Community Calendar

Baltimore, MD – Make Studio is excited to announce the highlight of our fall programming season, the 8th installment of Cordially Invited! Cordially Invited is our annual invitational exhibition featuring artworks created in innovative U.S. and international studios serving disabled artists.

On view from October 10 – November 15, Make Studio’s CordialIy Invited VIII highlights the phenomenal and thought-provoking art produced in progressive art studios internationally as a way to better understand and appreciate our neurodiverse world. Each year it is our honor to put together this showcase to celebrate how these studios foster and promote exceptional art, advance full inclusion, and ensure the advancement of disabled artists so that their distinctive work can be experienced by all. This year's installment features 28 participating groups, hailing from as near as Rockville, MD and Washington, DC, and as far as Spain and Japan. Over 100 selected artworks will be featured in our gallery and even more will appear in the digital exhibition online. Visitors are encouraged to drop into the gallery during our weekly hours, or visit during special extended hours that will be announced on social media.

A reception will be held on November 7 from 5:00-8:00 PM during Art Around Hampden and First Fridays in Hampden. Details about exhibiting artists and studios, as well as special programming including a virtual artist talk with participating studios, will be shared on Make Studio’s website and social media. A companion display of Make Studio artists’ work will also be on view at University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Campus Center for Disability Employment Awareness Month throughout October.

About Make Studio
Make Studio is a 501(c)3 community-based arts organization located in Baltimore, MD. Founded in 2010 with the aim to put art and abilities to work, Make Studio’s mission is to empower artists with disabilities to grow as professionals with visibility and voice in their communities. We create opportunities for everyone to connect through art.

On View: September 12 - December 6 (closed Oct. 17 & Nov. 25 - 29)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.

The work in this exhibition compresses and expands expectations of depth as moderated by a post-image visual culture. The artists adhere to neither medium nor dimensional restrictions, but manipulate the viewer’s relationship to the image as a temporal document, compressed and fractured, through the singular eye of the lens. This expectation, no longer warranted in the age of computer generated images, becomes a fallacy of both the eye and of the language used to comprehend it. The image is untethered from representation and logical spatial association. Spatial continuity and discontinuity run amok in playful fracture--the work pushes and prods the amorphous opening left in the wake of this rupture; what was flat is unmoored of grounding, what was solid is now compressed.

Reception September 11 following the 6:30 p.m. lecture.
For parking information visit towson.edu/parking/visitors

September 10 - December 6 (closed October 17 & November 26 -29)
Gallery Hours: Monday - Saturday, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Opening reception Wednesday, September 10, 7:30 p.m.

How have recent upheavals—from the pandemic to global conflicts, amplified by media—reshaped our private lives? How do personal memories become collective history? In a world forever changed, how do we find our way forward? Elaine Qiu’s awe-inspiring installation of painting, video, and sound invites visitors into a multi-sensory exploration of communal consciousness, connection, and healing in a fragmented, post-pandemic world.
For parking information visit towson.edu/parking/visitors

Ain’t No Mo’ by Jordan E. Cooper, directed by Mari-Andrea Travis is presented as part of the Theatre Morgan LOL! Laugh to Keep from Crying Fall Season, which explores the rich, complex tradition of Black humor as a tool of survival, resistance, and truth-telling. LOL! invites audiences to laugh out loud while thinking deeply. It’s a celebration of the brilliance, resilience, and sheer audacity of finding joy in the face of adversity—because sometimes, you really do have to laugh to keep from crying.
Ain’t No Mo’ catapults you into a no-holds-barred rollercoaster ride where satire meets raw truth. The premise? The U.S. government has offered Black Americans one-way tickets out—and the clock is ticking. In a rapid-fire storm of outrageous, surreal, and laugh-out-loud scenes, the play rips open what it really means to be Black in America after the soaring promises—and sobering aftermath—of a Black presidency. Hilarious, fearless, and unflinchingly bold, Ain’t No Mo’ is more than a show—it’s an electrifying reckoning with the value this country places on Black lives. Buckle up.
16+ for mature content and themes including race, sex, stereotypes, and violence

Thursday, October 23, 2025—11:00am (talkback following) (Senior Citizen & Student Matinee)*
Friday, October 24—7:30pm
Saturday, October 25—7:30pm
Sunday, October 26—3:00pm

It’s midsummer’s eve and Miss Julie has opted to stay home and party with the servants rather than travel with her scandal-ridden father, the Baron. Alone in the kitchen with her valet Jean, the two begin a dangerous game of seduction and manipulation. Through a delirious night, the two battle for a way out of the prisons which circumstance and their own delusions have built around them. Craig Lucas adapts August Strindberg’s masterpiece to give the language a contemporary American flavor.

