BALTIMORE, MD (June 11, 2026)—On Thursday, June 18, the Baltimore Museum of Art will launch Practicing Place, a new artist-in-residence program that places six artists and organizations at the BMA’s Lexington Market branch for an extended period. The year-long program invites artists to serve as both practitioners and public-facing cultural hosts, contributing to an evolving conversation around art, community, and the role of public space in one of Baltimore’s most significant public buildings.

The Practicing Place series builds on the success of last year’s artist-led programs that attracted 3,500 participants by bringing back many of the same artists and deepening the museum’s commitment to Baltimore’s public realm as a site of encounter, exchange, and shared civic life. The inaugural residency begins on June 18 with Dreamseeds (Hannah Brancato and Sanahara Ama Chandra), whose six-week session will include facilitated workshops, community gatherings, and public programming. Future activities will range from collective weaving to sound baths and song circles. BMA Lexington Market is open Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Practicing Place program continues through June 2027.

Schedule

June 18– July 25
Dreamseeds (Hannah Brancato and Sanahara Ama Chandra)
Participants are invited to co-create visions for more just futures with performances and pop-up craft workshops that weave together embodied making, critical fabulation, and improvisational music within a collectively created sacred space.

September 10– October 17
Ashley Minner Jones
Following an interest in how cultural and built environments change (or resist change) over time, Jones will invite participants to join storytelling, archival research, and artmaking—with the market landscape itself as collaborator.

November 3– December 19
Seven (Xavier Walker)
This residency focuses on Baltimore’s nightlife from the 1980s to present and invites participants to join an investigation into how sound communicates place, defines culture, and fosters community through archival research and oral histories.

January 7– February 13 (tentative)
Baltimore Beat
The Beat will build on themes from their “Drop-in Newsroom” and “Looking Back, Moving Forward” workshops at Lexington Market, inviting participants to share and build their own stories while examining questions of who and what make the news.

March 4– April 10
Rosa Chang
Chang will invite visitors to identify and explore different shades of blue as a material, memory, and emotional landscape—expanding from her roots in Korean indigo into broader questions of place, repair, grief, healing, and transformation.

April 19– June 5
Jennifer White-Johnson
Taking cues from Kitchen Table Press, where women of color built sovereignty through publishing on their own terms, this residency brings disability justice and abolitionist practices to the ‘art table’ through drop-in zine making.

Hannah Brancato is a Baltimore-based artist and educator best known as co-founder of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an art/organizing collective that produces creative interventions to create a culture of consent. FORCE created the Monument Quilt, a collection of 3,000 stories from survivors of sexual violence on quilt squares that toured the U.S. and Mexico between 2013-2019 and culminated in a massive installation on the National Mall. Her current practice centers on “Dreamseeds,” a socially engaged art, music, and workshop series produced with Sanahara Ama Chandra for community healing. For this, Brancato was a recipient of the Rubys Artist Grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and was recently an artist in residence at Montgomery College and Visarts in Rockville, Maryland. Brancato is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in American Studies at University of Maryland.

Sanahara Ama Chandra is a joy-filled being of light and love as well as an internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter and recording artist with multiple projects, collaborations, and awards. Chandra is also a sacred woman priestess, energy healer, Usui Reiki Master, advanced sound healer, community servant, and registered nurse. She has used her voice as a tool for healing and community building for over 30 years and was recognized around the world for her work during the Baltimore City Uprising in 2015. She is a and a prominent Baltimore City performing artist who has been recognized with a 2014 Maryland Individual Artist Award, 2022 Rubys Award, and a 2023 Aspen Weaver Award winner for her Dreamseeds collaboration.

Ashley Minner Jones is a community-based visual artist and folklorist from Baltimore. Her interdisciplinary practice is deeply rooted in place—usually within the context of the U.S. South—and is focused on honoring and celebrating everyday people by lifting up their stories. Her artwork has been exhibited widely and is represented in several prominent collections. Her research is being archived as “the Ashley Minner Collection” in the Albin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. A monograph on one of her recent projects, a reconstruction of East Baltimore’s historic American Indian “reservation,” is forthcoming. Jones earned an MFA in Community Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland College Park. She is an enrolled citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

Seven is a Brooklyn-born, Baltimore-based multimedia artist who uses sound, film, and material culture to preserve Black cultural thought and invite others into immersive worlds where sound, imagery, time, and place intersect. As a DJ, archivist, and cultural organizer, he connects the dots between African diasporic traditions, ushering in the future of house music, polyrhythms, and smooth talkin’. Grounded in the ethos of Sankofa—the Ghanian Adinkra symbol for “go back and get it”—his craft is deeply rooted in his training as an archivist. He also extends his vision beyond turntables into the realm of film collaging by sourcing material from a rich tapestry of historical and contemporary Black cinema, music videos, and TV shows. His films serve as explorations of Black intimacy, movement, and concealed narratives of hidden spaces.

Baltimore Beat is a Black-led, Black-controlled nonprofit newspaper and media outlet. Their mission is to honor the tradition of the Black press and the spirit of alt-weekly journalism with reporting that focuses on community, questions power structures, and prioritizes thoughtful engagement with its readers. The Baltimore Beat aims to serve all of Baltimore City, including those with limited internet access and those who are a part of underrepresented communities. The organization aspires toward a more equitable, accountable, and rigorous future for journalism that fully represents the stories of all our neighbors.

Rosa Chang is an artist and educator whose work explores human interactions with the natural world through materials, process, and community engagement. Her practice focuses on Korean and Asian indigo, natural dye, and textile traditions. She also directs an indigo apprenticeship at Blue Light Junction and is an adjunct faculty member at MICA and SVA.

Jen White-Johnson (she/they) is a disabled and neurodivergent Afro-Latina art activist and design educator whose visual work aims to uplift disability justice narratives in design. Her work has been featured in Afropunk, Teen Vogue, and Bmore Art, among other publications. White-Johnson’s work is also permanently archived at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian National African American Museum of History and Culture. She holds an M.F.A. in graphic design from the Maryland Institute College of Art.