“Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again,” Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, through September 6. artbma.org
If you’re lucky enough to have tickets to see Amy Sherald’s “American Sublime” at the BMA, make a bit of time to see another exhibit just down the stairs that also features a MICA alum, former Baltimore resident Louis Fratino.
Fratino’s sensual and nostalgic paintings burst with remembered light streaming in through windows onto exposed flesh. His paintings are some of the most beautiful representations of the male body that you’re likely to find on the wall of a museum. And let’s be clear, Fratino is a very good painter of dicks, usually flopping languidly across a thigh. Asses too. The way the light illuminates the hairs between the buttocks of a kneeling man in “Studio Nude, 2025” is truly kind of sublime.
Fratino’s paintings are paired here with works by Matisse, which inspired Fratino during his time here, and I was hoping he might relieve the boredom that the BMA’s favorite artist usually inspires in me. The influence is clear and Fratino must have studied Matisse’s sense of form and light while he was here, but his figures are so much more solid and fleshy than anything I can see in the old master.
The lazy light that suffuses Fratino’s paintings reminds me most of the elegiac tone of gay, Greek Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy. “Now that it’s all finally in the past, / it seems almost as if you gave yourself / to those desires too—how they glowed, / remember, in eyes that looked at you, / remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices.” (Baynard Woods)
Bmore BeatClub, Maryland Art Place, 218 W. Saratoga Street, April 3, 8 p.m. @bmorebeatclub on Facebook
Bmore Beat Club returns with its unique form of hip-hop open-mic after a five-year hiatus. In this case, the name of the event has no relation to this paper, but instead refers to musical beats — but, for full disclosure, it is, like so many things, hosted by this paper’s own Eze Jackson.
“All I wanted to do was create the event that I wanted to go to. An event that I wished existed when I came to the Bmore Hip Hop scene alone,” Brandon Lackey told Baltimore Beat over email about founding the showcase a decade ago.
“If the average ‘national’ hip hop fan saw what I saw, they would realize that they are missing something amazing right under their nose,” Lackey says of trying to “make Baltimore hip hop more accessible to potential fans.”
The deal is simple: Any producer or rapper can sign up. Each DJ gets two songs and rappers are picked at random to jump on the beat. This randomness “bridged generational gaps between producers & MC’s,” says Lackey. “Literally old head’ producers worked with trap or mumble’ rappers that they didn’t see the value in before the event.”
Family health problems plus the pandemic put a stop to the event in 2020. “I went through a lot in the last 5 years and only recently began to understand what a special event Beatclub was,” Lackey says. Artists kept asking him to bring it back, but it was only when he saw that the young artists he works with at Beats Not Bullets, a community-based program training middle and high school kids in the arts of engineering and production, were in need of what BeatClub provided that he decided to bring it back. “It made me happy that I knew how to help and what to do,” Lackey says. “The event has a purpose so it’s time to get cooking.” (Baynard Woods)
Reception for “Sowebo Streets: 40 Years of Street Photography in Southwest Baltimore,” Zella’s Pizzeria, 1145 Hollins Street, March 25 6 p.m.
In a time when words like “icon” tend to mean little, the much-overworked noun can definitely be applied to photographer Martha Cooper. Cooper, a Baltimore native known for documenting the New York graffiti scene in the late ’70s and ’80s, returns to show a selection of work made in Sowebo along with work by fellow local photographers Shae McCoy, Christian Thomas, Josh Sisk, Wendel Patrick, Myles Michelin, Joshua Kittle, Cheryl Kinion, Jack Radcliffe, Mark Stephen Bugnaski, Patrick Harnett, Bridget Cimino, Dan Van Allen, and more.
Cooper, who happened to be in New York City as the worlds of hip-hop and street art began to converge, returned to Baltimore and took over 50,000 photos in Southwest Baltimore between 2005 and 2015, several of which will be on display as a part of the group exhibition. Other photographers like Sisk, Patrick, and McCoy are established Baltimore photographers who cover the Sowebo neighborhood. The show “Sowebo Streets: 40 Years of Street Photography” in Southwest Baltimore, curated by Baltimore Beat contributing editor Baynard Woods and featuring Beat photographers McCoy and Thomas, runs through April 30. Oh yeah, and Zella’s pizza is bangin’. (J.M. Giordano)