The Walters Art Museum Presents Five New Contemporary Art Installations

Works by Tsedaye Makonnen, Jackie Milad, Stephanie Mercedes, and more highlight enduring artistic traditions from across the globe

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Baltimore, MD (March 31, 2025)—The Walters Art Museum announced today that five new installations of contemporary art are now on view, underscoring the museum’s commitment to supporting Baltimore’s robust community of artists by placing their works in conversation with the historic objects in its collection. The slate of artworks by area artists includes site-specific commissions from Tsedaye Makonnen (b. 1984), Jackie Milad (b. 1975), and Stephanie Mercedes (b. 1993), as well as pieces by Golnar Adili (b. 1976) and Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann (b. 1983). These diverse installations engage visitors through the artists’ take on distinct themes, leveraging mediums like lithography, mixed-media collage, and sculpture to explore belonging and alienation, transformation and hope, memorialization, the natural world, and identity.

“Each day, it is our goal to bring our expansive collection into the present by relating it to the modern human experience. Contemporary art highlights the enduring relevance of the past, demonstrating how the ideas and perspectives explored throughout history continue to resonate today,” said Gina Borromeo, Senior Director of Collections & Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Ancient Art. “These contemporary artists have created works that are deeply personal and moving. When these pieces are placed in the context of our extensive historic collection, they provide essential opportunities for our visitors to engage with and enjoy art in a new way.”

Abracadabra (Abuelita’s Bowl) and Ya Habibti, Ta’ala (2025) by Jackie Milad are the first ever contemporary interventions in the Walters’ Ancient Egyptian galleries. Milad has created two large-scale mixed-media collages that will go on view alongside the row of royal heads in the Egyptian Royal Power gallery. Those looking closely at the collages will see drawings Milad made of King Amasis and King Amenhotep II next to sculptures of the ancient Egyptian rulers in the museum’s collection on which the drawings are based. By collaging pops of neon paint, sketches printed on chiffon, and clippings of her past works, the Egyptian- and Honduran-American artist explores her identity and creates the cross-cultural connections she wishes to see between her own heritage and the historic objects on display in museums.

Stephanie Mercedes’ We Were Treated Like Numbers Rather Than Stars (2025) is a metalwork sculpture suspended in the atrium of the Walters’ Centre Street entrance, making it the first artwork visitors encounter upon entering the museum and the first artwork to be installed in this space. The sculpture is made of .50 BMG bullet casings and 25 mm shells that have been annealed and hammered into bell-like forms. The installation reflects on the spiral-like nature of trauma, grief, and emancipation. As viewers move through the installation, different spiral forms come in and out of focus—as viewers’ perspectives shift, so does their experience of the work. Mercedes’ sculpture explores themes of transformation and hope, evoking the artist’s interest in transforming objects or materials with negative associations into something positive.

Tsedaye Makonnen’s name is likely familiar to visitors of the Walters. The interdisciplinary artist served as the guest curator for contemporary art in the museum’s award-winning 2023 exhibition Ethiopia at the Crossroads, and five of her mirrored light tower sculptures were on view at the Walters’ from 2023 to 2024. Now, Sacred :: የተቀደሰ :: Yetekedse (2025), a new pair of light towers commissioned by the Walters and fabricated by nonprofit makerspace Open Works, is on view alongside the Ethiopian processional crosses that the work references in the Walters’ medieval galleries. Through these serene and reverent light towers, Makonnen seeks to memorialize late Baltimoreans and beyond, among them, Danika “Danny” Henson, Bailey Reeves, Korryn Gaines, Freddie Gray, Sonya Massey, the Latino/a/e individuals who died from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, Jacqueline Copeland, Mary Elizabeth Lange, Elizabeth Talford Scott, Etalem, Nikki Giovanni, Lorraine O’Grady, Faith Ringgold, and “children around the world who are being targeted by state sanctioned violence,” said the artist.

Works by Golnar Adili and Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann have been added to Across Asia: Arts of Asia and the Islamic World as part of the regular rotations of contemporary art that connect with and enliven the historic artistic traditions displayed in those galleries. Adili’s lithograph Dust of Sorrow (Ghobar é Gham) (2019) depicts an enlarged version of Adili’s mother’s passport photo, cropped to show just her eyes. The words “dust and sorrow,” a reference to a Persian poem, are laser-cut into the photograph in a repeating pattern. The artist’s father, an Iranian activist, was forced into exile while Adili and her mother remained in Iran, and the work makes a statement about the loss and longing of those separated by strife from the people and places they love. Meanwhile, Mann’s The Pocket (2024) explores the natural world and symbolic imagery with deep cultural reaches into Chinese and European art histories from her unique perspective as a biracial, second-generation Asian American. The artist weaves together disparate materials and symbols to explore themes of cultural estrangement, fracture, and chimera. The three-paneled mixed-media work expands past the edges of the canvases and is meant to “create a portal to another world,” said the artist.

