On Saturday, the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, acting in conjunction with Baltimore's Artscape festival, hosted an opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art to announce the Sondheim Artscape Prize -- the Mid-Atlantic region's most prestigious art awards. Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon was on hand to announce the winner of the prize: the three-artist-team known as the Baltimore Development Cooperative. more ›

Artist Molly Springfield will be the lone District representative competing for the 2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize, an award that recognizes the work of a visual artist from D.C., northern Virginia, Maryland, or near Pennsylvania. Organized by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts and Artscape, the Sondheim award is $25,000 and bragging rights good throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on July 11, and an exhibition of the finalists' work will be displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Art. more ›

"It will be for a more skilled hand than mine to rear the superstructure." William Henry Fox Talbot made this statement in the mid-1800s, after he had developed his patented Calotype process, a technique that helped establish modern photography. His inability to draw made him search for a way to make direct impressions of the world around him, and while there's something to be said for artistic impressions that allow us to see things in a different way, Talbot noted that his precise copies perhaps give the viewer more insight, since they reveal minute details that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. more ›

>> Despite what we hear is a serious rash of over-dressed staffers at the Corcoran Gallery of Art running off to "dentist appointments" with updated résumés in hand after several high profile dismissals were announced earlier this month, there appear to be several good reasons to head down to the beleaguered museum. The first major retrospective of the work of Robert Bechtle, the San Francisco-based painter known for his photorealistic streetscapes, is up through June 4, and Reflections From the Heart: Photographs by David Seymour (Chim) opened last weekend. more ›

Editor's note: This top ten list was compiled by local art blogger and man-about-town Kriston Capps. Let’s be forward about it—top ten lists don’t really make a lot of sense. Especially for a field as diverse as contemporary art. Really, how much better is the sculpture of the giant Cheetoh than the digitally manipulated photograph? A true accounting for the decision-making process behind a hierarchical ranking of art shows would make the BCS computerized college... more ›