BMA Latrobe Spring House Displays Work of Acclaimed Baltimore-Based Artist
The BMA’s Spring House is transformed this summer with a multimedia installation by Baltimore-based artist Oletha DeVane. On view June 19 through October 20, 2019, Oletha DeVane: Traces of the Spirit features a selection from the artist’s ongoing spirit sculpture series. Seven works are displayed in an altar-like setting with the sound of water, referencing both the cooling spring that once ran through the Spring House’s structure and the forced Atlantic migration of the enslaved persons who labored in it.
“This exhibition illuminates Oletha DeVane’s quest to communicate her vision of the painful and troubled specificities of black American history side-by-side with her embrace of a pan-spiritual relationship to the divine,” said Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “We are delighted to present these extraordinary works, which reflect an awareness of global artistic practices and a strategic use of American craft sensibilities that is situated within her profound roots in the local Baltimore creative community.”
DeVane is an accomplished multimedia artist whose paintings, prints, sculpture, and video draw upon diverse spiritual and African diasporic traditions to reference narratives of memory, transformation, and loss. She derives her inspiration from the Baha’i faith, Greek mythology, Yoruba religious practices, Buddhism, Haitian Vodou, and biblical references, among others. The five intricate sculptures in this exhibition, dated from 2007 to 2018, are made of vessels richly adorned with beads, figurines, sequins, wood, and fabric. Snakes, birds, saints, and mermaids populate the dense surfaces, suggesting the transition between worlds or states of existence. The installation also includes two large new paintings. The Baltimore-based collective strikeWare produced the ambient sound of water recorded in Haiti that plays as part of the installation.
