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A banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach famously sold for $120,000 in 2019. Titled “Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, one version of the piece — or rather, its fresher replacement — sold at a Sotheby’s auction last year for $6.2 million.

While “Comedian” is a satirical roast of the art world, the banana itself has larger implications, alluding to thousands of years of slavery, environmentally destructive monoculture, imperialism and violent conflict through “banana colonialism” and the Banana Wars. Cattelan’s work is a cheeky critique of global capitalism, an inside joke between artist and audience where its true currency is global shock value.

There is an interesting riff on “Comedian” in the current Sondheim Prize Finalist exhibition at the Walters Art Museum. From a distance, the work by Wonchul Ryu looks like a real banana, but up close, it’s transparent, like bubbling yellow glass. The sculpture made of sugar is designed to melt to a puddle of sticky yellow ooze over the course of the exhibit. On the wall is a framed photo of the sculpture in its original state so you can compare how it has devolved.

Ryu’s sugar sculpture offers a clear statement on the fleeting nature of life — similar to Cattelan’s rotting banana, or even Flemish artist Joris van Son’s 1600s floral painting, “Allegory on Human Life,” which is in the Walters’ permanent collection.

Contemporary art might seem haphazard or irrelevant, but you can look to artists’ material choices to understand their work. Though an oil painting of a banana, a banana sculpture made of sugar and an actual banana duct-taped to a gallery wall function in different ways, all three reference capitalism, consumption, globalization and entropy. Materials contain meaning.

All five artists in this year’s Sondheim finalists exhibit — Aliana Grace Bailey, Amanda Leigh Burnham, Lillian Jacobson, Jacob Mayberry and Ryu — expertly exploit the power of their chosen materials in distinctly different ways. Whether it’s painting, weaving, poetry or sculpture, this exhibit offers up a multitude of rich narratives that reflect our current reality.

The winner of the Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize — $30,000 given to one visual artist or collective living and working in the Baltimore region — will be announced at an awards ceremony on June 26, followed by a public reception. The finalists’ work will be on view through July 20.

Aliana Grace Bailey

Woven textiles, much like writing, are constructed row by row, where each unique line is merged into a larger structure through a loom. Aliana Grace Bailey is the author of warm, vibrantly colored, wall-sized woven fiber pieces, which are displayed both on the museum walls and hung from the ceiling.

In some cases, weavings hang next to album covers, including those by Chaka Khan and The Five Stairsteps, referencing the music and cover art that shaped her memories. Weaving is a meditational, repetitive act, where moments of improvisation merge into a larger network; every line is a revelation and a unique mark. Bailey’s section of the Sondheim exhibit abounds with spirituality, calmness and care.

In newer works, Bailey moves into quilts where the artist’s self-portrait, printed onto fabric, repeats and merges into fields of colorful dyed blossoms. These self-portraits in fuschia and saffron are cut, sewn and embroidered, documenting a journey of exhaustion and restoration.

Amanda Leigh Burnham

I have only recently discovered an appreciation for the dynamic lines in comic books whose varying thicknesses suggest motion with lyrical precision. In the bold, dimensional works on paper by Amanda Leigh Burnham, I see the connections between comic books, Japanese woodblock prints, Expressionists like Edvard Munch and Baltimore street writing, all of which use expressive lines containing multitudes of meaning.

Burnham’s section of this exhibit offers a delirious, improvisational chaos that references Baltimore decay and energetic rebirth. The Yale graduate and tenured Towson University art professor presents works that abound with riotous color — some in smaller, framed pieces and others in larger unframed installations that tower over you and pulse with a frantic linear style.

As you lean in close, currents of intense, warm- and cool-colored tendrils vine around recognizable fragments of body parts, rocky outcroppings, architecture and nets. The artist uses ink and watercolor on both sides of the paper before folding, cutting, layering and weaving it back together into chaotic three-dimensional compositions that recall biological overgrowth, convoluted maps and crowded rooms.

Lillian Jacobson

Lillian Jacobson’s figurative portrait paintings explore aspects of belonging, each featuring a single human figure with a contrasting image or pattern projected on top.

The artist was born in Colombia and adopted into a white American family in Baltimore, which has made her hyperaware of how she is perceived in public spaces by strangers who either expect her to be fluent in Spanish or tell her to “go back to her country.”

Jacobson’s meticulously painted figures capture the jarring sensation of being in between realities and force the viewer to pay close attention to where symbolic words, architecture, flags and landscape transform surfaces of skin and clothing.

The most powerful painting of the series is, “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…” where Jacobson juxtaposes the vibrant reds and blues of the American and Colombian flags and cloud formations over a self-portrait. The artist luxuriates in the exquisite depiction of details: pearl shirt buttons, ruffled fabric, glistening lips, while amping up the contrast between a blood-red shadow and cool, puffy clouds. You get a sense Jacobson is discovering new aspects of herself, embracing the dichotomy between her unique identity and a relationship with place.

Jacob Mayberry

“I leave my home.

They stare at me the way a tombstone stares at flowers,

Like I’m meant to lay before them.

I put on a suit

And they still saw a hoodie I wasn’t even wearing.

Transfixed a crucifix on my back.

Those same cops came back,

Turned me to the premonition of a funeral.

I closed my eyes to die,

But I just woke up Black again.”

In the spoken word poem “Hoodie,” Jacob Mayberry uses words to paint a picture of lynching in contemporary America. As he details the involuntary transformation of a narrator into a multitude of characters, his voice a calibrated staccato snare drum, I cannot stop reimagining his exhibit as a Black Box theater where you’re seamlessly immersed in sound and cinematic presence.

It’s unfortunate that you can’t experience the poet’s lyrical precision without putting on a pair of headphones attached to a smaller-than-a-home-theater wall monitor. This is one of the challenges of an art prize exhibition, where jurors select the artists but have nothing to do with the way the art is displayed, presenting an insurmountable challenge to curators working on a shoestring budget and an abbreviated timeline.

At the Walters, there are several video monitors, a black hoodie and U.S. flag displayed on the wall, and a glass vitrine full of the artist’s handwritten notebooks. But instead of focusing on what’s not there, it’s important that we focus on Mayberry’s expertise as a wordsmith and performer whose cadence and alliteration come together in a passionate delivery.

Rather than dividing us, Mayberry’s insistence on speaking truth, no matter how painful, reminds us that our First Amendment rights are a uniting force and superpower.

Wonchul Ryu

“January 3rd, 1852, Hawaii,” is the title of Ryu’s golden sugar banana — the date of the first Asian immigrants’ arrival to the U.S. under legal labor contracts to work on sugarcane plantations. But it’s not the only banana in the bunch. There are also porcelain bananas sitting on a pedestal, white with dark blue accents of hand-scrawled K-pop lyrics, referencing the white and blue Chinoiserie ceramic works in the Walters collection.

The MICA alum’s section of the exhibit is visually more random than the others, but each material choice is intentional. He includes plywood shipping crates, projected video screens, 3D printing, cardboard, resin and Google Translate. Viewed together, the works share the artist’s “migrant experience” in the United States in comparison to his grandfather’s history of displacement from North to South Korea.

Perhaps most curiously poignant is the hanging screen, “4 ((Un)Becoming White 4),” which has rows and rows of grayish Korean text written on flattened shipping boxes: the lowly containers of millions of care packages sent across oceans. I don’t know if cardboard should become the next “banana” of the art world, but the ubiquity of Amazon’s delivery certainly makes a strong case.