“Within Reach of Silence”
Temi Wynston Edun at Gallery Blue Door, 833 Park Avenue, through April 18 gallerybluedoor.com
In an age full of ubiquitous targeted advertisements, AI slop, phone addiction, and fascist bluster, we could all use a little more silence in our lives. Nigerian-born Columbia-based artist Temi Wynston Edun uses oil stick and canvas to turn a sense of silence into a powerful pictorial imagery, building faces out of space in scratched out layers in “Within Reach of Silence,” at the Gallery Blue Door through April.
Edun’s deeply textured portraits explore the transmission of that silence in the Black face, often blurred, unfocused, or sinking into the background, showing, as Edun puts it, silence as “charged terrain: a chamber of ancestral residue.”
“My work centers on figurative painting as a site of restraint rather than declaration. I am interested in how silence operates as a structural condition, shaping posture, gaze, and presence without resolving into narrative or explanation. The figure remains central, but withheld, allowing meaning to gather without disclosure,” Edun says in an artist’s statement.
Edun has exhibited around the world, but this is his first solo show and is not to be missed.
“The Macrame Room”
Mandy Beats at Focused on Creatives, 807 E. Baltimore Street, through February 20
@themacrameroomexperience on Instagram
Every few years, we start to see news stories about how the youngsters are taking up the out-of-date and analog hobbies of previous generations. The reason these stories are evergreen and work for every generation is because art forms such as quilting, knitting, crocheting, and macrame never went away, though the latter is far less ubiquitous than it was in the 1970s of some of our antiquated childhoods.
“The Macrame Room” is putting that knot-based fiber art front and center — well, not just front and center but all around, creating an immersive environment at the Focused on Creatives space, where there will be a variety of events, workshops, and other programming over a six-week run, which will include craft classes if you, too, want to get your knot on.
“The Secret City: New Works in Color Film” J.M. Giordano at The Peale Museum, 225 Holliday Street, through March 29.
Conflict of interest alert: J.M. Giordano is the Beat’s photo editor and we are recommending that you go see his new show of works in color film at The Peale Museum. But don’t get it twisted, we’re not recommending the show because he is the photo editor; He’s the photo editor because of the sharp eye he’s been bringing to the city for decades now, his photographs having appeared in pretty much every publication that’s still around and many that aren’t (RIP Urbanite and City Paper) and a series of books.
So chances are you’ve seen Giordano’s work before, but you’ve never seen it like this. Some of his best known work is in black and white and most of it is digital. “Color film” might just sound like a description of the medium, but these photographs are really about the city’s color and light. And the blond wood frames highlight the incredible contrast and saturation, which, according to Giordano’s artist statement, was inspired by Italian photographers from the 1980s. These aren’t the topical, newsy images that make it into publications, but the slow, thoughtful tableaus that belong on museum walls.
Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: A Salute to Black Radio DJs Panel Conversation and Short Kuts Show Presentation, Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt Street, January 31, 1:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
A few years back, in an ill-conceived journalistic stunt, I swore to spend a year listening to nothing but Baltimore music. It took a lot of work — a lot more work than I imagined. But fortunately, I had built into the equation that I could listen to Baltimore radio stations who had live DJs actually in town, and I spent the last few months of the year mainly rocking 92Q. But, even in less extreme situations, there was a time back before the algorithm when DJs actively ruled the rhythms of our days and our nights and, yes, saved our lives.
The Reginald F. Lewis Museum will spend a Saturday afternoon saluting Black DJs in Baltimore and the broader region with a panel discussion and storytelling. The day begins with Short Kuts Storytelling, featuring stories from veteran newscaster Patti W. Smith; Marc Clarke, the erstwhile host of an eponymous “Big Phat Morning Show” on 92; Magic 95’s April Watts; and DJ Tanz.
After those stories, which are inspired by the barbershop and the beauty salon, there will be a panel featuring DJ Quicksilva, Konan, and LeDawn Black. These are some top-notch on-air talkers and it will be fascinating to watch — and not just hear — them chew the fat as they share their stories from over 50 years of collective radio experience.
“Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,” Jim Jarmusch, The Charles Theater, 1711 N. Charles Street, February 5, 9:00 p.m.
If you’ve never seen Forest Whitaker as a pigeon-fancying, sword-wielding, nearly-silent samurai assassin in 1990s New Jersey, then you’ve never really seen Forest Whitaker. Director Jim Jarmusch is sometimes faulted for the ironic distance he can keep from some of his characters in films like “Stranger Than Paradise” or “Down By Law,” but this 1999 mashup of samurai and gangster flicks is full of emotion, both laugh-out-loud funny and sad as shit as Whitaker’s character brings his commitment to an ethical code up against the vacuous mob bosses who usually employ him. And his relationship with a Haitian ice cream vendor who only speaks French captures the importance and fragility of those relationships we make in passing with our neighbors despite our differences in a more moving way than I’ve ever seen on film.
If all this samurai business feels a little Wu-Tang-y, have no fear, for none other than the RZA scores “Ghost Dog,” and the music plays as big a part in the film as dialogue does. And, if you dig the Jarmusch-RZA collab, for a bonus, you could check out the high comedy of RZA and GZA razzing Bill Murray about drinking caffeine in Jarmusch’s 2002 anthology “Coffee & Cigarettes.”
Anyway, you’ve got one chance to see this sword-sharp classic on the big screen as part of the always-solid Charles Revival Series.