May 15, 2022 — October 2, 2022
Overview
Beatrice Glow is a New York- and Bay Area-based multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the social history of plants. For her first exhibition in a major U.S. museum, Glow delves into the unseen and unsavory sociohistorical and ecological realities underlying the tobacco industry’s veneer of luxury through her digitally printed and embroidered silk textiles, VR-sculpted and 3D-printed objects, watercolors, and scent experiences.
In exploring the global uses of tobacco, Glow questions the embedded histories of visual culture by critiquing unresolved injustices wrought by colonial desires to profit from the lucrative tobacco trade. The artist weaves together tantalizingly decadent surfaces with imagery derived from historical sources, and examines the networks through which tobacco spread across the world.
While the works initially appear as a celebration of opulence, closer inspection reveals the cascading impacts of colonialism, capitalism, and inequitable trade networks.
Curated by Sarah Cho, Curatorial Assistant of American Painting & Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Virginia Anderson, Curator of American Art.
Public Programs
Aromatic Realities Workshop, June 5, 2022
Exhibition walk-through and conversation with Beatrice Glow, organized by John Hopkins University Center for Visual Arts, September 15, 2022
Press
Maryland’s Tobacco-scented Past Emerges in Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears, BMA Stories
A Landscape's Embedded History, Dovetail Magazine
BMA Curators Celebrate the Art of Collaboration, Baltimore Magazine
Artworks to Smell Around the World this Spring, Nez Magazine
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
LEFT TO RIGHT
Unidentified Lakota Artist
Pipe Bag
Late 19th century
Hide, porcupine quills, glass beads, feathers, metal
GIFT OF MRS. RICHARD W. CASE, SPARKS, MARYLAND, BMA 1985.132
Unidentified Lakota Artist
Pipe Bag
c. 1880s Deerskin, porcupine quills, glass beads
BEQUEST OF SAIDIE A. MAY, 1951, BMA 1985.45.27
Tobacco is a plant sacred to many Indigenous people. To honor this significance, Glow researched related Lakota artworks with Jessa Rae Growing Thunder (b. 1989), a Nakoda/Dakota scholar and active beadworker. These bags for canupas, or tobacco pipes, reflect the revered status of both tobacco and canupas in Oceti Sakowin culture. When not in ceremonial use, canupas are stored in intricate bags expertly crafted by beadworkers with care and knowledge. Growing Thunder states that “creating art is creating a life form.”
The bag with red feathers features a green and red pattern depicting thunder clouds with hail; Growing Thunder notes this may represent the bag owner’s deep relationship with storm clouds. On the other bag, a Lakota artist beaded an hourglass shape pattern. Growing Thunder explains that this pattern “reminds us to uphold our responsibilities because [our actions] reflect back into the stars. When we see this on tobacco bags, it is because pipes are tools that help us fulfill our responsibilities.”
Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears, The Baltimore Museum of Art, May 15 – October 2, 2022, Photography by Mitro Hood.
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Tom White
Courtesy of the Artist. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist