Where Practice Meets Public: Building Programs that Resonate
Join the Public Engagement team from the Baltimore Museum of Art for a behind-the-scenes look at how impactful, community-centered programming is built and sustained. Drawing from their work at BMA Lexington Market, participants will gain insight into how this dynamic site operates as a hub for creative engagement and community connection, while exploring how to design layered, accessible programs through a public engagement lens rooted in collaboration, clarity, and care. Grounded in the realities of a drop-in, highly variable public space, this approach considers how to welcome diverse audiences—across abilities, experiences, and levels of participation—through free, accessible programming that invites meaningful connection.
Highlighting collaborative approaches to program design and centering partnerships with artist and organization hosts as integral to shaping responsive, community-rooted experiences, this session also emphasizes ongoing learning, adaptation, and reflection as essential to this work. Through reflections, hands-on activities, and real-world examples, participants will unpack strategies for framing ideas, making artistic practices approachable, and building proposals that resonate with institutions and communities alike. Whether representing an arts organization or working as an independent artist or educator, participants will reflect on their own role and begin shaping a responsive program of their own.
Leave with practical tools, fresh perspective, and the confidence to craft and pitch compelling programs that feel both substantial and undeniable.
Join the Public Engagement team from the Baltimore Museum of Art for a behind-the-scenes look at how impactful, community-centered programming is built and sustained. Drawing from their work at BMA Lexington Market, participants will gain insight into how this dynamic site operates as a hub for creative engagement and community connection, while exploring how to design layered, accessible programs through a public engagement lens rooted in collaboration, clarity, and care. Grounded in the realities of a drop-in, highly variable public space, this approach considers how to welcome diverse audiences—across abilities, experiences, and levels of participation—through free, accessible programming that invites meaningful connection.The Baltimore Museum of Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art selected Baltimore City’s Lexington Market, which has served countless people from Baltimore and the surrounding communities for nine generations, as the home for its first branch location since the early 1980s. The space is designed to be flexible and welcoming to all in order to bring art-centered experiences to as many local residents as possible. BMA LM offers opportunities for visitors to create and show artistic responses, tell personal stories, and read from and/or contribute to a non-circulating library. Every season, BMA LM focuses on a new theme that acts as an umbrella for free programs, activities, and events presented in partnership with other organizations and individuals. While the BMA LM is unstaffed, it is a site for time-based media presentations from our collection, furthering our mission of bringing art directly to people. Themes are explored from multiple viewpoints and programs and activities spur critical and timely conversations while holding space for everyone’s voice to be heard. BMA LM provides a long-term commitment, enabling deep connections to the many different communities that use the Market and supporting increasingly reciprocal relationships. The space and all programming are designed to allow visitors who otherwise may never cross paths to have meaningful conversations and experiences, through engaging with art together.