Baltimore To Boston: Neo Contemporary Art: Curated by Kirk Shannon-Butts
Current exhibition
Overview
Baltimore To Boston: Neo Contemporary Art
Artists:
Ainsley Burrows
Ethan Hoskins
Heejo Kim
Ada Pinkston
Anysa Saleh
Ernest Shaw Jr
Stephen Towns
V. Walton
Installation Views
Works
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Heejo Kim, Bird House, 2025$ 2,000.00
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Heejo Kim, Shadow, 2025$ 2,000.00
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Ainsley Burrows, Of God, 2024$ 5,000.00
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Ainsley Burrows, Untitled, 2025$ 5,000.00
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Anysa Saleh, Untitled #1, 2025$ 1,500.00
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Anysa Saleh, Untitled #2, 2025$ 1,500.00
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V Walton, Grounded, 2024$ 3,000.00
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V Walton, Consumed, 2024$ 2,000.00
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Ethan Hoskins, Dupon Ty, 2025$ 7,500.00
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Ethan Hoskins, I bit the hand that fed me and it bled strawberry jam, 2025$ 7,500.00
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Ada Pinkston, Esperantus$ 3,200.00
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Anysa Saleh, Untitled #3, 2025$ 1,500.00
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Anysa Saleh, Untitled #4, 2025$ 1,500.00
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Anysa Saleh, Untitled #5, 2025$ 1,500.00
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Ada Pinkston, Blood in My Eye$ 3,200.00
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Ada Pinkston, Life is Just a Moment$ 3,000.00
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Ada Pinkston, Pearls No Diamonds. If I had the money for it, these pearls would be real.$ 7,500.00
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Ada Pinkston, Social Life or Social Death?$ 3,200.00
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Heejo Kim, Hand Shadow, 2025$ 2,000.00
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Heejo KimRear View Mirror , 2025Oil and baking soda on canvas10 x 11 in
(25.4 x 27.9 cm)signed versoHeejo Kim, Rear View Mirror , 2025$ 1,700.00
Press release
LaiSun Keane is pleased to announce Baltimore to Boston: Neo Contemporary Art, a group exhibition curated by Baltimore-based curator Kirk Shannon-Butts. This show brings together a diverse lineup of minority artists from Baltimore, showcasing a powerful cross-section of the city’s vibrant creative community.
Spanning emerging to mid-career, and including both self-taught and formally trained artists, the exhibition features a wide range of media including figurative and abstract painting, collage, photography, ceramics, and sculptural wall works incorporating found materials. The result is a compelling exploration of contemporary artistic expression rooted in cultural identity, innovation, and visual storytelling.
Shannon-Butts, formerly Curation and Public Art Manager at the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts and Manager of the Bromo Seltzer Art Studios, has long championed underrepresented voices in the arts. This exhibition—two years in the making—was conceived after a research trip to Boston, where he recognized an opportunity to increase visibility for Baltimore artists beyond the city's limited commercial venues.
Featured artists include Stephen Towns, Anysa Saleh, and Ernest Shaw Jr., whose figurative works center Black and Brown experiences; V. Walton, who uses clay to explore themes of body and representation; Ethan Hoskins and Ada Pinkston, whose practices blend 2D and 3D approaches through collage and assemblage; and Ainsley Burrows, who fuses graffiti aesthetics with his own visual lexicon.
Baltimore to Boston: Neo Contemporary Art marks the Boston debut for all participating artists and offers an exciting dialogue between two creative communities.
Ainsley Burrows (b. 1974, Kingston, Jamaica) is a multidisciplinary artist translating his personal history to the visual arts. A novelist, musician, and poet as well as a painter, Burrows’ works embody styles ranging from Expressionism to Cubism to Dadaism. Burrows grew up in Brooklyn, NY and currently resides in Baltimore. He attended SUNY Oswego (1996) and has held multiple residencies through the Baltimore Museum of Art. Burrows has been featured in solo and group exhibitions along the east coast and has won numerous awards for his poetry practice, including the Best International Performer of 2002 at the Farrago Poetry Café in London. His visual works primarily consist of acrylic paint on canvas and he has developed three unique artistic methodologies, which he designates as NeoChaos, Raktism, and String Theory.
Ethan Hoskins is a recent graduate of the dual BA/BFA degree program at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Hoskins received the Jack and Jill of America Visual Art Award in both 2017 and 2018 and has been featured in exhibitions in Baltimore and Providence. In October 2023, Hoskins was the subject of an article in Hyperallergic which chronicled his year-long undertaking to create a new painting each week (52 in total). Over the course of this challenge, Hoskins moved beyond paint on canvas to incorporate “found objects of Post-Industrial Providence,” including cardboard, colored pencil, and fabric. Most recently, Hoskins’ work was featured in the Afro-Futurist show, Rooted in Tomorrow, at the Quid Nunc Art Gallery in Baltimore.
