Past Exhibitions

Ceramics Highlights at Homewood

June 24, 2024 – September 21, 2025

Homewood Museum, Housekeeper’s Room

Free for all

Ceramics were among the most in demand goods in 18th and 19th century America, and the ceramics trade contributed to Baltimore’s growth as a prosperous port city. Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood is named after the port of Canton (present day Guangzhou), China, where export trade goods departed on ships bound for North America. This spotlight display features selected ceramic ware drawn from Homewood Museum’s own collections that reveal much about how life was lived at Homewood and contribute to our understanding of Baltimore’s significant role in the Chinese export trade.

New Perspectives of Historic Evergreen

April 1 – September 8, 2025

Evergreen Museum & Library, Student Engagement Space

What can happen when we look at a museum through the lens of a camera? Using traditional 4×5 land cameras, three Baltimore School for the Arts seniors—Kyndall Roots, Rose Jean-Gilles Joseph, and Hassan Hunt—under the tutelage of Baltimore photographer Joe Giordano, spent the past several months exploring Evergreen Museum & Library. The students played with different levels of lights, models, and angles to explore the site’s history and creativity, as seen through their eyes.

History Through Poetry

December 11 – August 31, 2025

Homewood Museum

Free for all

Installed throughout Homewood Museum’s period rooms, this exhibition features new original poems inspired by the collection. Considering decorative arts and material culture while honoring the lives of the enslaved people who once lived and worked at Homewood, the poems bridge creative imagination with historic research to bring paintings, furnishings, and other artifacts to life for visitors. The exhibition is the culmination of a Johns Hopkins First-Year Seminar that explores the study and practice of poetry to bring to light overlooked stories and give voice to the voiceless, materializing meaning out of absences and questions.

Leave No Trace: John Work Garrett in the American Outdoors

September 25, 2024 to June 8, 2025

Evergreen Museum & Library, North Wing Gallery

John Work Garrett II (1872-1942) is best remembered today as a diplomat and book collector, who was a product of the privileged East Coast milieu in which he was raised. But in addition to his boyhood summers at Evergreen, his teenage travels in Europe and the Far East, and his university years at Princeton, Garrett’s character and imagination were formed by numerous excursions into the American West. Leave No Trace: John Work Garrett in the American Outdoors examines these formative experiences through archival photography, diary entries, artifacts, sculptures, and more, asking visitors to consider the idea of the American West from multiple perspectives and reflect on their own relationship to the great outdoors.

(Re)Valuing Black Baltimore: Bare Hills, Cross Keys, and Hoes Heights

September 30, 2023 – June 2, 2024

Homewood Museum, Housekeeper’s Room
Free

Homewood’s new exhibition explores the history of three Black settlements in North Baltimore: Bare Hills, Cross Keys, and Hoes Heights. Drawing on historic maps, photographs, and oral histories of community members, the installation reflects upon the founders of these settlements and their descendants who faced and withstood the racial forces at play in the nation.

Gilman: A Pictured History

May 17 – September 17, 2023

Homewood Museum
Free

Many in Baltimore and beyond know Gilman School as an esteemed all-boys private school located on a picturesque North Baltimore campus. Less well known is that Gilman traces its origins back to 1897 when it was called the Country School for Boys and located in what is today Homewood Museum. Inspired by archival photographs from over 100 years ago, current Gilman photography students working under teacher Sarah Sachs have created original art that merges the past with the present.

Evergreen as Muse 2023

May 6 – August 27, 2023

Evergreen Museum & Library
Guided Tour

This exhibition showcases photographs by 12 Johns Hopkins University undergraduate students who were inspired by the history of Evergreen, its inhabitants, and its world-famous library, art collection, and grounds. Their photographs are the culmination of the spring 2023 course Evergreen as Muse: A Photographic Exploration taught by fine art photographer Phyllis Berger.

A History of Houseplants

October 1, 2022-June 4, 2023

Evergreen Museum & Library
Free

This exhibition explores the forces that catalyzed the Victorian obsession with houseplants, reveals how the trend manifested at Evergreen and in Baltimore, and examines how today’s houseplant craze both recalls and differs from the Victorian version of 150 years ago.

Baltimore Oval-Back Chairs Restored

September, 2021 – December, 2022

Homewood Museum
Guided Tour

In 2019, Homewood launched a Dress-A-Chair fundraising campaign to outfit six Baltimore-made, oval-back chairs with custom reproduction slipcovers. Work on the chairs is now complete and can be admired in a small exhibit in the Reception Hall that includes information on the chairs, as well as an exhibit case exploring joinery and upholstery. Included with regular admission.

The oval-back frame is a particular favorite style that came out of Baltimore in the early nineteenth century. Each chair also features an example of the famous Baltimore bellflower, a carved motif favored by Baltimore furniture-makers.

The design of the slipcover was chosen based on early nineteenth-century period imagery and modeled off of reproductions produced recently by Colonial Williamsburg for similar chairs. We consulted with several Mid-Atlantic curators before determining that white dimity with a ruffled skirt would be an appropriate fit for a property used as a summer estate. The fabric was woven on a loom by Rabbit Goody up in New York and the slipcovers were made by Alan Ibello from Baltimore.

The Lifted Veil

April 29 – September 25, 2022

Evergreen Museum & Library, North Wing Gallery
Free

For many years, fine art photographer Phyllis Arbesman Berger saw the world through a cloudy veil because of cataracts. During that time, she concentrated on making images in black and white. And then a miracle: cataract surgery and the world came alive in blazing color, full of intensity, as well as dreamy subtlety.

This group of photographs, ranging from infrared to color, shows how her view of the world has changed by revisiting photographs of her favorite places in Ireland; Brittany, France; and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and reimagining them in glorious technicolor through the magic of Photoshop.

Pictured: View from the Edge: Cliffs of Moher County Clare, Ireland

Evergreen as Muse 2022

April 29 – June 26, 2022

Evergreen Museum & Library
Guided Tour

This exhibition showcases photographs by 10 Johns Hopkins University undergraduate students who were inspired by the history of Evergreen, its inhabitants, and its world-famous library, art collection, and grounds. Their photographs will be located throughout the museum in areas that prompted their work. The exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, June 26, 2022 and can be seen via a guided tour of the museum.