Baker Artist Portfolios

Marian April Glebes is an emerging conceptual and mixed-media artist whose installations and sculptures are built of the remnants of elaborate processes that are futile or ridiculous, metaphoric, and temporary. Her works address issues of the urban/suburban environment, the character and power of the artist, and the use of site-specificity and the art object as a tool for social change. In 2015, Glebes became the inaugural Artist-In-Residence at the Baltimore Museum of Art's Joseph Centre for Education, during which she mounted a year long exhibition and associated public programming. She received a 2015 Rubys Artist Award from GBCA and three Our Town Creative Placemaking Grants from the NEA (2011, 2016, 2019) for her collaborative work in the public realm. Glebes's work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions, including shows at Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA, 2015), Co-Prosperity Sphere (Chicago, IL, 2011), Adkins Arboretum's Gallery and Outdoor Sculpture Biennial (Ridgley, MD, 2013, 2014), and in Baltimore, MD at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) (2013,2017), Goucher College (2011), Evergreen Mansion and Sculpture Garden (2010), The Creative Alliance (2010), and Current Space (2010, 2012, 2014). She curates exhibitions and temporal public art installations for a number of Baltimore venues including Artscape (2009-2016), Transmodern Festival (2011), Case[Werks] Gallery (2011, 2012), and cofounded SpaceCamp in 2015. Having received her BFA from MICA in 2004 and her MFA from UMBC in 2009, Glebes has made her home in Baltimore, and currently supports artist-run spaces across the City as a consultant while pursung two addidional Master's degrees from the University of Maryland in Urban and Community Planning and Real Estate Develoment. Glebes continues to teach as Part-Time Faculty at MICA in the General Fine Arts Department which she joined in 2012.

Glebes's work is rooted in questions about how we make a place, and how a place makes us. She believes art is a legitimate form of research; organizing is a legitimate form of art; and art practice demands artists act as builders of teams and worlds, positing more questions than answers. Social practice, community development, and activism are ingrained in her forms and methodologies. Through these projects, artists and project constituents consider their relationships to materials of home, the public realm, and how their connection with those materials, spaces, and habitats might liberate our notions of place, power, and environment.