Artists
Schroeder Cherry
Originally from Washington, DC, Schroeder Cherry is an award- winning Maryland-based, multimedia assemblage artist and puppeteer whose art for decades has captured everyday scenes of African diaspora life. He has performed puppetry in museums, cultural centers, libraries and schools across the United States, and his art is in numerous private and public collections. As a museum professional, he has worked in seven U.S. museums, including the Studio Museum in Harlem; The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Art Institute of Chicago; and The Baltimore Museum of Art. He was a 2019 Janet and Walter Sondheim finalist. He received a 2021 Maryland State Art Council Independent Artist Award and a 2023 Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. In 2024 he travelled to Salvador, Brazil as the recipient of a Municipal Arts Society of Baltimore Travel Grant. He is a featured artist in the 2024 PBS Episode, Play, by Craft in America.
Allison Duggan
Allison Duggan has experience working collaboratively with Baltimore United Viewfinders, the Walters Art Museum, East Baltimore artists, and the Bea Gaddy Family Center. She completed her graduate work in MICAs MFA in Community Arts Program. Allison's strong community arts background informs her visual art work and her approach as a community organizer with Fusion Partnerships, where she serves as Director of the inFusion Small Grants Program. Allison has worked closely with East Baltimore residents and community stakeholders to launch this program and fund resident led projects decided on by residents. Duggan was additionally the recipient of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts 2016 PNC Transformative Art Prize in Partnership with the rehabilitation treatment center, A Step Forward.
Denise Gantt
Currently the director of education at the Lyric. Gantt serves on the events committee for Maryland Citizens for the Arts, the BAEI Advisory Committee and the Urban Arts Leadership Council. Her plays and performance works include meditations/from the ash, winner of the Artscape’s Best Play Contest; anatomy/lessons part of Penumbra Theater’s Cornerstone Project, and The Gift, which in 2011 received staged readings at ACT (Seattle) and New York’s Drama League. In January 2013, her solo work, Eve’s Lament, was part the Lekhana Literary Weekend in Bangalore, India. In 2003, her collection of poetry, conjuring the dead, was awarded the Maryland Emerging Writers Award. Gantt is a founding member of the theater ensemble Medusa Speaks, is an adjunct professor at Coppin State University, and holds an MFA in Theatre from Towson University.
Nora Howell
Howell is a fiber and performance-based sculpture artist and art administrator living in Baltimore, Maryland. In her art, Nora uses a mix of ceramics and soft sculpture to develop a visual language to illuminate and stimulate dialogue around themes of identity, community, power, and privilege. In addition to her personal art practice, she is a project manager implementing public artworks across the state of Maryland. She is a Hamiltonian Fellowship Alumni, 2018 Daily Record 40 under 40 VIP awardee, and Sondheim Prize 2014 semi-finalist.
Tiffany Jones
Graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art, Tiffany Jones holds a BFA in photography. With an interdisciplinary practice, her art ranges from photography, mixed media, and installation focusing on the exploration of personal and communal identities. Tiffany examines how cultural and familial histories influence both individual experiences and at times the broader communal narrative. Over the years, Tiffany's has been exhibited in various galleries and museums in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. These include the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Gallery Aferro in Newark, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Baltimore Museum of Art, James E Lewis Museum, and Sheila and Richard Riggs Galleries all in Baltimore. Her work also resides in both private and public collections.
Sara Kaltwasser
Kaltwasser was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Portland, Oregon. She is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator. Invested in Community Art & Practice, Sara's foundation is rooted in education, history, socially-engaged modalities and collective community development. Sara uses painting, installation, collage & assemblage, sculpture, research and performative process to create works that explore the confluence of education, art, history, and activism, the role of power in the classroom, and the aesthetics of knowledge.
Paula Phillips
Phillips was born in Tuskegee, Alabama; raised in Fredericksburg, Texas and has lived and worked in Missouri, Colorado, Utah, Texas and now Baltimore, her home. She is a practicing studio and community artist, a former director of Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) Community Arts Partnerships and has been a teaching professor and program director with the College’s MA and MFA in Community Arts graduate programs since 1999. A fine artist, educator and social justice advocate and activist, Paula specializes in mixed-media artworks that intertwine with and lift up the fundamentals of social justice while honoring and reflecting combinations of her European, Indigenous American and African roots. “Voice’, symbiotic and relational meaning hold integral values and are constant components found in Phillips’ work.
Christine Stiver
Stiver is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn. At different points in her career her work has explored dance, performance, drawing and sculpture. As a member of Baltimore-based performance companies Effervescent Collective and Triptych, she performed in and choreographed site-specific works in such unconventional spaces such as the Patapsco River, skate parks, the YNot Lot and a church sanctuary. Most recently, Stiver has exhibited sculptures at Tappeto Volante in Brooklyn, Beverly’s in NYC, Headstone Gallery in Kingston, NY and McBride Contemporain in Montreal. She is also a member-curator at Underdonk, an artist-run gallery in Manhattan.
Adam Thorman
Thorman is an artist, photographer and educator based in Oakland, CA who makes art about the landscape, abstracted. His practice is rooted in photography, and in addition to showing straight photographs, Adam also creates digitally-altered images and hand-altered prints that occasionally veer into the sculptural. In his work, the landscape is an interpretive space where meaning is flexible. He approaches the world with an eye towards animistic mythmaking, intentionally unmooring the viewer to create unfamiliar realities out of the landscape. He is also enthralled by the sublime and how the climate collapse continues to produce moments of beauty while inducing real terror at the menace in the landscapes around us at the same time. Adam’s first book, Creatures Found, was published by the Dutch publisher The Eriskay Connection in the Fall of 2024.