Art exhibitions highlighting the winners of a cash award are often anticlimactic: The checks are already cut, the works on view are usually those the artists applied with and previously exhibited, the mystery and suspense are long over. While awards like the local Sondheim Prize and Pennsylvania’s West Prize keep the tension mounting by exhibiting finalists and awarding the top prizes based on these exhibits, the winners of the Baker Artist Awards are announced simultaneously on Maryland Public Television and at the Windup Space months before the corresponding show is installed. The awards employ a free, user-friendly application process that is open only to residents of the Baltimore region. With a blind jury process and a heavy dose of cheese—winners receive “B” statuettes, like a local art Emmy, along with their prize money and there’s previously been a “Baltimore’s Choice” prize based on popular votes—the award has been met with mixed feelings by the art community. The chosen winners, however, covering a wide range of media (visual, musical, and otherwise), have helped to keep the prize credible.

This year, the award has been restructured, eliminating the vote-based awards in favor of 18 “b-grant” winners, along with the three top prizes. The b-grant awards will recognize emerging artists annually, with $1,000 awards for each. This year, these awards were distributed to preselected artists of mass appeal, in an attempt to bounce back from the original vote-based format and keep artists interested. Five visual artists, a ceramist, performers, dancers, and writers were selected, each of whom is represented in some fashion at the Baltimore Museum of Art Baker Artist Awards 2011 exhibit, along with top Mary Sawyers Baker Prize winners Gary Kachadourian, Audrey Chen, and Shodekeh Talifero.

The museum exhibition—kudos, by the way, to the BMA for partnering with the awards and extending the opportunity to a larger cross-section of the artist community to take part in an exhibition—is really the visual artists’ forte, as it affords them the space, time, and encouragement to make new, site-specific works. For instance, Kachadourian’s engrossing installation “Interior/Exterior” transforms the museum into another space and time. His scale pencil drawings of objects and patterns from life (dumpsters, repeated sections of chain-link fence, cement block, grass, couches, etc.) are set into a seamless environment. Photocopied enlargements of the drawings are mounted on masonite and finished with a coating of polyurethane, allowing viewers to walk through and even on the artwork without damaging it. The effect is like walking through a black-and-white photo album, spatial proximity flattened and softened. The expert rendering of dated wood paneling, a drop ceiling, couches, and the views out a pencil-drawn window give the room a hyper-realistic dimension, and the softness of the enlarged pencil lines lends a personal, poignant quality to the otherwise ordinary objects, offering the rare feeling of seeing the world through someone else’s memory. A bathroom, complete with tub, toilet, and medicine cabinet, is lit by a single florescent bulb. This space is enclosed, except for the doorless doorway, and is the only interior space with a completed architectural design. Throughout the rest of the installation, outdoor textures and spaces meet unrendered exterior walls, memory and emotion blurring reality into a space that is at once real and clipped.

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