gray space, white IV stands are spaced exactly 6 feet apart, the standard space for social distancing. Instead of tubes and bags of fluid, the 18 stands bear double-sided framed images featuring color portraits and printed text. Because the displays are at eye level, the faces of other museum visitors are blocked out as you wander the gallery, though you’re aware of their presence. As you immerse yourself in the images and words, there is a sense of anonymous congregation in the room.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022” shines a light on the largely unsung heroes on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic. This immersive installation accomplishes two significant objectives. One is to identify and celebrate people from Baltimore who risked their lives to care for others during the pandemic in a way that humanizes rather than objectifies. The second is to break down hierarchies between photographer and subject. First-person textual accounts of each of the workers’ complex stories are treated with the same reverence as MacArthur Genius artist Frazier’s images.

Frazier arrived at this homage through deep engagement in Baltimore over several years. Though it was created for the 58th Carnegie International, where it won the Carnegie Prize, it has come home to its rightful place at the BMA. The exhibit offers a touching reminder that anyone who places the needs of others before themself is a hero despite structural systems that erase them. It’s a call to rethink who deserves honor and how this is expressed.

Lorraine O’Grady, ‘Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017)’

• Glenstone Museum (Room 111 of the Pavilions)
• 12100 Glen Road, Potomac
• Through Feb. 23

Lorraine O’Grady died in 2024 at the age of 90. For those not familiar with her work, she was a true polymath: a genius, a rebel, a natural performer, an impresario. Born in 1934 in Boston to Jamaican immigrant parents, O’Grady lived many different fantastic lives and careers, arriving at conceptual and performance art later in life. After working as an economist at the Labor and State departments, attending the famed Iowa Writers Workshop for fiction, running a translation agency specializing in seven languages and writing music criticism for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, she taught literature at the School of Visual Arts in New York in the 1970s. It was there she realized she was an artist.

In 1977, O’Grady began her now-famous “Cutting Out the New York Times” series, in which she collaged hand-culled headlines from the Sunday edition, rearranging and pasting them together to form short, poetic structures. The pieces are blunt, evocative and deceptively simple. The random public language, transformed to reflect the poetry of the private self, is haiku-like in its metaphorical range, and just one of many bodies of work that O’Grady pursued. Forty years later, O’Grady reworked these visual mini-poem compositions because they embodied the theory of her “Both/And” series — a rejection of Western dualistic hierarchies explored through purposeful diptych compositional pairings that contradict and compete with each other, with no one overarching system.

On display at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, the series reboot, “Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017),” is presented for the first time in its entirety as a sequence of four-paneled art displays, or quadriptychs. The original 250 found poems have been enlarged, cut apart and transformed into 26 new paired panels. “[My newspaper poems] were an effort to construct out of that random public language a private self, to rescue a kind of rational madness from the irrational Western culture I felt inundated by, in order to keep sane,” O’Grady wrote in her “This Will Have Been: My 1980s” art journal.

For all of us attempting to make sense and find comfort in increasingly absurd and threatening news headlines, O’Grady’s insouciant poetic statements are an open invite to think critically and creatively about the text we consume, to realize that power lies in transforming it to suit our own personal vision.

‘Material Systems’

• Maryland Institute College of Art (Fred Lazarus IV Center)
• 131 W. North Ave., Baltimore
• Through Feb. 9

When you hear the phrase “artist’s artist,” does it conjure images of incoherent ephemera or indecipherable banality? I know it does, but it shouldn’t. Some artists are incapable of communicating their ideas to non-artists, but others are natural translators. As curators, their insight into process and materials can be realized in exhibitions that take the mystery of “process” and transform it into a magical, unifying concept. “Material Systems,” curated by artists Alex Ebstein and James Williams II, is exactly this kind of show.

The exhibition statement for “Material Systems” sounds like any other process-themed group show in Baltimore: “a group exhibition showcasing works by artists whose systematic methodologies inform their artistic practices, encompassing works that span painting, printmaking, collage, animation, and sculpture.” But the artist-curators’ selections in this exhibit are inspired by their own understanding of craftsmanship and originality. You’ll find that the meticulously honed and distinct use of materials becomes synonymous with the artists’ voices.

Exhibiting artists include: Matt Bollinger, Richard Hart, Andrew Hladky, E.E. Ikeler, Saskia Krafft, Gracelee Lawrence, Austin Lee, Aryana Minai, Danni O’Brien, Michael Stamm, Elisa Soliven, Karen Yasinsky and Monsieur Zohore.

Tom Miller Week

• Eubie Blake Cultural Center
• 847 N. Howard St., Baltimore
• Feb. 15 through April 19

Tom Miller was a Baltimore-based multidisciplinary artist who achieved national acclaim — and a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art — before his life was tragically cut short in 2000 when he died from AIDS-related complications at age 55. Miller was widely heralded for his densely patterned, ecstatically colored screenprints and murals, as well as witty hand-painted furniture repurposed from discarded finds around the city. Miller coined the term “Afro-Deco” for his work, which merged stylistic elements from 1930s Art Deco adornment and objects representing African American history, Black memorabilia produced in Europe and vintage toys depicting African Americans in a positive light.

In 1995 Mayor Kurt Schmoke declared Tom Miller Day to celebrate the artist’s achievements, but Baltimore did not host any sort of commemorative event for Miller afterward. In 2021, Blackives LLC — organized by MICA graduate Deyane Moses — established Tom Miller Week to honor his legacy and highlight his cultural contributions to Baltimore. This year marks the fifth annual week in Baltimore, which will be celebrated from Feb. 15 through Feb. 22 with events hosted at the Eubie Blake National Jazz and Cultural Center, the Maryland Center for History and Culture and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. The celebration honors the life and work of the renowned artist through community art-making, an oral history circle and the auction of a never-before-seen screenprint. The exhibition at Eubie Blake, “Out of the Woodwork! Bringing Tom Miller’s Legacy to Light,” will feature locally owned artworks and objects sourced from private collections around the city.