Cara Ober

Photo by Grace Roselli from the Pandora’s Box Project

Cara Ober is an artist, arts writer, curator, and the founding editor and publisher at BmoreArt, a platform for creative and critical discussion and a leading resource for contemporary art and culture in Baltimore. Ober writes regularly about artist, museum, and material culture, with an emphasis on context and subtext in the art world. In 2019, she was awarded a Rabkin Art Writers Grant and was commissioned by the Warhol Foundation to write “Artspeak and Audience” for Common Field’s Field Perspectives Series. Ober has published articles in Vulture: New York Magazine, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, Art Papers, ARTnews, The Baltimore Sun, The Urbanite Magazine, and others, but her primary focus since 2019 has been writing, publishing, and advocacy at BmoreArt.com.

Founded as an artist community webzine, BmoreArt has grown since 2007 to include a daily digital publication and events calendar, biannual print journal with a subscription service, a variety of community events throughout the region, and full time staff of four including Rebekah Kirkman, Suzy Kopf, and Teri Henderson. Rather than a narrow focus on visual arts, BmoreArt highlights creative individuals, projects, businesses, and exhibitions, prioritizing accessible language and the power of high quality images. As a publication and cultural organization, Ober’s vision for BmoreArt is to engage with diverse and growing audiences, generate networks of support for artists and makers, and to elevate the reputation of Baltimore’s creative community locally and globally.

In 2019, Ober and Jeffrey Kent founded Connect+Collect, a collecting initiative designed to encourage new and established patrons to engage with Baltimore-based artists through talks, gallery and studio visits, and to generate collective momentum to place works in private, corporate, and museum collections. In 2020, Connect+Collect added an art gallery and meeting space at 2519 N. Charles Street, projecting video and animation nightly on its Charles Street-facing windows to make contemporary art accessible to socially distant audiences.

Before she became a full time employee at BmoreArt in 2019, Ober taught as an adjunct professor at MICA, Johns Hopkins, American University, UMBC, and Goucher College. She holds an MFA in painting from MICA and a BA in fine arts from American University.