Opening Celebration for Darrel Ellis: Regeneration & Interior Lives
Saturday, February 17 | 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. | Talks 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Celebrate the opening of featured exhibitions Darrel Ellis: Regeneration and Interior Lives: Modern American Spaces, 1890–1945 with an afternoon of family-friendly activities and talks. Enjoy exhibition-inspired art activities including a photo booth, experimental gelli print activity, build-your-own diorama station, and home-themed indoor design challenges with the Big Blue Blocks. At 2:00 p.m. hear back-to-back talks from the featured exhibitions’ curators — learn about Interior Lives from Michael Neumeister, CMA senior curator, then about Regeneration from Leslie Cozzi, its co-curator and Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Sergio Bessa, its co-curator and chief curator emeritus at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Both talks include a Q&A with the audience. CMA members are invited to bring a friend along between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m. to see the exhibitions, attend the celebration, and enjoy food by Sarah Simmons of City Grit and beverages from Curiosity Coffee Bar in the reception gallery. Free with membership or admission. Join today!
Dr. Leslie Cozzi (she/her), FAAR’18, joined the staff of the Baltimore Museum of Art in the fall of 2018 as Associate Curator in the department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, where she currently oversees the museum’s collection of post-1900 works on paper. At the BMA, she helped conceptualize the museum’s 2020 Vision initiative spotlighting female-identified artists with presentations of Valerie Maynard, Zackary Drucker, SHAN Wallace, and Ana Mendieta. Recent projects at the BMA include the critically acclaimed survey A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone, and Baltimore; Omar Ba: Political Animals; and Darrel Ellis: Regeneration, the artist’s first major museum retrospective.
Dr. Antonio Sergio Bessa is chief curator emeritus at The Bronx Museum, New York, where he has organized several exhibitions, including: Jamel Shabazz: Eyes on the Street (2022); Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (2020, in collaboration with Andrea Andersson), Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (2017, in collaboration with Jessamyn Fiore); Martin Wong: Human Instamatic (2015, in collaboration with Yasmin Ramirez); Paulo Bruscky: Art Is Our Last Hope (2014), and Joan Semmel: The Lucid Eye (2012). Dr. Bessa holds a Ph.D. from NYU Steinhardt School of Education, and in 2005 he participated in the Museum Leadership Institute at the Getty Center.
Regeneration is co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Interior Lives is organized by the Columbia Museum of Art.
Image above: Darrel Ellis. Self‑portrait based on Peter Hujar photograph. c. 1990. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2019.159. © Darrel Ellis Estate and Candice Madey, New York