Performances:
October 23 at 11:10 a.m.
October 24, 25 at 7 p.m.
October 26 at 3 p.m.
October 27 at 10 a.m

The Sunday, October 26th at 3 p.m. performance will be ASL interpreted

Location: CCBC Catonsville, Center for the Arts, Theatre

CONTENT WARNING: This play contains themes and depictions of sexual situations, violence, foul language, misogyny, and alcohol abuse.

DIY PD @City Neighbors is an emergent professional development opportunity, driven by the community of practitioners in attendance. At our DIY PD Sessions, we gather and connect - and have four short breakout sessions for you to choose from, with participants sharing a great strategy, a great question, or a problem of practice.

Come together, build community, share practice, get a new idea, share a problem of practice, or just keep innovating, broadening, and thinking.

60 powerful and efficient minutes of learning, connecting, and collaborating, followed by free dinner!

Come connect with KeraLink International and learn how we’re working to expand access to vision care and end avoidable blindness in our community and beyond. This happy hour is a chance to meet our team, hear about our mission, and join fellow supporters who share a passion for eye health and vision. Enjoy cocktails and hors d’oeuvres while mingling with others who care about making an impact — all while taking in breathtaking views of the city — plus, take part in a surprise interactive activity designed to bring our cause to life!

Join us for a discussion with the composer to learn about the works programmed for the concert later that evening. Bring questions of your own to participate in the Q&A.
Sonia Morales-Matos was the 2016 recipient of the Dr. Herman Hudson Alumnus Award presented by the African American Arts Institute of Indiana University for her excellence as an educator, performer, and composer. She is the June 2019 recipient of recognitions from the City of Santa Ana, the House of Representatives of the United States Congress, and the Mexican Consulate in Santa Ana, CA, for her participation in the “Latino Masters Concert” as a composer, performer, and educator.

Mindfulness Meditation + Sports & Positive Psychology + Neuroscience + Group Coaching = mPEAK

mPEAK (Mindfulness, Performance Enhancement, Awareness & Knowledge) is a mindfulness training program for anyone seeking to achieve personal and professional goals, as well as attain new levels of performance and success. This cutting-edge training program is built around the latest brain research related to peak performance, resilience, focus, and “flow”.

The mPEAK program enhances the human capacity of mindfulness through established and empirically supported practices and exercises. Mindfulness is effective precisely because it is a way of being and relating to all aspects of life, rather than a specific technique or tool for a particular goal. As with physical training, this brain training program is based upon the understanding that optimal outcomes occur most often when participants continue to engage in the practices and exercises on a daily basis as a part of their training regimen.

This program was specially designed for athletes, first responders, leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, musicians, dancers, and busy professionals or parents who set big goals, face consistent challenges and stretch themselves towards excellence. mPEAK is appropriate for beginner and seasoned mindfulness practitioners alike. Previous meditation experience is not necessary to participate, but can facilitate a deeper learning experience.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Horror as Queer,” a look at the influence and depiction of queerness in horror films, with May Santiago, adjunct professor of film studies at George Mason University and producer of the podcast Horrorspiria.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating.]

Horror was queer long before both Brad and Janet succumbed to the charms of Dr. Frank-N-Further in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In fact, one could make the argument that, for both better and worse, the history of horror films is the history of queers on film. Film scholar May Santiago will do just that, with plenty of vivid examples, in a talk that has earned rave reviews.

You’ll learn how queer authors such as F.W. Murnau and James Whale were there at the very beginning. Murnau played a central role in the German expressionist movement that gave rise to films such as Nosferatu, while Whale left a body of work full of queer codes, including the films Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Invisible Man.

From there, Santiago will discuss how the representational codes established by such queer filmmakers were appropriated throughout the celluloid century by non-queer authors who constructed cinematic horror language that used queerness as shorthand for the monstrous. The result was harmful stereotypes of queer people in films and society, with examples being the stoic psycho lesbian trope embodied by Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, the transgender sex-obsessed serial murderer Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the villains of Dressed to Kill and Silence of the Lambs.

Yet, even with these negative portrayals of explicit or implicit queerness, horror cinema’s relationship with queerness and queer audiences has grown stronger with each passing decade, with queer authors and queer audiences reclaiming the monstrosity that created the basis of the horror genre. Santiago will look at how the evolution of horror films coincided with that of queer stereotypes and how queer authors embedded queerness in films that aren’t explicitly queer. Among the questions she’ll tackle: How did we come around to thinking that the Babadook was gay? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A frame from the 1920 silent German horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (tint added).