These installations build upon the Walters’ ongoing strategy of presenting visitors with opportunities to experience exceptional contemporary works by world-class artists that shed new light on the historic pieces in the museum’s collection. In the last decade, the museum has added several contemporary artworks to its holdings and presented even more through exhibitions and installations. This includes the presentation of the first and only retrospective exhibition of work by renowned jeweler Betty Cooke and the annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize Finalists Exhibition, as well as purchases and gifts of pieces by Jessy DeSantis, Yélimane Fall, Roberto Lugo, Herb Massie, Fujikasa Satoko, and the only stained-glass by Kehinde Wiley on view in a public museum in North America. During the same time frame, the Walters has also presented works by Jessica Bastidas, Tawny Chatmon, Pete Eckert, Theo Eshetu, Bernhard Hildebrandt, Arghavan Khosravi, Linling Lu, Helina Metefaria, Murjoni Merriweather, Walter McConnell, Aïda Muluneh, Faith Ringgold, Kiyomizu Rokubei VII, Elizabeth Talford Scott, teamLab, Elias Sime, Sugiura Yasuyoshi, René Treviño, Stephen Towns, Ventiko, Wosene Worke Kosrof, Koike Shōko, and Kimura Yoshirō.

About the Artists

Golnar Adili was born in Virginia and migrated with her family from the United States to Tehran as a young child. Her father, an Iranian activist, was forced into exile while Adili and her mother remained in Iran, separated from him for many years. Adili holds a masters degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and has attended residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts, Center for Book Arts, Smack Mellon, Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation for the Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, among others.

Tsedaye Makonnen is an interdisciplinary artist-curator and cultural producer. Makonnen’s practice is driven by Black feminist theory, firsthand site-specific research, and ethical social practice techniques, which become solo and collaborative site-sensitive performances, objects, installations, and films. Her studio primarily focuses on intersectional feminism, reproductive health, and migration. Makonnen’s personal history as a mother, the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, a doula, and a sanctuary builder informs her work.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is a Washington, D.C.-based artist. She received her BA from Brown University and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Taiwan; the AIR Gallery and Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Fellowships in New York, NY; and the Individual Artist Grant, Arts and Humanities Grant, Mayor’s Award, and Hamiltonian Fellowship in Washington, D.C. Mann’s work has been exhibited at the Walters Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the U.S. consulate in Dubai, UAE, and the U.S. embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon. She was a Sondheim semi-finalist in 2012, 2015, 2023, and 2025.

Stephanie Mercedes is a queer Latinx uncategorized artist who works between metal, sonic sculpture, experimental opera, and techno. They transform weapons into sonic instruments, and they reveal missing violent histories. Mercedes has exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, and the National Gallery of Art. She has been funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Light Work, NALAC, Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Washington Project for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the GLB Memorial Fund for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Clarvit Fellowship. Mercedes created their first experimental opera Never In Our Image with CulturalDC and was recently commissioned by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology to create another performance, We Shall Not Inherit the Earth.

Jackie Milad is a U.S.-based artist whose mixed-media abstract paintings and collages address the history and complexities of dispersed cultural heritage and multi-ethnic identity. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Select exhibitions include the Walters Art Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), Academy Art Museum (Easton, MD), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Charlotte, NC), and The Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC).

Jackie Milad’s installation is generously supported by The Boshell Foundation / Betsey and David Todd.

About the Walters Art Museum

The Walters Art Museum is a cultural hub in the heart of Baltimore, located in the city’s Mount Vernon neighborhood. The museum’s collection spans more than seven millennia, from 5000 BCE to the 21st century, and encompasses 36,000 objects from around the world. Walking through the museum’s historic buildings, visitors encounter a stunning panorama of thousands of years of art, from romantic 19th-century images of French gardens to mesmerizing Ethiopian icons, richly illuminated Qur’ans and Gospel books, ancient Roman sarcophagi, and serene images of the Buddha. Since its founding, the Walters mission has been to bring art and people together to create a place where people of every background can be touched by art. As part of this commitment, admission to the museum and special exhibitions is always free.

Visitor Information

Admission to the museum is free. The Walters Art Museum is located at 600 N. Charles St., north of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. For general museum information, call 410-547-9000 or visit thewalters.org.

Free admission to the Walters Art Museum is made possible through the combined generosity of individual members and donors, foundations, corporations, and grants from the City of Baltimore, Maryland State Arts Council, Citizens of Baltimore County, Howard County Government, and Howard County Arts Council.