The Billie Holiday Center sponsors and supports various exhibitions from our curatorial work and group projects from our student courses.
The Birth of Jazz, Baltimore’s Billie Holiday
The Birth of Jazz in Baltimore is a 14 panel modular traveling exhibition that utilizes that showcases new information about Billie Holiday’s girlhood in Baltimore, the early 20th century jazz scene in the city, and the ongoing connection between Holiday and the historic Black Arts District of Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, with maps, archival photographs, and recently acquired materials from the Sheridan Libraries.
Ethel’s Place: Celebrating Ethel Ennis, Baltimore’s First Lady of Jazz (Oct ’23 – Apr ’24)
Devoted to jazz vocalist Ethel Ennis, this exhibition explored each era of the singer’s life and featured over 130 items from the Sheridan Libraries’ Ethel Ennis and Earl Arnett Collection, including photographs, posters, unpublished written arrangements, and audiovisual recordings.
(Re)Valuing Black Baltimore: Cross Keys, Bare Hills, and Hoes Heights
The exhibition space at the Homewood Museum largely focused on the estate’s historical and architectural significance and on the accomplishments of the Carroll family, with very little and only very recent attention being paid to those that the Carrolls enslaved. This exhibition transformed the gallery space at Homewood in order to render a fuller understanding of the past and present contributions of the Black settlements surrounding Homewood—namely, Cross Keys, Bare Hills, and Hoe’s Heights
Bearing Witness: Photographing Black Families in Baltimore
The exhibition highlighted the photography of Daisy Brown, John Clark Mayden, I. Henry Phillips Sr., I.H. Webster Phillips III, Brian Pinson, and SHAN Wallace—established and emerging Baltimore artists whose work, spanning some seven decades, reveals how Black folk live, love, struggle, and triumph in their daily lives.
Community Legacies, Humanity Remains: Intersections, Crosswalks, & Pathways (Apr ’24 – Dec ’24)
Community Archives Fellow Jeneanne Collins produced a captstone art installation that reviewed the community art and archival impact of the BHCLA from 2019 to the present.
Levington Exhibit
St. James’ Episcopal Church celebrated its 200th Anniversary Jubilee Year with the temporary return of a cherished historical artifact, a tapestry knit by its founder and given as a gift in 1832, June 9 2024
Arts + Social Justice Spring Practicum 2022
This exhibition was the culminating group project of students in BHCLA’s “Arts & Social Justice Practicum: Spring 2022.” The course introduced students to concepts of social justice and practices of community-engaged artmaking.