Heejo Kim (b. 1995, Seoul, South Korea) earned her BFA (2018) in painting from the Hongkik University in South Korea and her MFA (2023) from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. She has teaching experience in both South Korea and Maryland, working as an art instructor in Seoul from March 2018 to July 2021. She was featured in a solo exhibition Hi, could you spare some time for me? at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2022. Kim has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Graduate Merit Scholarship and the Vermont Studio Center Partial Fellowship in Johnson, VT. She was in a two person exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery and made her art fair debut at Art Miami in 2024.
Ada Pinkston was born in New York and currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD as a multimedia artist and educator. Pinkston earned her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has taught in educational settings spanning Kindergarten through college. Her performance pieces have been featured at prominent institutions including the Smithsonian Arts + Industries Building, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Peale Museum, and the Walters Art Museum. Along with her expansive teaching experience, Pinkston has given lectures at The French Embassy, NYU, UCLA, USC, Columbia University, and The National Gallery of Art. She was the House of Sedulō (Baltimore , MD) Artist-in-Resident in 2019 and was awarded the Black Space Artist Residency (San Francisco, CA) in 2022. Pinkston’s art speaks to her work as a community and cultural organizer; she combines myriad artistic media with her research interests in social sciences, global colonial histories, and American Studies to create wholly unique visual artworks.
Anysa Saleh was born in the Central Valley of California and she earned her BA in Psychology and Fine Arts from California State University Bakersfield, before receiving her MFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2014. Saleh is known for her short videos and photographs which document her experience in the United States as a Yemeni Muslim woman. She has taught at the San Francisco Day School and is currently an adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Saleh has appeared in group shows across the United States since 2011, and was recently had a solo exhibition curated by Kirk Shannon-Butts, entitled The Daughters of Yemen at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Towers in Baltimore, MD. Her photographs address familial relationships, absence, and reconnection, inviting viewers to engage with her deeply personal artistic projects.
Ernest Shaw Jr., (b. 1969) a Baltimore native, earned his BFA from Morgan State University, his MFA from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and is currently working towards his PhD in Philosophy/Art at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Shaw views teaching as an artistic medium and has served as an adjunct professor at institutions including Johns Hopkins University, Towson State University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has held residencies at MASS MoCA, Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, Studios @ Key West, FL, and the VCCA at Amherst, VA. Shaw is the recipient of the prestigious 2022 Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize and received the 2021 Baker Artist Award. According to Shaw, his work seeks to illustrate the humanity of his subjects, in turn highlighting the humanity of the viewer, emphasizing the reciprocal interactions between art and audience.
Stephen Towns (b.1980, South Carolina) earned his BFA in studio art from the University of South Carolina and currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. HIs first solo museum exhibition took place in 2018 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The show, entitled Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning, traveled to Mark Bradford’s Art & Practice gallery in Los Angeles. In 2021, Towns was the first African American artist-in-residence at the Fallingwater Institute in Pennsylvania and in 2025, he became the first artist-in-residence in the relaunched program at the Gilcrease Museum. Towns’ work can be found in numerous public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Flint Institute of Fine Arts in Michigan, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Primarily known for his quilting practice, Towns is a multimedia artist; his formal training as a painter, combined with his experience in textiles contributes to his well-developed, multi-faceted oeuvre.
V Walton (b.1994) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator living in Baltimore, MD. They have an MFA in Ceramic Art from Alfred University and a BFA with a focus in ceramics from Towson University. Walton explores the wonder and complexity of Black identity, creating sculpture and video works that center the narratives of women and gender-expansive people. V draws from her own life: reflecting on the intersection of her identities, their chronic illness-disability and queerness. Their work illustrates the societal and interpersonal dynamics that build and break us down simultaneously, making multi-layered connections between clay[terra], nature, and the body. They were recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Swann House, Baltimore, MD curated by the renowned artist, Derrick Adams. A forthcoming solo exhibition is scheduled later this year at Hannah Traore Gallery in New York City.
About The Curator
Kirk Shannon-Butts is a Writer and Director of Films and a Curator of Art. Shannon-Butts holds a BA in Marketing & Arts Management and an MFA in Film/TV Production from Chapman University. He served as the Curation and Public Art Manager for the city of Baltimore, managed and curated exhibitions in the gallery of the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, and organized the hugely popular annual Artscape exhibition.
About the gallery
Founded in 2020 by LaiSun Keane, the gallery focuses on artists working in non-mainstream mediums and from diverse backgrounds. It presents a rotating schedule of exhibitions each year, occasionally participates in art fairs, and has placed works in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Fuller Craft Museum, Zimmerli Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Rose Art Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, and Ackland Art Museum.
For further inquiry, please contact laisun@laisunkeane.com
